Behaving Like A Jew

Children of Israel are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

So if we’re friends on Facebook, you are likely already aware that I create memorials for animals I find dead in the road. Usually I find these animals during the miles I walk each day. When I see one, I turn around, go back home, find gloves and a cardboard box, and then go get the animal.

I used to bury them but now I try to find a beautiful, peaceful spot to leave them for predators, who are also animals that need sustenance. I like to imagine that if they come upon a creature that’s already gone, they might not need to kill any live ones for at least a few days.

It feels right to me to mark their passing and then leave them to the wild circle of life.

This is my ritual: I bring them to the loveliest spot I can find. I adorn their bodies with flowers. I tell them I’m so sorry they were hit by a car. I sit with them and appreciate them, studying all the details I’d never be able to see up close if they were alive. I try to find a poem that’s appropriate for the moment and I read it out loud. And I always end by reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish.

These are a few of the animals I have memorialized in the past:

As I share this ritual, I’m aware that some people will think I’m at least a little bit batshit and some people will deeply get me. I hope most of you are in the latter category, but in any event, today the animal happened to be an opossum.

It fills me with special dread to see a newly-killed opossum in the spring because so often they have babies in their pouch and nothing is sadder to me than finding their tiny bodies already dead as well. If I were ever to find live young, I would rush them to a local wildlife rehabber; I have many in my network. But as yet, I have never discovered an animal in time to save the babies.

To my relief, this one was male and his body was still in very fine form. Stiff and cold but bloodless, no terrible wounds, no decay yet, no odor, no larvae. (Sorry if this is TMI but I have dealt with all of the above.)

There was a perfect field around the corner. I brought it there and laid it down and set about gathering flowers.

In the midst of this, I was reflecting on what bearing, if any, Jewish spirituality might have on this act. I’ve always considered myself a spiritual person, whatever that might mean, given the fact that I’m not a believer.

For me it means that my love of my heritage, my tradition and my people burns inside me like a blowtorch, and also that I can’t drive past a blazing gold and crimson autumn tree without pulling the car to the curb and jumping out and gathering the leaves. That I can’t pass a perfect two-toned tea rose without kissing its face. That I would rather have acorns and driftwood and ceramic shards polished smooth by the ocean and river rocks and sea glass in my possession than diamonds or gold.

And I’ve always considered these memorials a spiritual act.

If pressed to explain how, it would likely come down to this: I believe that acts like these matter. I don’t really believe — though I always still hope — that the animal’s spirit has some way to perceive its final arrangements. But if there is a God, this is one of His creations, and the decision not to let it be steamrolled into a stain on the pavement: I have to believe it matters. Reverence and tenderness toward its body, its beauty: I have to believe that matters. Taking the time to really see it and mark its passage from the world: such a ceremony is surely useless, and yet I have to believe that all of it matters in some way that can’t be articulated, only felt.

So after finding a perfect spot for the opossum, and laying it down, and decorating its body, and sitting with it and talking with it, I began an internet search on my phone for a poem, using the keywords “dead opossum”.

Would you ever believe this was the first one I found?

Would you believe I’d never seen or heard of it before this moment?

It’s astonishing even to me.

*

Behaving Like A Jew

Behaving Like a Jew

Gerald Stern

When I got there the dead opossum looked like
an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds—just
seeing him there—with the hole in his back
and the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal sorrow.
I am sick of the country, the bloodstained
bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grilles,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds
refusing to move;
I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy in death, that philosophical
understanding of carnage, that
concentration on the species.
I am going to be unappeased at the opossum's death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
with the Toyotas and the Chevies passing over me
at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk
and my eyes are still weak and misty
from his round belly and his curved fingers
and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

*

This poem explained me to myself. This compulsion of mine made sense to me once I’d read it.

I am going to be unappeased at the opossum's death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.

Since October 7th, I’ve gone deeper into my Jewish spirituality than I ever have before. I don’t think I could endure this social or political moment (and by “moment” I mean “seeming eternity”) without leaning on whatever shreds of Jewish faith I’m able to summon.

And now I get why my own version of spirituality compels me to gather the dead from the road and transport them somewhere that will restore their dignity and fulfill their final purpose.

Framed in this way, I’m not, finally, a terminally frivolous person, sentimental to the point of being overwrought, tender to a tiresome fault, overly prone to senseless gestures.

I’m just behaving like a Jew.

Am Yisrael Chai.