*This article originally appeared in the recent JOFA journal. JOFA.org

The 9th yahrzeit for Batsheva Chaya Stadlan z’l will be observed on the 25th of Nisan.

“She seemed so happy.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Will she be buried in a different part of the cemetery?”

“My sister died this way over 60 years ago and we couldn’t talk about it. We had to lie.”

My daughter Batsheva Chaya Stadlan, z”l, died by suicide in April of 2017. At the time of her death, I was finishing my second year of study to become a rabbi at Yeshivat Maharat. I had already completed my study of aveilut—the laws and customs pertaining to death and mourning, including rules regarding someone who had died by suicide. While undergoing the extraordinary trauma of losing my almost-19-year-old, I had the additional burden and worry that, because of the way she died, her death would be handled differently. My knowledge of the halakhah on suicide presented a bleak possible reality that she would be buried in a different place in the cemetery, that her funeral would be without appropriate eulogies, and that shiva would be truncated, if held at all.

Thankfully, my rabbi at the time said these very important words: “She died of an illness like any other.” With that short but powerful statement, I breathed a sigh of relief. While not wiping away the incredible pain, it assured me that I wouldn’t have to endure the added stigma and shame that so many other Jewish families had to bear when their loved ones died by suicide.

In recent years, there has been a general consensus within the psychiatric and psychological communities that mental illness is a manifestation of a brain malfunction and that death by suicide is not the result of an informed or rational choice. Simply put, a healthy brain does not plan for its own demise—ever, and suicide is the end stage of what my psychiatrist calls “a very bad brain disease.” However, the halakhah has not yet fully embraced the categorization of suicide within a medical framework. As a result, many Jewish suicide loss survivors continue to experience shame and stigma. This affects their ability to handle the initial shock of loss and to carry their grief going forward, and may leave them with sometimes overwhelming and debilitating guilt.

Halakhic Approaches to Suicide

The stigma against suicide is derived from the premise that death by suicide is a mortal sin—tantamount to murder. This view is first seen in rabbinic interpretations of Genesis 9. After the flood, God tells Noah to repopulate the earth and allows him to eat animals, but adds the specific directive not to murder humans:

But for your own life-blood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast; of humankind, too, will I require a reckoning for human life, of everyone for each other. (Genesis 9:5).

The Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 34:13) understands that this directive includes a prohibition of suicide. This view can be seen as an application of the overarching moral principle within Judaism to promote life and to discourage all practices that would seem to encourage death.

As late as the early twentieth century, Rabbi Yechiel Mikhel Tukatchinsky (1871-1955), in his book Gesher HaChaim, expands upon the idea that suicide is sinful and tantamount to murder:

The sin of one who murders himself is greater than that of one who murders someone else for several reasons: First, through this murder he has left no possibility for any remorse or repentance. Second, death … is the greatest form of repentance, but he, on the contrary, has committed through his death the greatest sin, namely, murder. Third, through his act he has made clear his repudiation of his Creator’s ownership of his life, his body and his soul… 

Yet the Rabbis also seemingly understood that suicide was not an act that a healthy brain would do. They tried to strike a balance between this understanding and their desire not to endorse anything that might encourage or promote death by limiting the situations in which death was categorized as suicide.

A key rabbinic limitation was characterizing only a willful suicide as sinful.  Moreover, in likening willful suicide to murder, the rabbis subjected labeling a suicide to the same evidentiary standard needed to convict someone of murder: two witnesses must attest to seeing the act of murder itself after (1) having warned the potential murderer that his intended actions are unlawful and subject to the death penalty (hatra’a), and (2) the potential murderer had stated his intent to murder notwithstanding the punishment; circumstantial evidence, including written notes or forensic investigation, was not admissible.

