The Usage of Dirt in Jewish Funeral Burial Practices

This image depicts the burial process of a Jewish funeral. Here we see a crowd of mourners dressed in black surrounding the burial site where the coffin has been laid. We witness individuals at the front of the crowd holding shovels, and preparing to collect dirt to shovel onto the coffin. The mourners are very close to the burial site and actively participating in the burial by shoveling the dirt. This process engages directly with the matter of dirt, which Mary Douglas discusses in Purity and Danger. While Douglas claims that dirt “offends against order” (Douglas, 2002:2), this image depicts dirt as being a direct component of establishing order in a ritual process. I will discuss Douglas’s ideas about ritual and the construction of danger and power to understand the context of this ritual and its construction of power.

Douglas discusses the relationship between matters considered corrupt or polluted with ritualistic and communal practices. She explicitly discusses the community' s assignment of meaning on different matters such as dirt, and how we can understand our construction of meaning based on religious structures. She states, “the more we know about primitive religions the more clearly it appears that in their symbolic structures there is scope for meditation on the great mysteries of religion….reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death” (Douglas, 2002:7).Douglas questions why bodily refuse such as dirt represents “symbol[s]of danger and power” (Douglas, 2002:149), and why, in initiations such as those of sorcerers, these bodily refuse are manipulated. Therefore, our assignments of meaning to matter are often determined by the bodily experiences we attribute to this matter. Douglas concludes, “to which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what situation the body is mirroring….to understand bodily pollution we should try to argue back from the known dangers of society to the known selection of bodily themes and try to recognize what appositeness is there” (Douglas, 2002:150). I connected this process of covering a coffin with dirt to the meaning of making a community with usage of a polluted or corrupt matter, and how this matter can be assigned meaning and power based on the manipulation of its actors.


Douglas states “those rituals which most explicitly credit corrupt matter with power are making the greatest effort to affirm the physical fullness of reality ... .cultures which frankly develop bodily symbolism may be seen to use it to confront experience with its inevitable pains and losses” (Douglas, 2002:148). This effort is apparent in the construction of meaning for burials in the Jewish funeral tradition, in which community members participate in rituals that manipulate a corrupt matter with power. This reassigns meaning to the matter as having the capacity to provide connectedness with life, and providing healing by allowing the community to directly confront and engage with loss. Jewish tradition stresses not leaving strangers to bury the coffin or to have it done before the service. The event that is being avoided, the burial of a loved one, is actively constructed. The customs in this burial process involve shoveling dirt three times, to represent three soul levels, and to shovel with the face of the shovel turned backwards, to symbolize the difficulty of burial and mourning. While the bodily margin of dirt is oftentimes perceived as a form of pollution and corruption, its meaning is transformed in the act of burial, in which the covering of the body in dirt symbolizes return and a connectedness to the cycle of life. When members of the Jewish community shovel dirt onto the coffin, they are actively participating in returning a loved one to the Earth and connecting to this cycle. I interpret the “danger” of this event to be the enormous grief of loss and the confrontation with death. Returning to Douglas’s themes of danger and power, the Jewish tradition of participating in burial manipulates the usage of dirt and reconstructs its meaning from one of danger and corruption to one of holding the capacity to build community, create closure, and provide healing.



Bibliography




Anon. n.d. “Jewish Traditions Regarding Death | Sinai Memorial Chapel.” Retrieved April 4, 2025 (https://www.sinaichapel.org/jewish-traditions-regarding-death.aspx).




Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London New York: Routledge.




Anon. n.d. “Ashes of Holocaust Victims Buried in Monsey.” The Journal News. Retrieved April 4, 2025 (https://www.lohud.com/picture-gallery/news/local/rockland/monsey/2019/09/27/ashes-holocaust-victims-buried-monsey/3781655002/).