Rachel’s Tomb – Vayyishlach
The Jewish care and concern for graves is symbolised by the precedent of Rachel’s tomb. No wonder one of the saddest tragedies of Jewish history is that most of the six million martyrs of the Holocaust were neither allowed to live nor to receive respectful burial and that no matzevah could be erected to identify their resting place. The perpetrators of the Holocaust sinned against the dead as well as the living.
Other sins are possible against the dead. One – obviously not as deliberate or wicked as the Holocaust, but still a cause for great worry – is the attempt from time to time to limit the tenure of a grave to, say, fifty years, thereafter allowing the site to be re-used unless a further fee is paid.
For Judaism this is unacceptable, and the voice of the Jewish community has made itself heard on this issue in unequivocal terms. The dead must be allowed their place of rest in perpetuity. Their “address” must not be taken away from them.
Even if there really were a shortage of land for burials we would still oppose these proposals, but the fact is that Australia is a big country and unlikely ever to run out of space for cemeteries. If existing cemeteries become full we will have to travel a little further to establish new ones.
And cremation is not an answer. For Judaism, that is the ultimate act of desecration of the dead: the body is and remains God’s property and no human agency has the moral right to order or allow its wanton destruction.
