Killing the Dead

One of the most stable areas of Jewish law is the framework of rituals surrounding burial. We always rush to bury our dead. We bury them in simple white garments. The casket is always a simple wooden box, pegged together with a little bit of glue. No metal nails or screws are used so as not to interfere with the decay of the corpse, together with everything that is buried with it. Dust you are and to dust you will return.

It turns out, however, that things have always been more complicated, not only in America, but in Europe before us. Despite the aversion to metal in burial, there was a widespread practice in Slavic Jewish communities to bury bodies with working padlocks, many of which have been exhumed from graves. The idea here was to keep the dead from wandering, from causing mischief in the community of the living. The padlock deal was all about anxiety, a complex of frequently gruesome practices to deal with a fear of the disgruntled corpse. If we did not succeed in really killing them, they would cause endless grief to those who survived them. Thus, decapitations and wooden stakes and bricks shoved into the jaws of the dead. If you’re thinking Beetlejuice, you’re on the right track. Zip over to the New York Times for more modern examples.

All of this sheds helpful light on recent events in Minneapolis. Renee Nicole Good was shot three times. Alex Pretti was riddled with bullets, fired at close range into his twitching body, because that’s what people do when they’re shot. A total of ten bullets were emptied into Mr. Pretti, many of which were no doubt superfluous. Any of the officers who swarmed his body could have seen that he was dead almost from the beginning, and yet at least two of them continued to empty their guns. Ten bullets is a lot of bullets. It was almost as if they couldn’t do enough.

One possibility is that they went berserk. It’s clear from the video that Pretti was no threat to anyone. As a million people have already pointed out, he did not pull his gun and he was immediately disarmed. It’s possible that the officers were seized by the mania that sometimes overcomes people in battle. Scandinavian warriors reportedly stirred themselves to frenzy, the better to become irresistible in combat. The men who succeeded were called berserkers. I am certain that the minimally trained officers in Minneapolis came quickly to a state of hyper-energized panic where they lost control of their conscious senses.

The other element here was some dark understanding that what they were doing was existentially wrong; that their mission in Minneapolis would lead to moral injury; that it was contaminated by cruelty and ideological fervor. They must have understood at the most primal level that it would leave a disgruntled corpse on the street in front of the donut shop, and that Pretti had to be killed and then killed again. How else to keep him from rising from his grave and bringing ruin to themselves and their families? Are we very different from those Slavic Jews who padlocked their neighbors into their pine-plank coffins?

The truth of course is that Pretti won’t haunt them, but he calls to us still to act in his name.