“And the neighbors are quiet,” she said. Something about her smile made me uneasy 

It’s early afternoon on Chanukah and I’m standing with my son at a bus stop just past one of Jerusalem’s busiest junctions — the meeting point of Bar Ilan and Shmuel Hanavi Streets.

There’s music playing from some of the stores across the street, and lots of foot traffic: groups of teenaged girls dressed according to an unspoken fashion code, fathers carrying boxes of doughnuts, mothers stocking up on drinks or paper goods for their family parties. And of course, lots of kids coming and going from the shekel store.

My son and I move to make room as a big, dark-blue van turns in next to us. The driver, a young man with long peyos, stops outside the yellow gate blocking his way. He gets out of the van, punches some numbers into an electric keypad, then hops back in and drives onward as the yellow gate opens up.

“Do you know what’s inside that van?” I ask my son.

He shrugs.

“Do you know what that man does?”

No, he doesn’t. So I tell him that’s a chevra kaddisha van, and the man inside does one of the most important, and at times difficult, tasks in Yiddishkeit.

My son nods. It makes sense. He knows that just beyond the yellow gate is a cemetery. He knows that death is part of life.

Our bus still hasn’t arrived, so we continue people-watching, and we notice a steady procession of people going up and down the flight of stone stairs behind us. There’s a young couple — he in jeans, she in not-quite-Bais Yaakov attire — heading up the stairs, absorbed in quiet conversation. An elderly woman and her son are slowly coming down. Two yeshivah bochurim approach, then wait for the mother of a large family to bump her stroller down the stairs. She has four boys in matching sweaters and two girls grouped around her. As they turn toward the strip of stores just past the bus stop, we hear her instructing the children: “So remember, you each get six shekel to spend at the shekel store.”

Where were all these people going? What was the big attraction?

“It’s a Chanukah trip,” my son helpfully explains. “To the Sanhedria cemetery, to get in some good davening. Nice idea, no?”

A Chanukah trip to the cemetery… what could be better?

The Chanukah scene reminded me of an encounter that took place years earlier. The weather and circumstances were very different, but the location very close by.

It was during our years-long search for an apartment. Someone had tipped us off about a family in Sanhedria who’d married off most of their children and were looking to downsize. The apartment had an expansive sun-drenched living room, big-enough kitchen, and a second floor up on the roof with three extra bedrooms. Now the woman of the house was ready to show us her porch.

“And the neighbors are quiet,” she said. Something about her smile made me uneasy — it held a touch of sheepishness, or was it irony?

Her strange introduction about the quiet neighbors made sudden sense when we gazed down — at rows and rows of gravestones. Standing submissively as the fierce summer sun blasted and bleached them with its unforgiving heat, they were indeed very quiet.

I tried to imagine a leisurely Shalosh Seudos in their company, a birthday party with them looking on. It was a long way from Brooklyn.

In time, we found a different apartment, in a different location and for different reasons. But since that neighborly encounter I’ve found myself stopping short every now and then at the utter casualness with which the people of this city approach death.

Two of our neighborhood parks are named for ancient burial caves, and if you don’t watch carefully, your little boys might find it fun to play inside the (now-empty) crypts. The city’s large indoor chareidi mall sits a stone’s throw from its main funeral home, and the lines of cars exiting the parking lot laden with shopping bags and dripping ice cream cones often wait deferentially for the lines of cars on their way to levayos to enter the same narrow space. Roads are planned and built to circumvent burial grounds now submerged beneath civilization, and roadwork is held up by demonstrators determined to protect human remains.

Where I grew up, death was kept, as much as possible, at a distance from children. I never saw a baby at a levayah. Death happened in a hospital and was discussed in hushed voices, its results hidden from sight in a wooden coffin draped in velvet.

Here the kids exchange news of ambulances, then watch the sign-hangers plaster notices of a levayah when said ambulances could not successfully ward off the Angel of Death. They will imitate the wailing voice of the loudspeaker echoing through their neighborhood, announcing the details of the upcoming levayah, and then might even watch it take place right under their window — no funeral chapel, no physical or emotional remove, no coffin. And the education starts young: strollers and baby carriers make regular appearances at levayos. There’s no mandatory shielding of the little ones from the cycle of life.

If it’s your kids who are growing up in this matter-of-fact environment, you will likely get lots of questions about the topic. On the way to the dentist, or as you plan a Chol Hamoed trip, there’ll be big placards or loud megaphones announcing that yet another person has passed through the portal to the next world. Kids being the curious creatures they are, they’ll ask you for details and descriptions, hows and whens and whys.

If you grew up with a sacred hush surrounding death, it might feel jarring to talk about burial practices in the long-ago cemetery that is currently your children’s Shabbos afternoon park. It might feel sacrilegious to associate visits to the cemetery with Chanukah outings (followed, of course, by a stop at the shekel store), and unnecessarily frightening to point out the angels in human garb driving by in their dark-blue vans. It might even seem like a desecration of childhood innocence, a puncturing of some golden balloon. But maybe it’s healthier this way?

At some point, the children over there and the children over here grow up and make their inevitable acquaintance with loss and grief (may it only follow the natural pattern). At some point, we begin to internalize that everyone gets their turn to accomplish and then their turn to rest. No one makes it to adulthood with their golden balloon of childish naivete intact.
But I wonder if the children who grew up with a casual acquaintance with death — who know it as the natural next stop, the inevitable portal to eternity, or even as the quiet, sun-bleached neighbors next door — absorb with those placards and megaphones a better understanding of just how temporary is our stay in this hotel.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1044)