Q&A: The Sanctity of the Body
The Sanctity of the Body
Question
With God's help,
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: where does our attitude toward bodies come from? For example, the bodies of dead people, God forbid. That we do not make use of them or treat them disrespectfully. After all, the person is the soul.
By contrast, regarding other creatures such as animals, we do not see any moral problem—whether because of causing suffering to animals or otherwise—in using their bodies.
Answer
I don't know what you mean by "our" attitude. The attitude of Jewish law? There is an obligation to bury the dead and to treat the deceased with respect:
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9B%D7%91%D7%95%D7%93_%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%AA
Simply put, this is because of respect for the person who had been alive, and perhaps also for educational reasons—to accustom us to respect human beings.
Discussion on Answer
I don't mean specifically our attitude from the halakhic standpoint; I mean what the source is, from the human moral standpoint, for this. Because it seems that in many cultures there is this idea of respect for the dead in one version or another, as they brought here with the video clip, which I haven't watched.
As for the educational aspect, that indeed sounds reasonable to me, but I don't think people actually see it that way, because they really do attribute sanctity to bodies—for example, they want to bring back bodies of those who fell into captivity, and so on… It doesn't seem that all this is for educational reasons.
And even if it is respect for the person who had been alive, at the end of the day he is dead. It's possible that it doesn't help him if people treat his body nicely. Just as we probably wouldn't think it is forbidden to sell a house that a person who died had lived in, out of respect for him.
(I actually think there is some passage in the Talmud that says the dead person feels what happens to his body, but in any case that doesn't seem to be the moral source that prevails today regarding respect for the dead.)
Personally, I don't see any moral issue here, and certainly it is not appropriate to pay any price for bodies. True, for some reason people (the relatives) are sensitive about this matter, and there is a moral reason to take that into account.
It seems to me that the Rabbi still sees a problem with eating someone's body for breakfast… no? (Even if it's done in complete private and we're talking about a lonely person with no family, and so on.)
It seems that at the very least there is something ugly about it.
And it also seems that a human body matters more than an animal body, which some people eat for lunch and non-Jews also for breakfast.
A question in the style of Doeya can also be asked regarding just using bodies in general. Everyone would probably say that we'd prefer to use an animal body before a human one.
But according to your approach, it seems there isn't really any reason for that. Is that really so?
See here: https://mikyab.net/posts/8154
and also in column 86 and 177.
There's a nice bit on YouTube about the beginnings of humanity's attitude toward burial matters (starting at 32:14):
These are among the earliest signs of human cognitive development beyond an animal state.