Friday afternoon right before Rosh Hashanah began, I received a phone call from one of my close friends and students. She was crying. Fearing the worst, I gently asked her what was wrong. She told me that she had just heard on the news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died.

After sharing the customary Jewish words of consolation - Baruch Dayan HaEmes (Blessed is the True Judge) with my distraught friend, I comforted her that even though we can’t see the whole picture, everything that God does is for the best. We both went into Rosh Hashanah with a sense of great communal loss, as well as concern about the political controversy that loomed.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not only the first Jewish woman to sit on the Supreme Court, she was a political and cultural icon. She was proudly Jewish. “I am a judge, born, raised and proud of being a Jew,” she said in address to the American Jewish Committee following her 1993 appointment to the court. She seated her drive for justice in the Bible, stating in that address that, “The demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition,” and hung the Biblical injunction to pursue justice on the walls of her chambers.

For many Jews, she was not just the image of a proud Jew, her political views made her the very face of Jewish liberalism. For that reason, it is noteworthy that Justice Ginsburg, with all her progressive ideals, chose to be buried rather than cremated.

Although it is a Biblical mitzvah to be buried, we find that in the United States more than fifty percent of Jews, particularly liberal Jews, choose cremation, believing it to be somehow more “progressive” than traditional burial. But there is a difference between true liberalism and mere fashion, and we can be certain that a mind as reasoned as Justice Ginsburg’s discerned that difference.

The legal decisions she authored impact every American, but it is Justice Ginsburg’s final decision that all Jews, across the spectrum of politics and religious observance, should take to heart when considering their own final end-of-life plans.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a liberal icon, but she was also Yita Rochel bat Tzirel Leah. She was born a Jew, and she chose burial, because that’s what Jews do.

God Himself buried Moses, and for the last 3,500 years, Jews have emulated God and chosen to gently bury their departed loved ones. Burial in the ground provides a final resting place for the body, and a place to visit part of the soul that remains with that body. Cremation, on the other hand, does not afford any rest for the soul, nor does it provide the profound sense of closure for remaining family and friends that burial provides.

Burial is the ultimate mark of respect for both body and soul, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg certainly deserved no less than this final form of Jewish respect. May her memory be for a blessing.

Robin Davina Meyerson is the West Coast Director for NASCK, the National Association of Chevra Kadisha.
Robin can be reached at 602-469-1606 or robin@peacefulreturn.org.