Covenant Before Consent A Response to “It Was Their Wish” — The Case for Burial Over Cremation

Presented by Rabbi Anchelle Perl Based on and expanded from the thoughtful reflections of Mark Scherer, Lay Leader, Chabad of Mineola, New York.

The Question Deserves an Answer

“It was their wish.” The sentence is spoken gently and meant to be final. To argue against it can feel like arguing against love, as if honoring the dead and obeying their instructions were the same thing.

They are not. The claim rests on a hidden premise: that a person owns their body like property, free to dispose of it, and that our only duty is to carry out the order. That sounds obvious to the modern ear. From the standpoint of four thousand years of Jewish thought, it is simply mistaken. What follows is not a dismissal of anyone’s grief but an argument that “wishes” is the wrong frame entirely and that there is a deeper way to understand what we owe those we have loved.

The modern West assumes the body is property and the person its owner; on that assumption, the owner has spoken and we are merely executors of the estate.

Judaism begins elsewhere. The body is not owned but entrusted, fashioned b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, a vessel that housed a soul and was never mere property to sign away. We are its stewards, not its proprietors, and a steward has no authority to destroy what was placed in his keeping. This is why the dead are treated with such tenderness: washed and purified by the chevra kadisha in the rite of taharah, never left alone, spoken to as if still present. That care is senseless if the body is refuse to be disposed of efficiently, and obvious if it remains something sacred, to be returned with honor. So the first answer to “it was their wish” is a question: whose body was it to give away?

Burial is not a Jewish preference among options. It is the practice, woven through the tradition from its first pages. “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19) describes not one route back to the earth but the return, the body’s slow, patient reunion with the ground. Fire forecloses that; it forces in an hour what the earth was meant to do in its own time.

The first thing Abraham does after Sarah’s death is buy a grave, the Cave of Machpelah, at full price, so his people would always have one (Genesis 23). The patriarchs and matriarchs are buried; Jacob makes his sons swear to carry him to the land; Joseph’s bones travel the wilderness for generations to lie in the earth of his people. And the command is explicit: even an executed criminal must be buried the same day, kavor tikberenu, “you........

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