By Rabbi Dr. Kari Tuling
I was making lunch when the funeral director called: it’s an unaffiliated family; the deceased’s name is Rachel; it’s a graveside service with no eulogy. Are you available?
Rachel was a middle-aged woman who left behind a husband and two tween boys. The boys are irritable in their grief, and roll their eyes when asked to move from one chair to another. They are wearing cheery matching gingham dress shirts and thin black ties, possibly bought for their last family picture: Did they know that their mother was dying, or was it a surprise?
When I learn, days later, that she had been receiving treatment at an out-of-state cancer center, I wonder: was she lonely receiving treatment so far from home? Or did her family go with her, to create an encampment in her room and the waiting room?
I have walked into so many rooms like that, with hand-drawn crayon pictures on the walls, snack foods, friends and family with tired bodies and hopeful eyes. Thanks for coming Rabbi, they tell me, thanks for being here.
My role in those moments is to provide a non-anxious presence: to ask how the treatment is progressing, to listen closely to the answer, and to provide a prayer that highlights the most hopeful aspects of their care. I am there to talk forthrightly about death and dying at the bedside of someone midway through the process, without resorting to platitudes or cliches.
I am not there to change things. I have no power to change the decree. I cannot sway God or nature. And I offer no answers and fewer certainties.
When someone is dying, we don’t want to be a burden, we do not want to cause others to go to too much trouble. We’re all very polite about it. Rachel had a posse of female friends at her funeral, fierce in their grief, a group of like-minded women who would have walked through fire for her. Maybe she did not feel a need for pastoral support. And yet: what a rabbi offers is different from the support of friends. I would have liked to have been able to provide pastoral support in those moments as she prepared for her death.
I do not know why she and her family had not invited a rabbi to talk with them about her diagnosis. Had she given up on religion at some point? Had she never met a rabbi she liked? Or worse, had she at some point had an experience with a rabbi she disliked? I realize that it is hard to take religion seriously when there are so many poor examples of it. Just one bad rabbi is more than enough rabbis for an entire lifetime. I live with that understanding; we all do.
And yet. And yet. All of this – all our structures and our services, all our rules and our practices – carries real meaning. You don’t have to believe in miracles or the supernatural to believe that Judaism has something to say about the business of living and the business of dying. We rabbis are offering the richness of four thousand years of tradition: we offer the comfort of knowing that you are neither the first link in the chain nor the last. You are part of a wholeness so much greater than yourself, larger than you can imagine.
Which, in turn, makes this into a plea: please do trouble us. We view these invitations as an honor and a privilege: please do ask us to be present in these bittersweet moments of departure, grief, and closure. It’s what rabbis do.
This article was originally featured in the Dec 2025/Jan-Feb 2026 issue of the Vine.