Transcription
When a person believes in the words of the Bible, or the words of the Torah, and G-d says, for you are dust and to dust you shall return, one gets an understanding that the body, while it was a shell for the far more important eternal soul, was nevertheless created in G-d’s image and G-d appointed a certain destiny for both the generation of the body and the decomposition of the body, and so G-d dictated to man that he wishes optimally to see the body go from a process where he starts as a zygote, embryo, fetus, living being, and then once the soul departs, the body is meant to decompose in a process that involves burial in the ground. It does happen because many Jews who are Orthodox did not grow up in an Orthodox family. They made a lifestyle choice based on their view of what Judaism is about and they said I’d like to become Orthodox. So quite often many members of my congregation have parents who are not Orthodox. Many times we have converts whose parents were not even Jewish and the Jewish tradition says that even non-Jews should be buried whenever possible. So what do I do when a congregant comes to me and says my parent has requested cremation? I try my best to present to them why Judaism feels it’s important to have a burial instead of a cremation. It’s very difficult to be sort of ominous when a person is going through a very difficult situation like that. There are texts in the rabbinic tradition which are a little bit scary that talk about what happens to the soul of a person who willfully submits themselves to cremation. But I try not to bring those topics up because I don’t believe that religion should be based on fear that oh no something terrible is going to happen. I would much rather a person be motivated by doing the right thing and fulfilling the will of G-d in making sure that the body is tended to in a way that G-d wanted it to be.