The Gemara in Tractate Semaḥot (one of the minor tractates, which deals with death and mourning practices) explicates the application of this evidentiary standard to suicide:

We do not occupy ourselves in any respect with the funeral rites of one who committed suicide wilfully. …  We do not rend garments for him, bare the shoulder, or deliver a memorial address over him. …

Who [comes within the category of] ‘one who committed suicide wilfully’? He [is] not [one] who climbed to the top of a tree and fell down and died, or he who went up to the top of the roof and fell down and died [i.e.,where the fall may have been accidental]. But he who calls out, ‘Look, I am going to the top of the roof or to the top of the tree, and I will throw myself down that I may die’ [comes within the category]. When people saw him go up to the top of a tree or roof [for that purpose] and he fell down and died, he is presumed to have committed suicide wilfully. …

If a person was found strangled or hanging from a tree or lying dead on a sword, he is presumed not to have committed suicide wilfully, and none [of the rites] are withheld from him.” (Semaḥot 2:1-3)

The Rabbis also often characterized the taking of one’s life as an act of martyrdom rather than suicide—not as murder, but as an act of holiness, dying to sanctify God’s name (kiddush Hashem). The very midrash that teaches that suicide is tantamount to murder also teaches that there are circumstances when a person is permitted to take their own life, based on the fact that the applicable verse (Genesis 9:5) begins with the word “akh” meaning “but,” which is viewed by the Midrash as a limitation on the scope of the verse. The Midrash gives two examples where death by one’s own hand was not seen as suicide or murder. The first is King Saul, who took his own life to avoid torture and desecration by the Philistines (I Samuel 31:4). The second is Ḥananya, Mishael, and Azarya, who were willing to be thrown into a fiery furnace rather than bow to an idol built by Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3:17). Tractate Semaḥot (2:4) extends this interpretation to other incidents where the deceased was overcome by fear of torture and anxiety.

In what has become the modern standard mourning practice handbook, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning (written in 1969 and updated in 2000), Rabbi Maurice Lamm provides a seven-point list for determination of whether a suicide was willful or not. The list contains the exceptions for mental illness and distress, but also includes the following understanding of what constitutes a willful suicide:

Was the act of suicide planned in advance, to make an ideological statement, such as an existential thinker, believing that on balance life is not worth living and prescribing self-destruction? Was that plan expressed verbally or committed to writing? How long before the suicide was it made?… Did death come as the suicide planned it?

Treatment of “Willful” Suicides

Although the Rabbis employed various means to limit the deaths categorized as suicide, they were reluctant to take away this categorization entirely. Those who took their lives for a political cause, or to show loyalty to some other philosophy, or as an act of rebellion were considered willful suicides and treated tantamount to murderers. The Rabbis often referred to ‘philosophers’ (most likely Socrates) who were not in distress but took their lives in order to have a ‘good death’ as those who willfully died by suicide. Those whose deaths were seen as a rebellion against God were also understood to be willful suicides.

Mourning practices were designed to support the mourners, but to afford no honor to the one who died by “willful” suicide. As a result, the Rabbis required a thorough investigation of each death by suicide to determine whether to characterize it as willful. The Shulḥan Arukh, the sixteenth-century authoritative code of Jewish law, succinctly delineates these rules:

One who commits suicide wilfully is not attended to at all; and one does not mourn for him and no lamentation is made for him, nor does one rend [garments] or bare [the shoulder in mourning for him], but one stands for him in the line [of comforters], and one recites over him the mourners’ blessing, and whatever [brings] honor [only] to the living [may be done]. (Shulḥan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah 345:1)

In The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, Rabbi Maurice Lamm brings these practices into sharp focus.

Burial: … If the suicide is definitely an intentional suicide, he is to be buried at least six feet from surrounding graves. Sometimes cemeteries reserve a special section for suicides. It usually is located near the fence or border of the cemetery. …

Eulogy: No eulogy should be made for a deliberate suicide, despite the good qualities he has demonstrated in life, as it is in his very act of dying that he committed sacrilege. 

There are two difficulties with drawing these distinctions. First, it is very hard to delineate those mourning practices that honor the deceased from those that comfort the living. Burying a loved one on the outskirts of the cemetery may harm the deceased, but the real pain will be felt by the family when they visit the grave of the deceased. Similarly, depriving the deceased of a eulogy is a sign of dishonor, but at the same time it deprives the survivors of the comfort of remembering the deceased. Perhaps more important, requiring an investigation of each death by suicide to determine whether it is “willful” subjects the deceased’s family to stigma and shame even if the death is ultimately ruled non-willful.

