Q: Why do we wash our hands when leaving the cemetery?
A: the cemetery, as a house of the dead, is filled with
impurity. As the Torah and Rabbinic literature spell out, tumah is contracted through contact with the dead. As an act of
ritual purification we wash your hands after having visited such a place.
Water results of the symbol of life and birth, as it is the
first thing that comes out when a baby is born.
Also it is the stuff of the primordial universe. Remember in Genesis it says, “God’s Spirit
hovered over the deep?”
We wash our hands as a gesture of the fullness of life.
Death is not the end. We believe that those who passed from this world are
eventually reborn in Paradise.
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