Judaism

CultureLaw

This past July, the town of Saint-Apollinaire voted against allowing their small Muslim community a space to bury their dead. In response, Quebec City has generously offered land for the building of an Islamic Cemetery.

This article is not about Saint-Apollinaire or Quebec’s obnoxious denial of its racism problem.

It’s about death, and how we deal with what’s left of the people we know.

Though we’re all affected by it, death and its technicalities are things we just don’t talk about…

…That is until someone we know dies.

When a loved one dies we do our best to make sure the person gets what they would have wanted. The late comedian George Carlin joked about wanting to be dropped from a plane and left wherever he landed even if it was the mayor’s lawn. Unfortunately, though we’d like to fulfill the wishes of even our most eccentric friends and relatives, the province of Quebec has rules about how a body can be disposed of after death.

The rules come primarily from Quebec’s Burial Act and the Act Respecting Medical Laboratories, Organ and Tissue Conservation, and the Disposal of Human Bodies and related regulations. Generally there are two common ways a body can be put to rest after death, burial and cremation, so this article will focus on those.

The law says that burials have to take place “in a cemetery lawfully established, except in cases otherwise provided by the law”. That means that if your uncle, for example, wanted to be buried at your family’s cottage, he couldn’t unless the land was a cemetery. This is undoubtedly to avoid any dispute as to what should be done with human remains should a property be sold or expropriated.

Cemeteries, it should be noted, are considered private property, and the land is at the disposal of the physical or legal person who owns it, subject to any restrictions imposed as a result of someone buying a burial plot on said land.

In cases not otherwise specified, coffins must be placed in a grave and covered with at least a meter of earth, but the Minister of Health and Social Services who is charged with the enforcement of said acts can make exceptions for special cases.

Burials cannot take place in a church or chapel currently used for religious purposes without the consent of the ecclesiastical or diocesan authority of the religious group who owns the space. In cases where such authority grants this permission, the law requires that the body be placed in a coffin with 2.5 kg of quick-lime or lime chloride and covered with at least 1.25 meters of earth or enclosed in masonry at least forty five centimeters thick. The quick-lime is likely required to neutralize the odor and speed decay.

Cremations can only be done by the holder of a funeral director’s permit allowing him or her to perform them. Crematoriums must be equipped and operated so as to prevent any risk of contamination and avoid to pollution. The law specifies that said crematoriums must have a firebrick oven “kept in good working order at all times”. If the funeral home has a columbarium – a place to keep urns of ashes – it has to be fireproof.

Though the government has its own rules, the faiths of the deceased come into play when deciding how to treat the remains. For the purposes of this article, I will do a crash course on the rules of the three most common Abrahamic faiths in Montreal: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As there are so many sects of Christianity, I’ll focus primarily on Catholicism. Apologies to anyone who is outraged (though houses of worship shouldn’t permit trolls).

Judaism requires that a body be buried immediately after passing, or at most, the following day as the belief is that the soul remains in turmoil until burial. The body must be buried complete: with all its limbs and organs.

Islamic practices are a bit trickier as they vary according to interpretations of Islamic law, but there are a few common customs. As in Judaism, Muslims are buried and burials must take place as soon as possible after death, historically because in the days of poorer hygiene an unburied corpse posed a sanitation risk. If the death was not from natural causes i.e. assassination or freak accident, a burial can be delayed to determine cause of death.

Catholicism permits both burial and cremation, though in 2016 the Vatican issued new rules regarding how remains should be dealt with. At the end of October of that year, they said that ashes and bone fragments cannot be kept at home or divided among relatives as mementos as it deprives community of their right to respect the dead. They declared that Church authorities should designate special spaces such as cemeteries or church areas to hold them. Only in special cases can a bishop permit an individual to keep remains at home. Unlike Judaism and Islam, there is no time requirement as to when to bury or cremate the body. If for whatever reason as per canon law, a person cannot be buried in a Catholic cemetery, the law allows the person to be buried in designated ground adjacent to said cemetery.

If someone is not religious, their remains can be dealt with as they or their families wish subject to the confines of the law. Last summer, Quebec approved the practice of Aquamations, an eco friendly alternative to cremation that involves using a water based solution to dissolve the body, leaving the bones which are then pressed into powder. With its increasing popularity, many Quebec funeral homes are getting on the enviro safe bandwagon.

