Hi everyone (anyone out there?)
Here is a paper from my seminar on Pain, Suffering and Loss. It is about shiva.
Shiva: The Unmaking and Remaking of a World
“I became Your charge at birth; from my mother’s womb You have been my God.” Psalm 22:11
“Death. . .is not simply human’s coming to an end. It is also entering a beginning.” Abraham Joshua Heschel
Death is the unmaking of a world, the reversal of creation. Existence as a sentient human being is over. A death ends both life and a normal system that existed with that person’s integral presence: as spouse, lover, parent, friend, child, congregant, co-worker. Like no other experience, death’s finality unmakes realities.
Death unmakes God’s pinnacle of creation, the human being, that only aspect of creation that reflects God: “And God created human in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” After humanity’s creation creation was complete. What followed was rest from the ongoing task of renewing creation:
The heaven and the earth were finished and all their array. On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing and He rested on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done.
Death as everlasting rest does not mark creation—it is its complete reversal, the decomposition of the natural body to its elemental parts, returning to an ecosystem in a process that is no different than animals or other formerly organic living creatures. In death humanity faces the same fate as the animals.
It is to the living, to the survivors, for whom the world seems an improbable place in the face of such a painful absence.
We, the survivors who do not accompany the deceased on their journey into the night, are left along staring into the veiled, black void. There is a rage of conflicting emotions that seethes within us: bewilderment and paralysis, agony and numbness, guilt and anger, fear and futility and pain—and also emancipation from care and worry. The golden chain of the family link is broken and swings wildly before our eyes. Our whole being is convulsed. Love and warmth and hope have vanished, and in their place remains only despair. The precious soul that enhanced its sense of purpose and meaning is no more.
How this time is ritualized for Jews structures a period of emotional tsunami for those whose task is, ultimately, to return to the land of the living. It is ritual for the stopping of normal: normal time, normal place, normal responsibilities.
From death until burial, Jewish tradition focuses on the needs of the deceased. A time of disbelief and profound shock is given status: immediate family members are known as oneninim, a between-and betwixt period where all religious obligations are obviated in favor of attending to the burial of the deceased and whatever intervening business arrangements must be made. This is a stark indicator of what is happening: the stripping away of all normal ritual, the rhythm of prayer, the obligation of mitzvot. Onenim are caught, at least temporarily, in the “suffocating embrace of death” in that their time is consumed by a person’s actual physical death—not with mourning or even the shock of death. It is a time to attend to the last physical needs of the deceased. Jewish tradition attempts to shorten this period to the shortest time possible, both to minimize the sense of limbo for the survivors, but also out of respect for the deceased. As long as there is a body that requires attention, the work of mourning cannot and does not begin in earnest.
This is the time that the earthly body is prepared for its final journey, washed in the process of tahara, purification, and watched over from the time of death until the funeral. One clean, the corpse is wrapped in shrouds and placed in the coffin. After the funeral, family, friends and community join together as the body is laid into the ground and surrounded by earth. In this moment, the placing of body in the ground entombs, but it is also a kind of enwombing of the earthly remains—a place where there is no function for the body other than to naturally decompose into the earth and there is no further ritual action required by the living. The physical remains are enveloped into its own closed system.
It is also the time of taking leave of the response to the physical death itself, that is, of the attention being on the needs of the one who no longer exists. This ritual is enacted with movement: when the mourners turn away from the grave of their loved one and, with community lined on each side of them, leave graveside to return home. Their ritual limbo is over as the process of shiva begins and they become part of an elaborate ritual that is a placeholder for shock, grief and disbelief. Mourners now step out of time, a Shabbat not in commemoration of creation, but a stopping ritual for the unmaking of a world. It is a suspension of reality from the physical leaving of the dead body, the first tentative steps to an interim state before the beginning of a new kind of creation, the creation of a new normal. The time for recreation has not yet arrived as onenim become avelim, moving seamlessly from one non-state of being to another. For as the corpse is entombed/enwombed, the mourners begin a process of enwombing that is shiva.
If the paradigm of creation is the making of a world with human as its center, imitating God with once-weekly rest, the paradigm of shiva is the unmaking of a world, the loss of humanness, the deconstructing of a world and the accompanying depths of emotions. After a person dies and is buried, immediate loved ones and the community begin a process where life for the mourners is stripped of its normal functioning outside of what humans need to exist in their most basic state.
