Dying, Death and Bereavement in the Jewish Community Having to do with Diversity an Ethical Considerations
Literature Review
The main religion of Jewish population is Judaism which is different in the structural level among the Christianity and Islam. The religious writings, holy books, and custom as well as practice have also different standards in terms of dying, death, and bereavement. The basic beliefs of Judaism are described to be part of the concept of God. But apparently, being a Jew became controversial issues in the world. The traditional Judaism stands for almost the 2000 year old law. Part of the Judaism has stayed loyal to the traditional but can be more open in the acceptance of potential converts, more sensitive when is compared with the other religions. However, within the branch of Jewish community, the Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism have expanded their definition of a Jew from one with a Jewish mother to also include one with a Jewish father.
The history of Jewish people is traced to start with the Biblical time where Abraham and continue though the American Jewry, the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel. The events of Jewish lifecycle are very rich and this can be mark as a different event. For an instance Jewish weddings includes Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and even Bris ceremonies are so well-known outside the Jewish world. Judaism stresses celebrating life. And one way to do this is the celebrate lifecycle events. Celebrations of life’s milestones are called Simchas (Smachot in Hebrew), which means “Joys.” On the other hand, the Torah is the primary sacred document of Judaism. Torah, which means “teaching”, is God’s revealed instructions to the Jewish People. Torah includes both Written and Oral parts. The Written Torah, called the Tanakh, is sometimes called the Hebrew Bible, Jewish Bible, or Old Testament. The Oral Torah, explanations of the Written Torah, was originally passed down verbally from generation to generation and later codified into the Talmud.
As based on the lifecycle of the Jewish, there will also the time when a person needs to bid his farewell. The cultural level is characterized by shared perspectives and thus shared meanings. It is very closely associated with the notion of ‘connectedness’ – recognizing that even the most private of personal experiences is circumscribed by a set of cultural relations based on shared meanings. An important part of this is the role of rituals. These are institutionalized patterns of behavior that carry predefined social meanings. A good example of these is the rituals that faith and non-faith communities provide for the rituals of passage, such as birth, achieving adulthood, marriage and death. Here we experience shared meanings and celebrate our connectedness, even if we feel somewhat on the fringes of understanding. For example, a young person attending a Jewish funeral service for a close relative may not fully appreciate the significance of the details of the service if they are themselves not part of the Jewish community.
Having a shirt or another article of clothing symbolically torn as a sign of grief; listening to a liturgy delivered in Hebrew; watching the ritual actions, may not mean very much at all to them. Although it may not make sense at one level, at a deeper level it will be saying something about connectedness and belonging, and that even our aloneness at death has a social context. It is often the rituals that surround and accompany death that are the richest examples of cultural and communal ‘meaning making’. There is, for some, a sense of ‘this is how we do things – this is the wisdom that has been passed down to us’, and that ‘we need to get it right in order to do the best for those who are left behind’. On occasion, in some faith communities, this is also deemed to be for the benefit of the one who has died and whose soul or spirit is believed to have gone to a life beyond death. Within such faith communities an understanding of spirituality will pervade the rituals they perform, because the rituals give formalized expressions to the meaning they give to the event.
Of course, it is still decent to let the mourners have their own privacy while maintaining the culture. For an instance the relatives are allowed to reflect on the lifecycle of their love-ones by covering the mirror. In this way, the sense of vanity is somehow ignored and the focus is more on the funeral practice and reflection.
References:
Moss, B., & Thompson, N., (2007) Spirituality and Equality, Social & Public Policy Review, 1(1) [Online] Available at: http://www.uppress.co.uk/socialpolicy_pdf/Thompson.pdf [Accessed 25 February 2011].
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