The act of putting our dead to rest has been a custom for thousands of years. It not only allows us to pay our last respects to those we knew, but also keeps the inevitable result of human death and decay from becoming a sanitation risk.

News

Social media has been set ablaze following the news that Bill C-51, the Conservatives’ so-called “anti-terrorism” legislation, has passed. The Conservative government intends to use their new legislative weapon to ban any BDS movement on the grounds of hate speech. I won’t elaborate on that question here, since Jason quite eloquently did so in a previous article.

Obviously anti-semitism and BDS aren’t synonymous. Many Israelis and Jews throughout the world are against the occupation and colonization of the West Bank and the illegal blockade of Gaza – does that make them any less Jewish? If anything, it would make them more human!

But what this whole debate underlines, once again, is that you can’t consider yourself Jewish if you don’t prostrate yourself completely at the feet of almighty Israel that can do no wrong – you aren’t Jewish unless your every action is a perfect emulation of Israel’s moves.

Support of Israel and Neo-Nazis in Ukraine

In this parallel universe that Harper, Netanyahu and Irwin Cotler, among others, have created, your “Jewishness” is defined by your support for Israel. Thus as long as you support Israel, all is fine and well. As long as you support Israel, you can even support, let’s say, the Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, even arm them and give them training. You can send strategic advisors to the aid of notorious anti-semites such as Andriy Parubiy or Andriy Biletsky and yet still be anointed with the title of “biggest friend of the Jewish people.”

Militants of neo-fascist Ukrainian party Svoboda.
Militants of neo-fascist Ukrainian party Svoboda.

The hypocrisy of the Harper government has reached new heights within the past few weeks, especially after this government’s megalomaniac decision to directly intervene within Ukraine’s internal affairs. Defence Minister Jason Kenney decided to quell the rumours of the potential affiliation of Canadian troops with Neo-Nazi elements by issuing a statement refuting those claims.

But in issuing that statement, Jason Kenney proved his complete lack of understanding about the Ukrainian conflict or, at least, his intellectual dishonesty. It’s interesting to see that Jason Kenney seems to know how to separate a “Neo-Nazi” from a “Non Neo-Nazi” better than the Ukrainians themselves.

The sphere of influence of Neo-Nazi terrorist outfits in Ukraine is larger and more powerful than ever and indistinguishable from the state apparatus. Neo-Nazi elements are present within every single major party represented within the Ukrainian parliament, within government, and within the National Security Council, which is the main actor through whom Canadian military officials are coordinating their operations in Ukraine.

Re-Defining Anti-Semitism

I guess being the best friend of Israel, gives you those sorts of benefits… Fighting against Islamic fanaticism on one side of the globe and supporting Neo-Nazi fanaticism on the other – that’s Stephen Harper’s foreign policy in a nutshell.

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Anti-semitism has become a word that has been thrown around so much that it’s become merely a tool nowadays – a rhetorical figure of speech to quash contrary points of view. Unfortunately, because of its over usage and conflation with any criticism of Israel,  the word has become devoid of its original essence, which is the hatred of the Jewish people, perpetuated by millennial racial stereotypes.

A year ago, this Conservative government organized the grandiose gala of anti-semitism in Ottawa and, with figures from across party lines, jointly denounced the “new anti-semitism:” a monstrous and preposterous new epidemic afflicting the world – the criticism of Israeli crimes against humanity.

This is the whitewashing of anti-semitism for political purposes, at its best. This type of whitewashing succeeds at doing exactly what it supposedly condemns: creating a racial stereotype and thus facilitating racism – in this case anti-semitism. In the universe of this new era of anti-semitism that comes in the drapes of criticism of Israel, Jews are seen to be a monolithic group: all support Israel, all support the illegal blockade of Gaza, and since Netanyahu said it a few months ago, every single Jew is against a two-state solution. As Steven Blaney said – at the time referencing the Qu’ran as justification for bill C-51 – “violence starts with words, hatred starts with words.” May I add violence starts with misleading racial stereotypes and hatred grows through the perpetuation of those racial stereotypes.

Nazi propaganda pumped racial stereotypes and conglomerated Jews as one and the same. That is how hate speech was born then and how it is born now. In defining Judaism as supporting Israel, the Harper government and all those that abide to such a logic are instigating hate speech, promoting a false racial stereotype and should be convicted under the hospice of their new draconian hate speech laws.

