Introduction: Contemplating Death
Tahneer Oksman2021, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
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Abstract
In an interview published in the New York Times in March 2020, titled "What Judaism Teaches Us about the Fear of Death," philosopher George Yancy describes the ways traditional Judaism generally focuses more on life than on death. Alternatively, he explains, it could sometimes be said to focus more on death than on life, depending on what texts, traditions, and interpretations one examines. Using the Akedah, or the story of the binding of Isaac, as an example, he states, "Different Jewish interpretations of [the story]. .. reflect this range between an emphasis on life, on the one hand, and the spiritual possibilities presented by death on the other hand." 1 When we titled this special issue of Shofar "What's Jewish about Death?," it was with this very ambivalence-what we see as a central and productive tension running through Jewish tradition and culture-in mind. This collection is made up of a series of creative and critical responses to our question, confirmation of how an ironically categorical inquiry can liberate if we remain open to where it may take us. There is, of course, nothing particularly Jewish about death, that ultimate universalizing force. But today, several years following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, and in the midst of the 2020 swelling of support for Black Lives Matter, a worldwide activist movement driven by grief, alongside the devastating and still in-progress global Coronavirus pandemic, the puzzles of what Jewishness and Judaism, in their many configurations and iterations, can teach us about death, and what attending closely to death, as well as its close companions, mourning and grief, can teach us about Jewishness and Judaism, have particular urgency. As numerous historians and scholars recognize, it was in times of great upheaval, including around the Crusades and the Black Death, and its attendant massacres, that various now widely recognized Jewish customs and rituals surrounding death, mourning, and memorialization were crystallized. 2 This contemporary moment, then, seems like the right time to rethink what death-and its economic, material, social, ideological, and emotional contexts and circumstances-can mean for Jews and the world around us.
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