Chesed Shel Emet

Yesterday I traveled from Vermont to Connecticut to attend a funeral.  A large group of family and friends were assembled to honor the life of a greatly loved, recently deceased synagogue member, Michelle.  She was one of my first friends in Connecticut, where I moved twenty-six years ago. 

Michelle worked as a banker in the town where the congregation I would serve for ten years was located, but she belonged to a different congregation in another town.  Eventually, I became the rabbi at her congregation and served there happily for thirteen years. 

Around the time of my departure from that congregation, I sat down with Michelle and her husband in a Starbucks, and they presented me with several thoughtful gifts, among them a backpack emblazoned with the Milwaukee Brewers logo.  It’s an amazingly efficient – lightweight and compact – travel accessory.

Most of it can be stuffed into a small pocket located just inside the backpack’s top, and then, when I’m not using the backpack, I can stuff it like a pair of socks conveniently in my luggage.  It’s practically invisible when scrunched into that tiny ball, and then it can be unpacked and filled with stuff.  It’s kind of like Michelle herself, who was of short stature, not ostentatious in the least, but packed full of life and enthusiasm.  When I’m in Israel, I find the backpack handy for shopping, and I use it for various other purposes as well.  When she and her husband gave me this gift, I was touched by the personal emphasis – Michelle had remembered a not necessarily obvious detail about me:  my Milwaukee roots.   At her funeral, I heard other stories about Michelle’s courteous ways.

She was always thinking of people, attending to their needs, imagining what they might need, going out of her way to show kindness and generosity toward anyone she knew and those she didn’t.  Her death is a loss for her synagogue community, those especially close to her, and me.  She died at age fifty; too young.

The rabbi who officiated at Michelle’s funeral noted the Jewish tradition of chesed shel emet, a phrase meaning, literally, “love of truth.”  Emet, translated as “truth,” also means – reflecting Michelle’s nature and personality – “faithfulness.” 

The love spoken of here is, as the rabbi also noted, one of several kinds Judaism speaks of and means love infused with kindness:  lovingkindness – understood, in theological terms, as covenantal love, the unbreakable bond of love between God and the people Israel who are consecrated to a life of holiness.  Michelle lived that life.  Chesed shel emet is a reminder of how, signally, in the divine-human relationship, there abides an understanding of ahavat chinam / “gratuitous love.”  Here, translation (mine relies on the BDB dictionary) begs for explanation.

People often use the English word “gratuitous” (translated from chinam) in a pejorative sense, to suggest something unnecessary and wrong or (as my Apple dictionary says) “uncalled for,” but the word has more positive connotations too.  It is from a Latin word meaning “given freely, spontaneous,” and that is what we’re talking about with chinam.  That word derives from chen, meaning “grace” or “favor.”  These language clues point toward humans’ desire to emulate the divine impulse to give without expecting something in return.

Those who think of God as a person can therefore say that God’s readiness to give love is unconditional, not depending on reciprocal generosity from the person on whom God has bestowed love.  Those who prefer (as I do) not to personalize God can say that the capacity to love freely, boundlessly and unconditionally is a holy quality.  And that is what chesed shel emet is about; those who have died cannot repay us for our kindness in accompanying them to their graves. 

Whether you call the gesture of being at a funeral gratuitous or gracious, it is holy.  I was honored to be among the throng of relatives and friends at Michelle’s graveside.  The sting of losing her won’t go away soon or ever, but knowing we were doing for her what she did for everyone she met provides some comfort.  Just as Michelle, a consummate banker, banked on no favors in return for all her goodness, we don’t ask for anything in return for our act of remembering her.  And yet…

In not asking for anything back, we did receive something invaluable:  the satisfaction of knowing that we were following in Michelle’s footsteps upon the path of faithfulness and lovingkindness.