Death, Grief and Cheesecake
At first, we had just a smattering of attendees. Understandable, I thought, given the wealth and variety of programming at Tikkun Leil Shavuot last month.
About two dozen other simultaneous — and arguably more uplifting — learning sessions were underway, pulling people in. Among them, a discussion of the impact of Jewish-born musician Bob Dylan, an exercise in Jewish storytelling, a dive into Jewish comedy.
But then, the door to our seventh-floor space at the Marlene Meyerson JCC on the Upper West Side kept swinging open. A trickle turned to a flow. And some minutes after we began, we reached overflow capacity.
Death and grief, it appears, is a hot topic.
That was the focus of our Shavuot learning session, one that I led with Rabbi Amy Bolton, a noted hospice chaplain and also a Board member at Plaza Jewish Community Chapel.
For over an hour, and followed by one-on-one lobby conversations over cheesecake, end-of-life issues predominated. To me, it was just the latest manifestation of a palpable, measurable surge in interest and a hunger to talk about it all in open forums.
How do we walk through grief? What is the value of pre-planning a funeral? How do we open sensitive conversations with aging parents? How does Jewish ritual give us a roadmap through loss? The questions, the examinations, the interpretations of death as a lived experience — it’s all increasingly out there.
But it wasn’t always like this.
Plaza Jewish Community Chapel was founded nearly 25 years ago as a bit of a disrupter of the end-of-life space in New York and the greater metro area.
It was established as a project of Jewish philanthropists, organizations and clergy embracing and promoting a community-owned non-profit structure new to the city and the region’s funeral chapel landscape.
The model, with utmost intention, elevated the practice of Jewish values — among them kehillah, chesed, kavod — not just as theory and words on a page, but as breathing, everyday drivers.
But there was more, because the inclusion and interpretation of “community” in Plaza’s name carried and continues to hold deliberate responsibilities. That is, creating a place on the Jewish communal spectrum — one that arguably had been generally unoccupied — where issues such as death and grief are living within the mainstream of our daily dialogue and consciousness.
Over these past two-plus decades, that has been developed and exercised in numerous, measurable, and replicable ways. The very fact that my professional charge at Plaza is to establish and grow communal partnerships and conversations underscores a unique commitment to these issues and these values.
Discussions about an inevitable life cycle event, and the Jewish practices surrounding it, are an opportunity to enlighten, and to reset and grow our individual and communal relationship to death, grief, generational responsibility, and each other.
As Plaza approaches its quarter-century mark next year, we welcome the moment to more deeply catalyze, advance and amplify conversations on Jewish end-of-life issues — even on our Exit Strategy podcast — in a morphing and shifting community landscape.
People are breaking through the reticence and recognizing not only the imperative of such topics, but their normality as well. Even over cheesecake.
