Wednesday, May 04, 2005

I just read a beautiful post on Rachel Barenblat's blog on doing taharah - the ritual of preparing the dead for burial. One paragraph particularly struck me: on how the body was lovingly dressed in simple white garments, which eventually left it "a bundled white human-shaped figure: no features, no distinguishing marks, only legs and arms, a torso and a head, a small still white figure." I thought back to the movie on the concentration camps I saw earlier tonight - which depicted the bodies of the dead simply thrown naked into a pit without care or dignity. What a contrast to Rachel's calm, focused description of how the body of a person should be treated when the soul is no longer there.

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