As onenim they were free of religious obligation and normal obligations of life; as avelim they no longer inhabit the world that was, yet this is not yet the beginning of the long road back to a new normal. Shiva offers an intermediate state, a time where the survivors are alive, but may not experience living, as the depths of grief are experienced most acutely.
To compare shiva to a womb is to tease out the nature of the self-contained world that shiva creates for the mourners and by extension the community. A womb provides for all the needs of a gestating fetus. Attached to the mother, the fetus receives all that it needs to grow until birth. It is a world unto itself. So it is for shiva. For the mourner is in no condition to provide for their needs, physical, psychological, or spiritual. Shiva is a suspension of normal time and place where one is responsible for one’s self and for others. In shiva, humans find the time and the place to exist on the most basic level—breathing, sleeping, eating, expunging. There is no place to go, nothing to do except be. The ecosystem that normally supports life comes into the shiva house from the outside to meet the needs of the mourners where they are and how they are. It is an outer-worldly experience—as is being in the womb.
Observing shiva stops time, or slows it down, to create an experience of “other-worldliness” that comes from the immense sense of loss in death’s aftermath. The singular and irreplaceable nature of a human being is what makes the death of a human so world-shattering. Immersed in grief, it is almost incomprehensible that for one who lives it is possible to create a new normal. Yet where Shabbat is a palace of time, shiva is a placeholder that allows time to stop, taking life out of gear and putting into neutral:
The seven days of shiva represent a kind of inversion of God’s seven-day week. Unlike God’s seven days, which begin with life and the creation of the world, the mourner’s begin with death, as if to indicate that, at least for a week, the human response to death, the work of grief, reverses the divine order of creation.
Shiva is a study in contrasts: intensely private but takes place in community; observed at home, but with the privacy of the home replaced with the taking on the role of prayer space, meal space, communal crossroads.
The ritual enactment of shiva, the state of living while not living, is indicative of how survivors often feel—like not living:
Shiva highlights the difficulty to return to the living. One way this is accomplished is by creating certain symbolic parallels between the two. During the shiva the mourner is allowed, even encouraged, to seem helpless, dependent on others, as if acting out the helplessness of the deceased who truly can do nothing for themselves.
The performance of shiva has its well-dictated norms which create this acting out of nothingness: the mourner stays in the home (usually of the deceased) for seven days, wears the same clothing torn as a sign of mourning, does not wear shoes, minimally bathes, does not greet the visitors, prays at home—leaving only on Shabbat but then quickly returning home without participating either in Kabbalat Shabbat singing or in after-davening Kiddush or oneg.
Boundaries that normally enforce privacy become porous. For the home, the usual source of the ecosystem for that family’s normal domesticity is replaced with a rhythm that is unique to shiva—a private space becomes communal. A place that is organized to meet the needs of its inhabitants becomes inadequate on its own. At home a space that is normally functions as refuge looks physically familiar, but the environment is anything but.
I felt a fever of excitement during those first few hours after returning from the cemetery. I could not stop to eat or to sit on one of the cardboard boxes the driver of our limousine had left in our living room. Like the tall shiva candle standing on a table in the corner of the living room, also provided by the funeral parlor, the cardboard boxes were astonishing reminders that ours was a home unlike other on our street that day and unlike anything it had ever been before.
Kitchens overflow with food but none of it is prepared by the person who knows where the milkek and fleishek pans are kept. Doors open, doors close, people come, people go: often the mourner is unaware of who is present in their home because the mourner never rises to enter the home, nor greets the people who come. Mourners sit close to the ground and are discomfited. Mirrors are covered, vanity is discouraged. These changes are all constitutive of the change that will ultimately be the work after shiva: how they saw and experienced themselves in relation to the person who has died is to be no more. A new status is to evolve where the memory of the person lives on in sights, sounds, smells, and memory.
