Transcription:
Okay, so let’s talk about monuments for a second. There is no rule that says you need a monument, but it is a good deed that you can perform for somebody to mark the place where they are buried with some sort of monument or stone. We call that in Hebrew a matzevah. A matzevah is a marker. It’s a custom that goes way, way, back in Judaism to mark a place where somebody is buried. There are some headstones. You go to some ancient Jewish cemeteries from the Middle Ages. You see some gorgeous, big, beautiful headstones, each one different than the next. We have a different way of doing it in Toronto. Maybe it wasn’t the case a hundred years ago, but nowadays if you go to most of our cemeteries, the headstones are very standard. There is an idea in Judaism that everybody is equal in death. One of the ways that we show respect to people when they die is by not making huge headstones for families with money and small headstones for families who have less means. All the headstones are pretty much standard. What’s written on them is pretty much standard. Your English name, your Hebrew name, some important relationships that you had throughout your life, maybe some sentences that give people a sense of who you were. You can even be creative to make it as personal as possible. I always prefer that the stone says something a bit personal and unique about that person’s character. When you look at it, you’ll remember them. There is a ceremony that is conducted when the monument is dedicated. Some people choose to have a rabbi there, but you don’t need a rabbi there. I said before, you need a rabbi for a funeral. I think it’s stupid for people to do a funeral without a rabbi, but you don’t really need a rabbi to conduct the unveiling ceremony. All it is is another opportunity for people to gather and to share memories, to be uplifted by remembering somebody’s life. There’s a few prayers that you can say, but there’s nothing that’s really too difficult or too crucial. Any rabbi will give you the text of the appropriate prayers to say. Then at the end you say, we dedicate this monument in the name of so-and-so and hope that everybody who comes here will be inspired by the way they live their lives and the good deeds that they left behind. That’s the hope and prayer. Then the monument is established. You know that when we go to cemeteries, we place a little stone on top of the monument that shows that we were there, that shows that this is somebody who meant something to me. Like stone, which is eternal, which sort of is durable, the legacy they leave behind is similarly durable. Other traditions, they do flowers, but we don’t do flowers. Flowers are a Gentile thing because flowers die. We think that that’s not the way we want to live, that we were here and then we fade away. We want to aspire to permanence.