Being a Havera: Feminist Ethnography and Jewish Death Rituals

• In Event: Feminist Perspectives on the Body

Abstract

Chevrei Kadisha (Holy Societies) serve as the organizing infrastructure of Jewish death care. The Chevra Kadisha, also called Jewish Burial Society, cares for the corpse from death until burial. Their principal task is named for its purification, tahara. In Tahara, the body is cleaned, purified, and dressed. Tahara is performed in teams, and is gendered: women with the meyta, female corpse, men with the meyt, male corpse. And yet, the women’s role in this ritual has been oftentimes neglected in academic literature when the male academic neglects to consider the gendered specificity of his experiences.

This very specificity became a recurring theme in my ethnographic research of a North American Burial Society. A universal difference presented itself between male and female informants when the latter consistently invoked gender as a grounding aspect of their participation. Men on the other hand did not have a corollary association of Tahara as an instance of intentional Jewish male community.

A feminist lens, sensitive to gender and women, revealed a paradox in male Tahara participation. On the one hand, Tahara is a precious part of practitioner’s lives. Members of the Tahara team receive no compensation, material nor social, for their participation. Additionally, their own eventual need for death care serves as a comforting facet of their practice, with their care of the corpse in part as an act of caring for their own corpse. With an intimate, positive connotation to participation, the corpse becomes a locus for Jewish community and the future corpses of Chevra Kadisha members themselves.

On the other hand, male Tahara teams were far more challenging to form. While the investment in the Jewish ritual was unilaterally true for men and women, the internally and externally imposed expectation to perform uncompensated labor was not. This paradox of deep investment but limited execution calls for research into normative labor practices among Jewry. Analysis of the ritual as a gendered experience entails considering women as members and participants in the Jewish world. The result, which I hope to demonstrate, reveals new theoretical avenues to the study of Jewish death and culture.

Author

• Madison Hyman, University of Florida