One source of pleasure and meaning for me over the years has been allowing the worlds of Judaism and Harry Potter to converse, each shedding light on the other. This unusual interest has produced the bestselling Unofficial Hogwarts Haggadah, as well as The Unofficial Muggle Megillah and Morality for Muggles. The following piece, a peek at one of my current projects tentatively called Potter & Parasha, is in that spirit. But whether you dabble in Harry Potter or not, I hope it will speak to you and our current moment.
A peculiar custom associated with Jewish burial rites requires that the first spadeful of earth placed in an open grave by each member of a funeral party be taken with the blade of the shovel reversed. A common reason suggested for the awkward gesture is that we wish this saddest of mitzvot to always remain clumsy and unaccustomed to our hands, foreign to our experience.
Reading Harry Potter in conjunction with the Torah portion of Chayei Sarah suggests another explanation.
One of the most heartrending moments in the entire Harry Potter saga is when Harry must bury Dobby the house elf. Dobby — who had tried misguidedly to protect Harry from danger by preventing him from attending Hogwarts in his second year; who had actually protected him from Lucius Malfoy at the end Book Two; who heroically rescued Harry and his friends from Malfoy Manor in Book Seven — brave, loyal, endearing Dobby is cut down by the thrown knife of Bellatrix Lestrange just as he disapparates with Harry to the safety of Shell Cottage. And it is left to Harry to bury his rescuer. How he goes about doing it says much of love and grief and their relationship.
“I want to do it properly,” were the first words of which Harry was fully conscious of speaking. “Not by magic. Have you got a spade? ...He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives.” (Book 7, p. 478)
In other words, the very unnecessary and unaccustomed physical labor performed by Harry is a tribute to Dobby. The sweat, muscle fatigue, and staining of his clothes are a testament to his love and grief. And the two are intertwined. The depth of the grief is a reminder of the depth of the love. “Just as Voldemort had not been able to possess Harry while Harry was consumed with grief for Sirius, so his thoughts could not penetrate Harry now, while he mourned Dobby. Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out... though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love.”
All but the most stone-hearted of us aspire to love, all the while knowing that our love must someday lead to grief. But it is the grief that ratifies the love retroactively.
How different would have been a grave dug by Voldemort for his Muggle father, whom he blamed for abandoning him and his mother, and whom he killed and buried in the graveyard in which, reborn, he later dueled Harry. One cannot picture Voldemort, who knew nothing of love, digging any grave for his father with anything but a lazy wave of his wand, if he’d even bothered to bury him.
In other words, the act of burial reflects the essence of the relationship.
In Chayei Sarah, when Abraham comes to bury Sarah, his wife and partner in a mission of multiple decades, we might have expected to hear eloquent words of eulogy. Instead, we are plunged into the midst of Middle Eastern negotiations. Rather than bouquets and mourners, we are subjected to a real estate deal, as Abraham procures the cave in which he will inter his wife. How demeaning it must have been for Abraham, emissary of the one God, to haggle with a mogul named Ephron for a burial site in the land that had been divinely promised to him.
And yet couldn’t it be that the very humiliation of the experience, getting his hands dirty with a business deal as his wife lay unburied, was precisely his offering of love, when a lifetime of love had turned to grief? To pull rank as God’s representative would be the same as Harry using magic to dig Dobby’s grave. No, the gift given on the seam of life and death had to be felt.
The lesson that love and grief are inseparable stays with Harry all the way to the Epilogue of the series, when he experiences sending his youngest son off to Hogwarts as “a little bereavement.” (Book 7, p. 759)
In our finite lives, we reach for eternal love, all the while tacitly understanding its price in a finite world. When laying a loved one to rest we symbolize that price by seeking to feel uncomfortable by using the reverse side of the spade. It is a small price to pay if it evokes, even by its painful absence, the love that birthed it.
Thank you for reading this edition of Ketoret, a newsletter about making meaning in difficult moments. To receive these installments in your inbox, feel free to subscribe: