Here’s the most interesting part of the funeral ceremony of a member of the Habsburg Dynasty.
The coffin is drawn, at the head of a procession,
to the entrance of the Capuchin Church in Neuer Markt Square in Vienna.
And
the Herald knocks three times on the large iron door.
"Who wishes to enter?" Replies
the Custodian of the Church, standing behind the
closed door.
The
Herald responds,
“His
Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty,
By the Grace of God, Emperor of Austria,
King of Hungary and Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia,
Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria;
King of Jerusalem,
Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow;
Duke of Lorraine and Bukovina;
Grand Prince of Transylvania,
Margrave
of Upper and Lower Istria;
Grand Voivode of the Voivodeship of Serbia
And on the list goes – actually that’s not even
half of it. The Grand Title of the Emperor of Austria has its own Wikipedia
entry.[1]
And after all that, the monk responds, "We don't know him."
The Herald tries again, with fewer titles.
The
monk responds again, “We don’t know him.”
And the Herald tries a third time. This time
using the forename of the emperor, describing him as "a mortal, sinful
human being [who] requests permission to enter.” At which point the door is opened
and the Capuchin monks exclaim, "So they may enter."
“A
mortal, sinful human being.”
I
want to reflect, today, on the three ways in which the Herald, eventually,
introduces the deceased to their last resting place – sinful, mortal and human.
Sinful
When
the Herald knocks the third time, the successful time, they introduce the
deceased as sinful. That doesn’t strike me as a very Jewish.
We
tend not to go big on calling people who have passed away sinners. I sin, you
sin, we all sin, but in the memorial prayer we recite at funerals we say this;
Remember
to their credit, the righteousness they have done, have mercy on their
transgressions, for there is none on earth who does only good, and never sins.
Our
sins are failings, they get in the way of the good we do, but they aren’t the
way we should be identified before the world, particularly in death.
The
Jewish way to speak of the deceased is to say ‘Zichronam L’vrachah’ – may their
memory be a blessing.
Memories
of those we have loved and lost are sometimes obviously a blessing for us, but
not always. And even when memories are obviously a blessing there is something
here worthy of investigation.
None
of us is perfect, but I’ve seen – even when the journey through life has been
challenging – there comes a time, usually when death is intruding on our most
dear relationships, that it becomes easier to see good in someone.
“It
was hard when I was younger,” one recently bereaved member shared with me, “but
in recent years, it was easier to love and to be loved.”
There
are so many possible truths underlying a statement like that; from parents who
struggled with parenting, to now-grown children who were, as younger children,
what’s the word, willful?
There
are issues around physical decline and cognitive decline that ease
relationships even as they hurt in so many other ways and much much more.
“In
recent years, it was easier to love and to be loved.”
For
many of us, we are full of deep love and enormous gratitude, but for others
there is more complexity. There those of us here bearing wounds that were not
be eased in life and maybe should never be eased, even by death.
But,
as death comes, we are called to find blessing and we find it easier to find
blessing – most of the time.
That’s
good.
Memories
as blessings, even rose-coloured memories, even memories that are willfully exaggerated
into blessings, elevate our own lives, making us kinder and easier to love in
our own imperfect turn. Memories as blessings create a sort of virtuous circle
of forgiveness, tempting God into forgiveness too.
I
think that’s why, as Jews, we stress not the sins of a person’s life in their
death, but their virtues – the elements that make them and their memories a
source of blessing.
Maybe
it’s not worth waiting.
Maybe
it’s not worth waiting until our loved ones have passed away or they decline to
the point where all the things that annoy us, even truly sinful ones, cease to
disturb us.
Maybe
it’s worth looking for the blessing in people while they are still alive, and
even when they are still annoying us. But that’s another sermon.
Back
to our Herald in Vienna, their Emperor and the Jewishness of that story. The
Emperor was described as sinful, mortal and human.
Mortal
I
love the story’s insistence on the democracy of us all, in our mortality.
In
death, even the greatest is, just another mortal whose life has ended.
With
the remarkable burial societies and undertakers we work with at New London,
there are no decisions to be taken as to what coffin to use. We are all to be
buried in identical coffins.
There
are no decisions to be taken as to what shrouds we are to be dressed in. We are
all to be dressed in identical shrouds.
There
are no real decisions to be taken around the order of service at a funeral. We
are all to be escorted to our lasting rest with an identical service.
It
was hard not to think of this stripped back identical fashion of Jewish funerals
watching the remarkable funeral of Her Majesty the Queen. She was the proud
leader of a Church, her Church, and I would have expected nothing less than the
immaculate mile-long guard and pomp and ceremony that escorted her to her last
resting place. It was moving and dignified and so brilliantly done. But for me,
the most moving moment came when the Lord Chamberlain broke the wand of office.
