COMMENTARY: A Spiritual Experience at Arlington National Cemetery

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Each funeral service I conduct fills me with sadness. Especially poignant is the inescapable journey to the cemetery for the recitation of prayers as the casket is lowered into the ground. But that sorrow becomes acute when I visit my parents’ shared grave in America’s most sacred space: Arlington […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Each funeral service I conduct fills me with sadness. Especially poignant is the inescapable journey to the cemetery for the recitation of prayers as the casket is lowered into the ground. But that sorrow becomes acute when I visit my parents’ shared grave in America’s most sacred space: Arlington National Cemetery.

My father, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, died in March 1988 and my mother followed him in death 16 months later. His casket is buried 12 feet into the Virginia soil, and hers 6 feet, directly above my father.


On a recent spring day, I entered the world-famous cemetery along with hundreds of high school students and teachers. As part of their Washington sightseeing itinerary, they came to Arlington to view President John Kennedy’s grave and the changing of the military guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns.

The otherwise talkative and boisterous teenagers became much quieter once inside the cemetery grounds. But even their muted conversations quickly faded as I began my long walk on Eisenhower Drive that leads to my parents’ grave.

It could have been a scene from a movie: a solitary person solemnly trudging on a lengthy paved road surrounded by thousands of identical white headstones set in meticulously neat rows. The only sound heard during my walk was the roar of commercial jets departing nearby Washington National Airport.

I remained alone once I reached my destination; no other mourners were nearby. The grave of Philip and Beatrice Rudin is on a small knoll less than a half-mile from the Pentagon, a building my father visited many times during his lifetime. On the headstone is an etched Star of David, along with my parents’ names, dates of birth and death, my father’s military rank and the haunting words “World War II” and “Korea,” just two of America’s many wars.

Happily, these cemetery headstones are free of both the symbols and words of “patriotic gore.” No images of military swords or lethal weapons adorn the graves, and there are no adjectives describing the dead as “heroic,” “brave” or “courageous.” They lived in perilous times and served America well. It is enough.

As I spoke the words of the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead, the floodgates of personal memory opened wide creating a bracing spiritual experience. And as Jews have done for centuries, I carefully placed a stone atop my parents’ grave and began the walk back to the cemetery entrance.

However, along the way, I stopped to watch a Navy military funeral replete with an honor guard rifle salute and the mournful bugle sound of “Taps.” As I stood there, a young woman carrying a small child left the freshly dug grave and walked toward me. I inquired whether she was a family member of the deceased.


“No,” she replied. “He was 87 years old. I didn’t know him, but I am a friend of one of the grandchildren.”

She asked why I was in Arlington Cemetery.

I responded, “The same reason everyone comes … family, friends, my parents are buried here.” And then the mother with child began to cry.

“My husband’s stationed in Iraq. I hope I don’t have to come back to this place to bury him. I hope it never happens. Excuse me; I have to go back to my friend. The service is over.”

But my Arlington Cemetery experience was not yet complete. Back on Eisenhower Drive, the driver of a passing car offered me a ride to the Metro station. He said he comes often from Annapolis, Md., to visit his wife’s grave, and we soon discovered we had served in the Air Force at the same time; he was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam (another somber name inscribed on many graves) and I was a chaplain in Japan and Korea.

As I left the car, I jokingly inquired if he was a retired general.

He smiled: “Only a colonel, and you?”

“Just a captain.”

His quick reply: “Rank really doesn’t matter. We all walked the same path, just like the folks we’re leaving behind. And besides, we’re all going to end up here anyway.”

MO/PH END RNS

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)


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