Ancestor worship is idolatry

While reading the recent article in Slate about gravers, I got to think that one of the things that genuinely and independently appeals to me about Judaism, and even appealed to me when I was a child and hadn’t yet learned anything, is the way Judaism approaches death and mourning. My parents, who both grew up assimilated and neither of whom dated another Jew before meeting each other, knew enough to tell me that we don’t “view” dead people before the funeral, that we don’t pray to our dead relatives, that we don’t put a dead person’s face on a t-shirt (this is why I wasn’t allowed to have a Kurt Cobain shirt after he killed himself), that we show dignified respect for the dead at all times.

As I grew up and got involved in Jewish issues and learned a lot from my own research and from my very gracious religiously-observant and -educated friends, I also found it very proper and even approaching a certain form of perfection that we are forbidden to bury anyone on Har HaBayit, our holiest place. Certainly some element of this rule is that Har HaBayit is a space for cohanim to conduct the sacrifices and other business on our behalf, and they are not permitted to come into contact with death. But Har HaBayit is also a space for every Jew, and accommodations could have been made for burials to take place there in a way that would not affect cohanim.

The significance of disallowing burials there is that Har HaBayit is a space to worship only a deity and not another human being; allowing dead people to be interred there would confuse the issue, if only subconsciously.

It’s very unfortunate, then, that the same approach was not extended to the other specific sites that Jews consider most holy. Consider: Maarat HaMachpela is where some dead people are buried; Kever Rachel and Kever Yosef are where some other dead people are buried. These people mattered and matter still today, but there importance is quite unrelated to the specific locations of their bones. By all means, their tombs are important sites that must be cherished and honored, but the notion of conducting prayer there is abominable and nothing short of idolatry.

Yes, idolatry, and the ones who engage in such practices are idolaters. Ancestor worship is for Chinese, for Hindus and for Catholics. It is pagan and unseemly, totally incompatible with monotheism, and utterly banned by the Torah with the further obligation that we may not even tolerate it.

Despite that, many Torah Jews visit the aforementioned tombs with some regularity, or would like to do so, and many more visit the tombs of mere rabbis. For example, I am consistently nauseated and appalled every year by the pilgrimage to Meiron to engage there in avoda zara – and a million times worse is that Jews actually leave the land of Israel to visit the graves of rabbis in Ukraine for Rosh HaShana. They should all fall to the ground and beg forgiveness for that hillul hashem.

In this respect I think we might learn something from the otherwise frightening Wahhabism, that most thoroughly distilled strain of the world’s most dangerous religion.