One Human Tissue: Bodies, Burials, and 7 Adar

“All of us—yes, all of us—are one living human tissue.” So affirms a popular Hebrew song by Moti Hammer, covered by many artists and regularly sung at memorial ceremonies in Israel. “And if any one of us dies from among us, something dies in us—and something remains with them.”

Body counts are standard in wartime news reports. All too often, the abstract numbers have a numbing effect. But when, for example, the remains of slain hostages are returned, our awareness is pulled to the actual human tissues of those who have been killed. The reality becomes visceral, and so do our reactions. “Something dies in us—and something remains with them.” The bodies matter, and they matter deeply.

“Shrouds of the Somme” Memorial to 72,396 missing / presumed dead WWI soldiers with no known grave (Detail) • Matt Brown from London, England, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Over centuries, the 7th of Adar in the Jewish calendar has become a day to honor the hevra kadisha, the Jewish sacred burial fellowship whose members accompany and care for the bodies of the dead. Israeli Jews today may associate the hevra kadisha with municipal employees. In major U.S. urban centers, hevra kadisha services are often outsourced by funeral homes to fee-for-service teams.

Yet many of us across the denominational spectrum participate directly in this sacred work as community volunteers. We cleanse, dress, lay out, watch over and accompany the bodies of our dead as hesed shel emet: ultimate, priceless kindness, beyond any compensation. Under ordinary circumstances, this ultimate kindness carries a simple acceptance of how we all must return to the earth.

Making the burial shroud (Detail) • Unknown artist, ca. 1772 • Jewish Museum in Prague

But war and terror are not ordinary circumstances. While ultimate kindness is traditionally anonymous, I want to lift up a few names to stretch our awareness beyond the abstracted body counts. These few names stand for all of the unsung burial attendants—formal and informal—who have labored under agonizing conditions through extreme violence.

IDF reservist Captain Avigayil Bar-Asher has headed up and supported the military Hevra Kadisha Women’s Unit responsible for identifying and caring for the remains of the female Israeli Jewish victims of October 7th. IDF reservist Captain Sivan Sekeli Ben Zichri has served as a bereavement officer whose heart literally broke in the process of notifying families and arranging funerals following the October 7th attacks. She was hospitalized for cardiac arrest and thankfully survived.

In times of relentless heartbreak, we cannot abandon those on the frontlines to carry the burdens alone. We need to share the heartbreak together—and to end the cycle of trauma that holds all of us in its thrall.

Over my decades of hevra kadisha service, I have learned how similar Jewish and Muslim burial traditions are. Beyond minor variations in shrouding and ritual, the primary difference is that Muslim family members are encouraged to participate in body washing and preparation, while Jewish family members are encouraged to lean on the broader community for these ultimate kindnesses.

This was brought home for me most powerfully between October 2018 and March 2019. Among the 11 victims of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was beloved burial fellowship leader Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz. Five months later, among the 51 victims of the massacre at two New Zealand mosques was beloved community caregiver and burial leader Husna Ahmed. Husna had been scheduled the next day to train additional women in the Muslim washing and prayer rituals. Instead, after her body was released, she was prepared for burial by her own devastated family members.

Through the current bloodshed, the inability to offer proper burial to tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians has been agonizing for survivors. Early in the war, burial volunteer Mohammed Abu Mussa testified to the shortage of shrouds and other supplies in caring for the already-overwhelming numbers of dead.

Sa’di Baraka has overseen the burial in central Gaza of nearly half of the Palestinian victims of the current war—many of them in mass graves. The wife and five children of Mahmoud Abu Dalfa are among the thousands under rubble who still have not been recovered or identified through the recent fragile ceasefire.

A common reaction to war trauma is to close our hearts to the suffering of entire peoples, leaving them faceless and nameless. But this only perpetuates the trauma through generations to come. The ultimate truth of “one human tissue” carries our best chances for shared survival, safety and security.

“Shrouds of the Somme” Memorial to 72,396 missing / presumed dead WWI soldiers with no known grave • Exeter: Northernhay Gardens • Lewis Clarke, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Our ancient rabbis wrestled with this uncomfortable truth and its tensions. In the timeless Jewish teaching that to destroy one life is to destroy an entire world, the Mishnah and Babylonian Talmud try to restrict the concern to one Jewish life. Yet that interpretation is not borne out by the teaching’s reference to Genesis, which highlights the biblical Adam as our shared ancestor—“that no human should say to another: My father is greater than yours.”

In affirming the ultimate value of a single life, the teaching also highlights the murder of one of Adam’s sons by the other. Neither Adam nor Cain nor Abel were Jewish. Accordingly, the Tosefta and Jerusalem Talmud uphold the universal understanding of one human life as an entire world.

This is the understanding that must guide us now, even when it stings. In the words of Israel Prize laureate and war-bereaved father David Grossman, “How easy it is in this situation to give in to hatred, to rage, and to the desire for revenge. But I have discovered that each time I am tempted by rage and hatred, I immediately feel that I am losing the living contact with my son.”

Over nearly two decades, an annual joint Israeli/Palestinian memorial ceremony has grown from 180 to more than 15,000 in-person participants. “In mourning together, we seek not to equate narratives, but rather transform despair and suffering into hope and build bridges of compassion,” declare Combatants for Peace, the founding ceremony organizers. Now co-sponsored by the Parents Circle – Families Forum, the annual ceremony has also involved hundreds of thousands since the beginning of the pandemic through international livestream platforms.

In recent years the Israeli government has tried to impose arbitrary travel bans on bereaved Palestinian participants. Again and again the Supreme Court has overruled the travel bans, dismissing them as ungrounded in actual security concerns. “Neither side in the Israeli public has a monopoly on the way a bereaved family is allowed to express its grief and pain on Memorial Day,” reiterated Justice Yitzhak Amit in 2023.

In response to the second attempted travel ban in 2019, a concurring opinion was written by now-retired Justice Anat Baron:

In the joint memorial ceremony for Israelis and Palestinians who lost their lives within the framework of the conflict between their peoples…there is an explicit goal and clear message of reconciliation and peace….Sometimes bereavement, a kind of shared fate, can constitute a source of identification and solidarity….The heavy price exacted from the participants has within it the capacity to join hearts and break down walls that separate those who by definition belong to two camps.

Justice Baron did not mention that her own son Ran was killed in a 2003 suicide bombing. Instead, she quoted lyrics from “One Human Tissue” into the Supreme Court record:

If we’d know how to calm,
how to calm the hatred—
if we’d only know.
If we’d know how to quiet our rage,
despite our humiliation—to ask forgiveness;
if we’d only know how to begin anew.
Because all of us….

With the mind of a legal scholar and the heart of a bereaved mother, Justice Baron highlighted that core truth beyond our tribalism, so regularly obscured by trauma and hatred: All of us—yes, ALL of us—are one human tissue, beyond our religious, ethnic, ideological or national divisions. We all live and die in each other.

As we move through 7 Adar this year, please consider learning more about the ultimate kindness of the hevra kadisha. This is an act of loving courage. Then consider stretching toward the ultimate truth of “one human tissue.” This, too, is an act of loving courage.

“Sometimes bereavement, a kind of shared fate, can constitute a source of identification and solidarity.” May we open our hearts, minds and hands to make it so, as we honor both the living and the dead.

10/7 memorial site, Reim Forest • Lizzy Shaanan Pikiwiki Israel, CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons