An Ethics of Erasure: The Jewish Moral Response to the Dead Body

Ethics is sometimes thought to be narrowly a concern with our treatment of the Other, a living thing: the neighbor, the loved one, animals, the earth, or God. However Jewish ethics also has a robust understanding of our obligations to the no longer living, to the no-longer-human. Of course Jewish rituals around death and mourning are well known and well studied. What has received less attention is our moral obligations to the dead body itself. By studying the Jewish visual response to death, namely how Jews traditionally (do not) depict and gaze upon the dead, I argue that ultimately it is the ethical agent’s moral responsibility to render the dead invisible. The Jewish corpse, a no-longer-human being who is not quite an object, who can experience shame and contains the image of God, requires that it ultimately be erased from this world, no longer available to living eyes.