It was the breaking of the property and propinquity that really got me – the
acknowledgement of mortality above all the pomp that seemed so true and so
important.
We
all face mortality stripped of the dignity and power of our life-time office.
In
a tale at the end of Tractate Moed Katan, the great Rabbi, Rav Nahman is dying
and Raba his student, comes to visit him.
‘Tell [the Angel of death], not to torment
me.’ pleads the master.
‘Aren’t you an important person?’
replies the student. [‘Can’t you tell the Angel yourself?’]
Rav Nahman replies, ‘Who is important,
who is regarded, who is distinguished [before death].’[2]
In
his short story ‘The Will’ the great storyteller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, tells
of a man who visited his father, a notary, to specify exactly how his funeral
should run. Each year the man returns with more detail, ritual
and specification; sprigs of this and shards of that, earth from here, the yolk
of an egg and a silver spoon ... And the will grew every longer and elaborate.
The last lines of the
tale read like this,
"Eventually, I
suppose, the man died. I doubt whether his will was ever carried out. Most
probably no-one read or serious thought about [it].”[3]
There is, and it’s
quite right that there is, a democracy in death. Even for the Emperors of the
Habsburg Dynasty.
And it’s probably
helpful for the rest of us to worry less about the sprigs of this and the
shards of that and more about the third, and last element of what the Herald
would say of the Emperor as he knocked on the gates of the Capuchin Church in Vienna’s
Neuer Markt Square.
‘Sinful’ would say the
herald, and I wouldn’t agree
‘Mortal’ would say the
herald, and oh yes we truly are.
And, ‘a human being,’
oh – how fortunate that Emperor was, to be so acclaimed.
Human
My mind is drawn to a teaching
in Pirkei Avot;
Bmakom
SheAin Anashim Hishtadel LeHiyot Ish
In a place where there
is no humanity, strive to be a human.[4]
Perhaps the Yiddish
works better.
Strive
to be a mensch.
It’s not, of course, a
one-size-fits-all demand made on our lives. The entire point of human existence
is a celebration of our variety and multiplicity. The entire point of human
existence is that I should be following my path towards menschlikhkeit, and you
should be following yours. For this is, as the Rabbis teach, how we understand
the majesty of human creation –
For when a King of
flesh and blood mints a coin, every coin comes out looking the same. But when
the King of all Kings mints a coin, every coin comes out looking different.[5]
That’s you and you and
me, and all of us, demonstrating the majesty of our creator in our variety.
But there is also
something about being considered a human being, even on our death, that I think
we sometimes miss – even the Herald of the Habsburg Emperor missed it the first
two times they knocked on the door. In fact, I think it’s the whole point of
the story. We sometimes confuse our titles with our essential humanity. We
think our titles are more important than our essential humanity. And they
aren’t you know. They really aren’t.
It’s so easy to spend
too much time chasing around after our titles –
Archduke
of Austria;
Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow;
Grand Voivode of the Voivodeship of Serbia
Or, I don’t know, Rabbi
of New London Synagogue, or teacher or lawyer or any one of the things we do
that give us status, and income, in this world.
It’s almost too cliched
to be worth an inclusion in a sermon in this, so-wise community, on such an
august day, but as your Rabbi I can tell you the cliché is true. I’ve never
visited a deathbed of anyone who wishes they spent more time at work, chasing
the titles.
Even Queen Elizabeth,
Queen of England, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, and that’s
some title. After she passed away, I didn’t find myself remembering any of the
majestic moments of majesty – of which, of course there were so many. Instead,
I drifted into Youtube in search of that moment with James Bond and that little
vignette with Paddington, the moments where the human was so revealed. Sadder
moments reveal humanity also; the Christmas message that spoke of the annus
horribilis, sitting alone at the funeral of her beloved husband …
I think that is at the
heart of what moved so many of us when the Queen died. It wasn’t the title, it
was the fact that she never lost her own humanity, or her ability to see the
human in each of us even despite the heavy weight of the title.
I don’t know what
higher an acclaim we could offer a person, on their passing.
They succeeded in their
striving to be a mensch.
A sinner, a mortal and
a human, says the Herald of the Habsburgs.
‘Sinful’ would say the
herald, and I wouldn’t agree
‘Mortal’ would say the
herald, and oh yes we truly are.
And, ‘a human being,’
oh – how fortunate are we to mourn the human beings who have blessed our lives.
How fortunate we would be to be so acclaimed at the end of our lives – may we
be written and sealed for good for many, many years to come.
Hatimah Tovah
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