In order that the whole  Torah, the five books of Moses, would be read in the course of a year Jewish tradition divides it into weekly sections, "parashot". It is customary to read and reflect on the week's parasha (singular form of "parashot"). Rabbis and others often develop a drash (exegesis/commentary) based on it, sharing a teaching they deduce from the Torah's texts. Last week I delivered a five minute long drash at the beginning of a meeting. I enjoyed and was inspired by the process and decided that I can use the traditional framework to share thoughts on religion online. Below is my first attempt. This week's parasha is Haye Sarah, Genesis 23:1-25:18. In it Sarah dies, Abraham manages to purchase the Machpelah cave as the burial site. By the end of the parasha he passes away and gets buried at the same place. (In later chapters we learn that all patriarchs and matriarchs are buried there.) The bargaining process that Abraham conducts to buy the cave is intricate and described in details. Lots of commentaries were written about its importance, showing that owning the cave outright has significance. In relation to religion online I first wanted to analyze the functions of  physical tombs and memorials through the lenses of  whose (perceived) interest we are looking at (the deceased, family, friends, larger community, God, or in the case of celebrities fans). Having peaked into the literature I decided that it is too vast to cover in a short blog entry. Particularly that I wanted to compare the functions of the offline memorials with that of the online ones. Next I thought I would do a listing of online memorial sites. Doing that may have limited utility for the reader, but at least I would familiarize myself with the major players in the field. Here are a few non-religious sites:

• Imorial
• Legacy
• Virtual Memorials
• Remembered Forever
• Memory Of
• Respectance
• Valley of Life
• Making Everlasting Memories

And a few religious places:

• Christian Memorials
• Yizkor (Jewish)
• Anusmanarakal (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh...)

Side note: The linked websites at the Virtual Memorial entry of the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying is woefully out of date, most of them are either dead sites (no pun intended) or show that their design haven't been updated for the last 10 years. Which could be valued as an advantage , considering that we are talking about eternal sites here, but looking at it from web-savvy perspectives they show their age. Next I thought I would give a quick overview of the literature on online memorials. Again, there is so much out there that I don't have time to read and decide which pieces are worthy to include here. So, at the end I decided simply to share the original thought that prompted this entry. The physical location and the rights to it of Sarah's burial site was important for Abraham. He believed that the only way he could ensure that her tomb would never be bothered if he (and his descendants) would own the place. Most online memorials are single pages (or sections) of large websites specialized in selling memorials. Some places offer you to maintain (i.e. keep online and fully functional) the online memorials for one time fee. But most require a yearly payment. Either way the virtual tomb is much lass static than its physical counterpart. Its accessibility depends on the infrastructure of the internet, including the backbones, servers, hosts, domain registrars. So nobody can own the whole "land" for a virtual memorial; most people just rent some minimal space and service from a company handling thousands of similar mini-sites. Even if you operate your own server and own your own domain name, visibility of your site will depend on the upstream provider(s) and DNS servers too. In short virtual memorials provide an opportunity for bereavement from anywhere in the world for anybody, but at the price of being much less eternal than physical ones. I wonder what kind of virtual memorial Abraham would have set up for Sarah? I suspect none as he was more concerned of Sarah's perceived need (i.e. that her body would not be disturbed till the Messiah comes) than with the bereaving family's. (FYI: I am aware that I was discounting all the wonderful Midrash about the Machpelah cave, including that Adam and Eve is buried there and that it has hole accessing the under/after-world.)