Holy Earth

 

    

     Over the past six weeks, I've been to three funerals. My mother, the son of my wife's parents' friends, and Lori Cannon. All at Shalom Memorial Park in Arlington Heights. I'm getting thoroughly sick of the place.

     Which is not a criticism. Shalom Memorial Park is very nice. The funerals are run briskly and efficiently. The place is beautiful. There are no headstones — the grave markers are bronze, flush to the ground.
     No headstones, but a few monuments there are — scattered benches, a mausoleum or two — more testaments to the futility of wanting to be remembered than any kind of aggrandizement of the wealthy.
     To be honest, I didn't have to go to the last two. But my wife was going to the second, and I go where she goes. And Lori's, well, I considered it a sign of respect. She always showed up.
     In each ceremony, after the casket is lowered, there comes a piece of funereal business where a packet of "Holy Earth" from the Mount of Olives is produced by the funeral director or rabbi, and scattered on the coffin lid. It is explained to the gathered mourners that since the Jew can't be buried in Israel — the ideal, apparently, though I don't remember a vote — a bit of Israel is brought to them.
     Nobody told me this would be done at my mother's funeral, and while I wasn't about to object, I wasn't entirely comfortable with it either. She would have preferred dirt from Rocky Mountain National Park. Holiness is a difficult enough concept to apply to an object, a person. But land? We're seeing how well that's working out.
     I'm reminded of last time I was in Israel, over 20 years ago. I took a tour of the Temple Mount, led by an Israeli of the type I usually associate with Israelis — brash, irreverent, candid. He told us that the Western Wall — it used to be called "The Wailing Wall" — is not actually part of the destroyed second temple, but of the retaining wall used to create the mount on which the temple stood. He also reminded us that there is nothing holy about it. " The stones there are as holy as the stones in my backyard," he said. "A stone is a stone is a stone. Jews don't worship stones."
     Or dirt, for that matter. After the second and third funerals, I considered breaking off, finding where my mother is buried and ... I don't know, standing there, feeling sad. But the second time, we were heading to the shiva at the apartment of the father of the deceased, to pay our respects. And the third time, after Lori's funeral, I just wanted to get out of there. My mother could wait.
     "She isn't going anywhere," I told myself.