תיקון עולם

News

It is an understatement to say that, during this past summer, tensions have been high. The Israeli carpet-bombing of Gaza exacerbated tensions all around the world. The other day, I overheard a conversation, which went a little bit like this: “You’re Jewish?” The answer was “Yes.” “Well you must be a Zionist then?” was the follow-up.

Jewish communities around the world are affected by the actions of the Jewish state. For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, because of the continuous tension between Arab nations and the new state of Israel, many Jews were forced out of their countries – countries, which they had inhabited for hundreds, if not for thousands of years.

Israel was supposed to be the refuge for the toiled masses of Eastern European Jews escaping the horrors of the Second World War, but from the outset of its creation, Israel came to be identified as the banner carrier, the symbol, and the sole defender of the entire Jewish culture and creed. Thus Zionism, which in itself was a relatively marginalized ideology within Jewish communities up until the end of WWII, became conflated with Judaism as a whole.

Pseudo-intellectual generalizations of the sort, supposedly “common knowledge”, are very slippery slopes indeed. Today the general knowledge — at least based on my few interactions within the past few months — is that all Jews are Zionists. There is quite a stark parallel to be drawn between this intellectual fallacy and the myths, for example the protocols of the elders of Zion, which were at the forefront of anti-Jewish propaganda at the dawn of the 20th Century. Such generalizations were, and still are, the breeding grounds on which fascist, nationalist and xenophobic groups lay their eggs of hate.

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In France, for example, the Front Nationale is trying to create bridges between themselves and the Muslim youth, who are rightfully revolted by the events in Gaza. This is a recurring event throughout Europe in this day and age. The French comedian and political activist Dieudonné and his highly controversial gesture “La Quenelle” are but part of a cultural trend that manifests the rise of a new anti-Jewish sentiment, whose slogan is “Every Jew is a Zionist” and whose fuel is the civilian casualties in Gaza.

Subsequently, anti-Zionism, as a result of these neo-fascist movements, becomes synonymous with anti-Judaism, thus allowing the Israel hawks or the right-wing Jewish diaspora to categorize any criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish, or anti-Semitic, which is a term I prefer not to use, because not all Semites are Jews.

On the one hand, every thing that is Jewish is seen as Zionist, and on the other everything that is anti-Zionist is seen as anti-Jewish. Even left-wing figures have been caught in this dreadful trap. George Galloway, leader of the British Respect Party, was caught equating all Israeli citizens with Zionists; although he must know very well, that there is a strong anti-Zionist intellectual contingent within Israeli academia and Israeli society at large.

Such intellectual shortcuts are dangerous, and there’s only one way to deal with them: going on a journey down memory lane. In most situations, in order to find solutions for the problems of today, we must dig into a past that has been, more often than not, purposefully omitted.

Before Zionism had the prominence and the global notoriety that it now has, it was a marginal ideal within the Eastern European Jewish community. Its main rival and anti-thesis was embodied by the Bund.

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The General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia was founded in 1897 in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was a socialist labor organization in the vein of the workers’ organizations sprouting-up throughout Europe at the time. Bundism — as it would be called — ideologically differed from other labor organizations, in the sense that it had the specific objective of uniting all of the Jewish workers within the Russian Empire, but its core principals and ideology were still based on the struggle to create an international workers movement that would uproot capitalist exploitation.

Bundism, was thus the nemesis of Zionism, because no dimension of Bundism appealed to any sense of ethnonationalism. The “Bundist” belief was that Judaism could be an internationalist creed, and thus the combination of international socialism and Judaism was a perfect match.

No wonder why, that, today, the Bund is all but forgotten, swiped under the rug. Zionism is a nationalist movement; a movement for the return of the Jewish people to the holy land. Parallels can be drawn between this ethnocentrism, which is at its foundation, and the ethnocentrism that serves as the foundation for the majority, if not the totality, of contemporary Western nationalist movements.

With the mounting xenophobia throughout the world, we are on the brink of a catastrophic head-on collision. Bundism is needed now, more then ever. A strong, inclusive, and tolerant Jewish alternative movement might be the dearly needed vaccination for our world’s predicament; not only for Jews, but for people of all walks of life. It is certainly needed in the current context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where the media is constantly saturated with close-minded Zionist rhetoric.

The antidote to dislodging the nationalist fear mongering, and avoiding a deluge of hatred, is going back to the roots of an internationalist interpretation of Judaism.