Shiva is also unique insofar as it is for the mourners, but it is performed by the extended community. The community needs to be part of the process of mourning and of acknowledging the breach that has occurred:
Jewish custom and tradition recognize that the dead and the immediately bereaved are not the only ones who suffer the aftereffects of death. The community does as well. No less than the bereaved need to find a way to ease the pain of their loss, the group needs to feel that it still has the capacity to heal, to provide order to those shaken by death. For neither is the funeral enough. In its aftermath, both the bereaved and the community must find some way to mend more completely the tear in the fabric of life that death has wrought and to knit themselves together again. . . By helping to repair and renew the bereaved, it also can repair and renew its collective self.
In a time when normal cycles for eating, sleeping and working are disrupted, prayer is the one ritual that through its performance provides a minimum level of daily structure and some level of functional response from mourners to the loss they have experienced. A profoundly powerful ritual for mourning is the reciting of the Kaddish Yatom, the
Mourners’ Kaddish. From the moment of burial through a specified period of time—for a parent, for example, 11 months, the mourner says kaddish three times daily. Post-shiva, it provides a daily interruption of the slow progress toward building a new normal. Another sign of the unique status of the unmade world that is shiva is that fulfilling this obligation would normally require leaving the home for a synagogue to find a minyan of ten in order to recite. During shiva, however, the home takes on an additional function as beit ha knesset, as a synagogue, a meeting place (literally) where the thrice-daily tefillot can be offered. Normal home-bound rituals such lighting candles, reciting Kiddush, and blessing before and after eating are joined by those rituals that require the presence of a minyan, such as reading the Torah, reciting kaddish, and praying the time-bound services. The ritual items of the home are supplemented by those normally found in the synagogue: a sefer Torah, siddurim, kippot, tallitot. The table that once was where cards were played or dinner ate becomes the amud where the shiliach tzibur leads prayers and reads from the Torah. Covered with a tablecloth, it takes on a lofty function.
The mourners do not leave their home, but the ritual of prayer functions as a time marker. The rhythm of the day becomes ritualized around the three main services, as people gather at seven or so in the morning for Shacharit and late afternoon/early evening for Mincha and Maariv. Words of Torah are often taught between services in memory of the deceased. Often times friends of the bereaved’s family will lead the praying. These are the times of the day where the household will swell with visitors and unstructured time becomes structured with the order of the prayer service.
The presence of all these sacred items along with the recurrent assembly of worshipers, morning and evening, make the house connected to death and mourning into the most holy and pure public space the Jewish community can create. This constitute s a symbolic reversal of the highest order, a true consecration of the house.
While the house indeed takes on an exalted purpose for prayer, at other times it quickly reverts to a place that is neither the home it was nor the home it will be. Signs are everywhere of the deceased—clothing, photographs, books, mementoes, projects. The activity of shiva, which is the lack of activity, the act of slowing down, is a distraction from all of what is to come.
The end of shiva can feel as abrupt as its beginning. As a child leaves the self-contained world of the womb to enter a room full of light and a smack on the rear end to begin breathing, those observing shiva are helped along with their leaving the womb of shiva and taking those first tentative steps.
Seven days passes and it is time to end shiva—for as the tradition tries to keep the time between death and burial as short as possible, the suspension of the real world must end sooner, rather than later. Which is why shiva is seven days long, but observing a partial day counts as a full day: the withdrawal of life is a temporary shelter, and unlike death, it is a withdrawal that is impermanent. Thus, on the seventh day of shiva, after the morning prayers, it is time to enact the ritual of reengagement, and with it, the first small step toward renewing creation.
Like the physical leaving of the cemetery denoted a change of status, so, too, does movement signal a change of status at the end of shiva. When mourners come to the end of shiva, the end it not by marking time on a clock, but by physically enacting the ritual of “getting up.” Every day until now the mourners have received those who came to pray. Today those who come exhort the mourners to rise, to “get up from shiva” and to begin the process of emerging as they are induced to life. The community joins one last time in the household for the morning service and immediately thereafter, the mourners rise from their seats close to the ground.
The torn clothing is removed. Shoes cover feet. The door of the domicile is opened, and unlike during shiva when the door opened and closed and the mourners seldom knew who was entering and leaving, this is a highly conscious crossing of a boundary: from the safety of the shiva into the light of the outside world. and the mourners take their first, somewhat tentative, step toward a new normal. The mourners step across the doorstep followed closely by the community who has been part of the shiva. As it was at the outset of the funeral, so it is at the end of shiva: the dead go their way and the living go back to life. The mourners are now entering another period, that of shiloshim, the 30 day period after death. Here they may expect to undergo a metamorphosis, emerging from their confusion and sometimes paralyzing grief.
