Taharah: what is it, why do we do it, and who does it? We translate the Hebrew word taharah as the purification of a dead body. According to our Bible, every person who enters this world arrives pure and clean; they are pure of sins and clean of misdeeds. When a person passes away and leaves this world, he should also leave pure. But, since no one knows in advance when one will pass away, how can you purify yourself before leaving this world? The answer is, you can’t. But, there is a way to purify a person who passed away by performing a taharah.
Now that we know what a taharah is and why we do it, it’s important to know who does it. The people who perform a taharah are called the Chevra Kadisha which, in Aramaic, means Holy Group. This is a volunteer-based society that carries out the ritual preparation of the Jewish dead for burial. These people are on call, around the clock, six days a week. Their duty includes ritual washing, dressing the body in a shroud, and wrapping it in a tallit before the coffin is closed. They do this while reciting specific verses and prayers for the dead. The group consists of one leader and three to four additional people, all of them equal in importance. I am a member of our local Chevra Kadisha that performs this ritual.
Due to COVID-19, the Chevra Kadisha cannot perform this religious ritual today. Some of the dead who are arriving at the funeral homes died from COVID-19. To protect ourselves, we do not perform any taharah during this time. We have not been able to perform this ritual since the pandemic started in February 2020. This reminds me of the wartime period when taharah was not performed either.
The reason I decided to write about a taharah is because I see a similarity between now and the time I spent in the ghetto where taharah was not performed.
I have been performing taharah for over 20 years. When we perform the ritual, we come across various individuals who died in a hospital of old age, heart attacks, or various other ways. We get bodies with limbs missing or feeding tubes still attached to them. So, we see bodies of various stages of suffering and we have to wash them and purify them for burial.
The worst time I had with a taharah was right after 9/11/2001 when two Jewish bodies came in from the Pentagon attack. I, and the entire group, lost it. Those were the most difficult taharot we had to perform. These two individuals' bodies were burned, half of their heads were missing. One had no limbs. When we saw the two bodies, we all threw up and started to weep. We did the taharah for each person the best we could. We were so traumatized that, for the next six months, none of us were able to do another taharah.
It’s important to note that performing a taharah is the utmost thankless job, because the person for whom we perform the taharah cannot thank us for that service. That is why this is considered to be one of the most righteous things to do. The only reward one gets from it is the extra points one receives when you reach heaven. I hope I earned some of these extra points, as I plan to retire from this work by the end of the year. It’s getting harder and harder to do it at my age. Just for the record, I am the oldest person who is still doing taharah in the Washington area. I never speak about it. Those who know, know.
When my youngest daughter found out five years ago that I was doing taharah, she decided to take on this work, and she has been doing it on a steady basis. I am very proud of her.
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