BINTEL BRIEFI prepare bodies as part of a synagogue’s burial society, but I’m an anti-Zionist. Is that OK?
A woman wonders if the fact that the dead she washes and prepares would consent to be touched by someone with her politics
A Jewish grave, marked with stones by visitors. Photo by iStock
By Mira Fox August 6, 2025
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Dear Bintel,
I have been volunteering with a local synagogue’s Chevra Kadisha — the burial society — since 2016.
I love performing taharot; it’s my favorite Jewish ritual. It is rare to be in a space where women are treating another woman’s body with love and honor and sanctity. Doing taharot has helped me deal with some of my own body image issues.
I am also a proud and vocal anti-Zionist. I never would have thought that my personal political stances would have any bearing on my Jewish status (and halachically I am 100% sure that they do not), but Gil Troy and Natan Sharansky seem to disagree, and think that I am an “UnJew.”
When it comes to most mitzvot, I don’t really care whether or not someone else doesn’t consider me to be a Jew – if someone else doesn’t say “amen” to my brachot, or eat out of my kitchen, or have me sign their ketubah, or marry my children, what do I care?
But tahara is different. The meis does not have the ability to step out of the room when I arrive to prepare their body for burial. It is my job, as a member of their tahara team, to act with the utmost concern for their dignity — as they were, not as I may have wished them to be.
Someone who plans to be prepared for burial by the synagogue’s chevra kadisha can and should assume that the members of their tahara team will be Jewish. The synagogue is also a Zionist institution. Does that mean that someone making end-of-life plans who wants the synagogue’s chevra kadisha to prepare them for burial is assuming that the people preparing them for burial are Zionists?
Should I step down from the synagogue’s Chevra Kadisha?
Signed,
Tortured Tahara
Dear Tortured,
I’m glad that you don’t seem to have any qualms about your own Jewishness; we get a lot of questions from Jews wondering whether their political views make them less Jewish but, as you noted, halacha does not require litmus tests. Indeed, Jews have been arguing over Zionism as long as it has existed — and in the end, history remembers all sides of the arguments as Jews. Indeed, even the article you link about “un-Jews” says anti-Zionist Jews are still Jews; it just poses a strong disagreement with the way they conceive of Israel.
Your real question is about the tricky nature of consent when not all parties can do so. Had they come to you in advance of their death, some of the people you are preparing — tahara involves ritually washing and dressing the dead — would not have chosen to spend time with you, or would not consider you Jewish, or would have argued vociferously with you.
Tahara is considered one of the most holy mitzvot one can do, because the dead can never reciprocate; it is understood in Jewish tradition as an extremely selfless act. But you wonder if the dead might not accept a mitzvah from you, just as they might not say “amen” to your blessings.
In Judaism, however, death is far more about the living than it is about the dead. When you look at the text of the kaddish prayer, it says nothing about dying, about the dead person, about an afterlife, about praying for their soul. Instead, it praises God and asks for peace here, on earth. Shiva, too, is about comforting the living and guiding their mourning.
I’d let this Jewish principle guide you. Worry less about how the dead might have felt about you and think more about their family, the meaning that you get from performing this mitzvah and your service to your community.
You clearly take that service very, very seriously. You talk about respecting the body’s dignity as you cleanse it, pray over it and dress it for burial. And it is clearly out of this deep sense of respect that you worry that you should quit the chevra kadisha.
But I want you to consider what chevra kadisha means: literally, it translates to “a sacred society,” or “a sacred community.” Being in community will always mean being around people who are different from you. You already do this every time you do tahara — you are serving the community of a Zionist synagogue, working alongside others with whom you may sometimes disagree, and presumably preparing the bodies of people whose feelings on Israel you may reject. Yet you manage to respect them deeply, and see them as whole people and Jews. You should expect to be treated just as wholly.
The one note I might make is that I know sometimes tahara involves placing soil from Israel into the coffin. If for that or any other reason you are changing the ritual because of your political beliefs, I think that changes the act from one of service to a personal, political stand that the dead cannot opt out of. But tahara is not performed alone — it is an act of communal service, performed in community, usually with four people — and no one you work alongside has asked you to leave; in fact, you’ve been doing it for nearly a decade. Evidently your politics have not been a problem. It’s only because you are so invested in and thoughtful about respecting the dead that this has even occurred to you.
If you still feel weird about it, there’s a practice of asking the dead for forgiveness as part of the rituals performed after they die, which you could do. But even the act of tahara is already one of amends; according to some sources, it is good for enemies of the dead to be pallbearers, as a symbolic act of reconciliation. You could look at your work similarly, a gesture bridging the chasm of disagreements, a way to return to coexisting in Jewish community despite whatever disagreements you may have had in life.
Tahara is a flattening moment; after death, it no longer matters who you were or what you believed in life. A great rabbi is buried the same as a pauper. Part of the ritual, as you know, is dressing the dead in plain garments and placing them in a simple coffin so that wealth or status cannot be distinguished after death. The only thing that matters is that they were Jewish, and that their body is ritually prepared Jewishly.
Indeed, after your eventual death, you too will be remembered as a Jew. You will be ritually washed and buried in white linen garments, as you do for each woman who comes into your care. Perhaps someone on your tahara team will be a Zionist. That’s OK too.
