On Compost, Death, and Immortality

Excerpted from
Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love, and Compost
By Rabbi Balfour Brickner

Prayer plays a constant role in many people's lives, but it seems to take on a particular importance in the presence of death. At such moments, it is not uncommon for even the most irreligious among us to participate in services where prayer is central. Even more strange, many of those prayers speak hopefully or faithfully about the prospect of life continuing after death. But does it make any sense to pray for life at a time of death? Where does one begin to find a response to that question? For me, it began in our kitchen.

Garbage has always been plentiful in our home. When the children were young, no matter how much they ate - and our kids were very good eaters - plates and platters frequently left the table half full. There were, of course, leftovers, but somehow, no matter how imaginative my wife was with the remaining food, there always seemed to be a lot of garbage. What to do with it? For years, we did what most people do: we threw it out - at first into a garbage can that was periodically emptied, and later, with the advent of new inventions, into the electric disposal in our sink.

Frankly, I never gave the matter a second thought. That was what one did with garbage. It was only when I began to garden that my postculinary habits changed radically. Garbage, the messier and the more the better, suddenly took on new meaning for me - and new life. In fact, that is exactly what happens to it when it is used in the garden: it takes on new life. Put differently and much more to the point, what seems dead lives - again. Farmers know this about manure. That is why it is saved from the barn and spread over the fields in the spring and fall. Rare indeed is the person who grows things, no matter how inexperienced, but does not know that garbage, like manure, is like brown gold - potential compost, richly alive with the three elements requisite for any successful growing medium: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash. Nitrogen is vital for the development of leaf and stem growth, phosphorus stimulates strong foliar growth and fruit formation, and potash plays a vital role in the development of chlorophyll and makes plants more resistant to disease.

Through the process of decay, compost, the name we give to seemingly dead plant material that has decomposed, becomes rich in these nutrients. When spread over a garden bed, it becomes the heart and soul of all successful plant life. No wonder that in the fall, gardeners take their dead leaves and dump them onto the compost pile, usually located, like an old cemetery, in some obscure corner of the yard. No wonder that during the summer, we daily tote our garbage pails to the compost pile and pour the seemingly offensive, potentially foul-smelling waste into a previously dug hole somewhere in the middle of the existing mound. The closer we are to a wild space, the deeper the hole - an attempt to keep the fresh material away from some marauding raccoon. (A useless effort: short of extensive fencing, it is simply impossible to keep a raccoon out of a compost pile. Make the deal: they get half,- you get half. Fair is fair.)

During the growing season, we spend serious time at the compost pile, pitchfork in hand, laboriously turning the pile and thus encouraging it to heat up - to increase its physical temperature and thus burn out any undesirable weeds. Lime is also frequently added to a compost pile: first to "sweeten" it - that is, to reduce its acidity - and second to speed the process of deterioration of the plant material. The use of lime for such a purpose has been known and practiced for at least five thousand years. In biblical days, and even before, we know that the dead were placed in limestone caves, called sepulchres. The possession of a family burial cave was critically important, as we have seen in the twenty-third chapter of Genesis, which describes Abraham's desperate bargaining with a local tribe of Hittites, seeking to enlist their help in persuading one of their members, Ephron, son of Zohar, to sell Abraham the cave of Machpelah as a burial site for Sarah, his recently deceased wife. At this juncture in his life, Abraham was a landless sojourner in Canaan, so he needed to pro-cure such a place in which to bury his wife. But the acquisition of even a small plot of ground was more than just a matter of practicality,- it was also symbolic. It represented for Abraham, and for subsequent generations, the promise of a future larger settlement on land legitimately acquired through purchase, not conquest. At some later time, these family burial tombs must have become communal.

In Israel, one can visit a very famous cemetery of such sepulchres, carved deep into a huge limestone hill near the ancient Jewish town of Beit Shearim in western Galilee. There, two thousand years ago, our forebears buried their dead in niches, called kochim, carved out of the soft limestone. As in the many other burial caves scattered throughout the land, the deceased lay in their shrouds for a year until the lime had eaten everything except their bones. These would be reverently gathered up and put in engraved ossuaries, which were placed in corners of the cave, by then a mausoleum. A visit to Beit Shearim can be an impressive and sobering experience.

Jesus was buried in such a place. Three of the four synoptic Gospels tell us that after his death, he was taken to the Jerusalem burial cave of Joseph of Arimathea, where his body, properly wrapped, was left in a limestone burial niche. What happened after that is the subject of religious belief and considerable theological speculation. Many people believed, and continue to believe, that his life did not end. That is not surprising. People have always been reluctant to accept the idea that death is final. There will always be people who believe passionately that there is conscious life after death and that the living can be in contact with the dead. I find that hard to accept. There are no known, scientifically substantiated cases in which a person who has died has been brought back to speak with the living.