Suicide Is Never “Willful”

Rabbi Yechiel Mikhel Epstein (1829-1908), in his Arukh HaShulḥan, puts forth a compassionate understanding of suicide, advocating that halakhic decisors determining whether suicides are willful should lean heavily on the exceptions:

The principle with regard to one who takes his life knowingly [is that] we attribute it to any reason at all, e.g. fear, or pain, or insanity, or the belief that suicide is preferable to stumbling and committing other transgressions, etc. Suicide is truly a remote prospect for a person in his right mind. (Arukh HaShulḥan, Yoreh De’ah 345:5)

Rabbi Epstein’s approach most likely reflects his experience as a community rabbi. It is not unreasonable to believe that Rabbi Epstein saw the effects that strict application of mourning rules for willful suicide had on the surviving family members and was reluctant to employ them.

Even the Ḥatam Sofer (1762-1839), the forefather of what we now would call Ḥaredi Judaism, was reluctant to label deaths as willful suicides out of concern for the added trauma it would have on the deceased’s family:

I say that whenever there is an honorable family whose dignity will be compromised and they would be eternally ashamed, as one [member of the family] has blemished his actions, and if the family is permitted to mourn then people will say that the rabbis are certain that the person did not commit suicide, then the rabbi may rule that the family can mourn even if it is clear to him that the person knowingly ended his life.  (Responsa Ḥatam Sofer, Yoreh De’ah 326:10)

Some earlier rabbis also understood that even outward signs of volition might not indicate the real state of mind of one attempting to take their own life.

A fascinating responsa of Rabbi Shlomo Kluger, (1783-1869, Poland), details a case where a man who was heavily in debt attempted to kill himself by slashing his throat. His son interrupted him and grabbed the knife out of his hand, but the man died several days later. The son reported that while slashing his throat his father expressed his desire to repent and confessed his sins. Rabbi Kluger ruled that the man’s death was not a willful suicide as he was in great distress. Additionally Rabbi Kluger stated that one cannot be punished for merely thinking about doing something sinful, but only for the act itself. Finally, since the man recanted, it definitely could not be considered a willful act.

This account is reminiscent of a true story of one of my adult students, a neurosurgeon covering the emergency room at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. A patient arrived on her service with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. The family pleaded with the doctor to let him die, as he had written a suicide note declaring his intent to do so. The doctor couldn’t abide by the family’s request and operated on the man. The surgery was successful, saving the man’s life. When she went to see the patient after recovery, the first words he uttered to her were, “thank you.”

This story and the case brought to Rabbi Kluger highlight what current research is beginning to indicate about suicidal behavior: that the moment one seemingly chooses to kill themselves—-whether due to mental distress, illness, fear, anxiety or to make a political statement, whether it has been planned or is a sponatenous decision—is a moment when the brain is malfunctioning. The medical model for understanding suicide strongly suggests that—all appearances to the contrary—there are no suicides that are voluntary, ever.

Employing this understanding of suicide would fundamentally change how such deaths are evaluated halakhically in that no suicide would ever be classified as willful. After the initial determination of suicide, investigations as to volition would not be necessary. All the traditional death and mourning rites would be afforded to the deceased and their survivors. Without the lingering worry of a “willfulness” determination, families can begin their grieving process without any extra shame or stigma.

As a suicide loss survivor, I sadly can attest that such a loss is like no other. During my grief process—which will continue for the rest of my life—I drew some strength from our tradition that Batsheva’s, z”l, death was tragic, but like any other death from a fatal disease. That—despite outward appearances—her death was not the result of any choice of hers, but rather the last stage of depression, anxiety, and a severe eating disorder. I believe she is not being punished for death but is resting in peace under the sheltering wings of the Almighty.

My family and I were fortunate in that we didn’t have to lie about how my daughter died. We were embraced by our community and did not suffer the shame and stigma that so many loss survivors had and continue to have in their Jewish communities. However, well-intentioned friends and family members still did ask us those shame-inducing questions of “‘why did she do it?”and “how could she do that to herself?” Loss survivors that I consult with also still get these questions, which most certainly add to their grief, as they added to ours. The understanding of suicide as a physical disease would help end these inquiries and truly help loss survivors move through their grief without any added burden.

Halakhah makes many demands upon how we live our lives. However, I do not think its application was meant to foment suffering or cruelty. Those who die by suicide and their survivors deserve the greatest amount of compassion. Our tradition has the mechanism to make sure no suicide victim is seen as committing a great sin and no loss survivor would ever have to couple their grief with shame and stigma.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)