Howard Mammon

It goes against foundational Jewish belief. The idea of resurrection, the idea of kavod hamet, the idea of respecting the dead. If someone has watched a cremation, unless it’s a religious thing, and I understand that some religions actually they espouse it, and that’s obviously their choice, I don’t think it’s a very gentle process. I don’t think it’s an environmental process. I think it’d be very difficult to watch that process, and I don’t know why anyone would want to do that to their loved one. So in Judaism we have the priestly tribe, the Kohanim. They are not permitted to come in contact with a dead body, except in exceptions of their immediate family members. A Kohen is not allowed to touch or be near or in the same structure of a dead body. A Kohen can pick up cremated remains because there’s no DNA left there. There’s no person left there. There’s nothing. You’ve taken your loved one and you’ve incinerated them to the point where there’s nothingness there. Why would you want to do that? Why wouldn’t you want to go to a place where they gently buried the individual, and as a treasure would be buried, we bury them, and you have a place to go to and mark their memory forever. Why wouldn’t you want to have that place? And again, from my experiences with people where families have cremated, and they realized after the fact, why did we do that? We have no place to go to. We spread his ashes along the waterway, and now we have no place for him. We don’t have a place to go to. We made a mistake. I wish we had a monument that we could go to and visit. We don’t have that.