The Oak of Crying

     During CoVID, the sadness at funerals was exacerbated due to the fact that the number of people who could participate in person was drastically reduced. While in Florida we were always able to gather a minyan at the gravesite, in other states rabbis were forced to go by themselves to the cemetery to officiate and include family and friends in the ceremony by zoom. Towards the end of Parshat Vayishlach the Torah records a curious detail: “Deborah, Rivkah’s nurse, died, and was buried under the oak below Bethel; so it was named Allon-bacuth.” The name of the place (“Bacuth”) implies multiple cries. This led the Midrash to explain that while the verse speaks of the death of Deborah, Rivkah’s nurse, it is alluding to another death – the death of our matriarch Rivkah. The Ramban suggests that Rivkah’s death was only hinted at because no family members attended her funeral. Yitzchak was blind and unable to attend. Yaakov was on his way back from Charan and not in the area. Eisav refused to attend because he was still angry at his mother for helping Yaakov steal the blessings. Since there were no family members to do it, the Hittites buried Rivkah. Perhaps this is another way to understand the multiple cries: we cry over the passing of Rivkah, and we cry over the fact that no one was present for her funeral.

        On January 29, 2019 Eddie Ford, an 85 year old Holocaust survivor, died in Toronto. The night before the funeral, Rabbi Zale Newman put out a plea on Facebook asking for at least 10 men to attend Ford’s funeral so that the ceremony would at least have a minyan. He received a response from only three people saying they would attend the funeral, Newman said. He called a rabbi friend in California – who once performed a funeral with no one there but the deceased – for advice. “I was prepared to do whatever it took to give him a proper send off,” Newman told CNN. “That’s what he deserved, that’s what all good people deserved.”

        As he headed to the cemetery the next morning for the funeral, he was surprised at how many cars were there. He thought there must have been another funeral at the same time so he began asking around, worried he wouldn’t make it in time to Ford’s funeral. Person after person told him they were there for the same funeral. “My heart started to pound,” he said, trying to understand what was happening. It became clear. Word of Ford’s funeral had spread across the social media world, prompting do-gooders to show up in the freezing cold to send off Ford the way he deserved. Newman said everyone was “dressed like ninjas,” a lot of people were hiding their faces due to the cold. “I saw 200 pairs of eyes,” Newman said. “What I could tell was there were men and women, old and young.” An added bonus, Newman said, was that a man who identified himself as Ford’s long-lost brother also showed up and performed the Kaddish, a Hebrew prayer for the dead, with Newman’s assistance. “Eddie … did not leave the world alone,” Newman said. “He left the world with his brother, his nephew and 200 members of the Jewish family.”

        The hidden death of Rivkah reminds us that difficult situations can be made easier, can even be elevated, when the Jewish People come together as a family.