“Steven, Do You Want to Have A Jewish Burial?”
Rabbi Mendel Super is the Chabad Shliach to Lake Havasu City, deep in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. He posted the following story on X of a recent encounter with a Jewish man regarding a Jewish burial.
I get the call every few months.
Someone I don’t know is dying somewhere in the vast region I cover, and the want a rabbi.
Every single time, they also want to be cremated.
But nothing prepared me for today’s encounter.
Steven was suffering from cancer for four years, and his body couldn’t fight any longer.
Now, in his final days, he’d stopped eating and become agitated, violent and combative.
“You’ve seen this before, right?” his sister asked hopefully. I hadn’t.
Violence presaging death is only something I’d vaguely heard about.
But it wasn’t pretty. “I hope he isn’t mean to you,” his sister said.
I hoped so too.
Steven made his brother promise him that he’d cremate him and scatter his ashes over Laguna Beach.
G-d though had long promised, “For dust you are, and to dust you will return.”
I needed Steven to want a Jewish burial.
His sister said he wasn’t having any lucid moments.
I came into his room, and his nurse told him he had a visitor. “GET AWAY!!” he barked.
Hesitantly, I approached the bedside.
“Hi Steven, Stacey thought you’d appreciate praying with a rabbi.”
“NOOOO!!!”
I began to recite Viduy, the final confessional prayers.
I tried making more conversation.
” Where did you grow up?”
” Orange Grove.”
” Have you ever met a rabbi before?”
” Yes.”
Steven was more responsive than he’d been in days.
Could I bring Steven back to his childhood Yiddishkeit?
I began singing Shema. Nothing.
Adon Olam. Nothing.
Hava Nagila. Steven relaxed. “I liked that,” he said.
We sang Avina Malkenu and Ose Shalom, and Steven relaxed. He seemed almost in another world, calm.
I felt like we friends now.
“Steven, you’ve always been Jewish, right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s because you have a Jewish soul. You aren’t just your body, but part of you is a soul. “
“The soul lives on forever. Even after your body can’t go on any longer, your soul still lives on. It watches down from heaven on your loved ones, your family, your friends.”
Steven was listening intently.
“Steven, after your body can’t go on any longer, do you want to have a Jewish burial?”
“Yes.”