This is the time when functioning in the land of the living begins anew, the slow, painful creation of a new normal, the remaking of a life where the living find their way back by again being in the world.
“No more shall your sun set: nor shall your moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall be your everlasting light, and the days of your mourning shall be ended.” Isaiah 60:20
“As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you; and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” Isaiah 66:13
Bibliography
Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, New York, 1992.
Goldberg, Sylvie Anne, Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague,, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996.
Gorer, Geoffrey, Death, Grief, and Mourning, New York, 1965.
Heilman, Samuel C., When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Sun, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001.
Kay, Alan, A Jewish Book of Comfort, Northvale, 1993.
Rabinowicz, Rabbi Tzvi, A Guide to Life Jewish Laws and Customs of Mourning, Northvale, 1989.
Weiss, Rabbi Abner, Death and Bereavement
Here is a paper from my seminar on Pain, Suffering and Loss. It is about shiva.
Shiva: The Unmaking and Remaking of a World
“I became Your charge at birth; from my mother’s womb You have been my God.” Psalm 22:11
“Death. . .is not simply human’s coming to an end. It is also entering a beginning.” Abraham Joshua Heschel
Death is the unmaking of a world, the reversal of creation. Existence as a sentient human being is over. A death ends both life and a normal system that existed with that person’s integral presence: as spouse, lover, parent, friend, child, congregant, co-worker. Like no other experience, death’s finality unmakes realities.
Death unmakes God’s pinnacle of creation, the human being, that only aspect of creation that reflects God: “And God created human in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” After humanity’s creation creation was complete. What followed was rest from the ongoing task of renewing creation:
The heaven and the earth were finished and all their array. On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing and He rested on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done.
Death as everlasting rest does not mark creation—it is its complete reversal, the decomposition of the natural body to its elemental parts, returning to an ecosystem in a process that is no different than animals or other formerly organic living creatures. In death humanity faces the same fate as the animals.
It is to the living, to the survivors, for whom the world seems an improbable place in the face of such a painful absence.
We, the survivors who do not accompany the deceased on their journey into the night, are left along staring into the veiled, black void. There is a rage of conflicting emotions that seethes within us: bewilderment and paralysis, agony and numbness, guilt and anger, fear and futility and pain—and also emancipation from care and worry. The golden chain of the family link is broken and swings wildly before our eyes. Our whole being is convulsed. Love and warmth and hope have vanished, and in their place remains only despair. The precious soul that enhanced its sense of purpose and meaning is no more.
How this time is ritualized for Jews structures a period of emotional tsunami for those whose task is, ultimately, to return to the land of the living. It is ritual for the stopping of normal: normal time, normal place, normal responsibilities.
From death until burial, Jewish tradition focuses on the needs of the deceased. A time of disbelief and profound shock is given status: immediate family members are known as oneninim, a between-and betwixt period where all religious obligations are obviated in favor of attending to the burial of the deceased and whatever intervening business arrangements must be made. This is a stark indicator of what is happening: the stripping away of all normal ritual, the rhythm of prayer, the obligation of mitzvot. Onenim are caught, at least temporarily, in the “suffocating embrace of death” in that their time is consumed by a person’s actual physical death—not with mourning or even the shock of death. It is a time to attend to the last physical needs of the deceased. Jewish tradition attempts to shorten this period to the shortest time possible, both to minimize the sense of limbo for the survivors, but also out of respect for the deceased. As long as there is a body that requires attention, the work of mourning cannot and does not begin in earnest.
This is the time that the earthly body is prepared for its final journey, washed in the process of tahara, purification, and watched over from the time of death until the funeral. One clean, the corpse is wrapped in shrouds and placed in the coffin. After the funeral, family, friends and community join together as the body is laid into the ground and surrounded by earth. In this moment, the placing of body in the ground entombs, but it is also a kind of enwombing of the earthly remains—a place where there is no function for the body other than to naturally decompose into the earth and there is no further ritual action required by the living. The physical remains are enveloped into its own closed system.
It is also the time of taking leave of the response to the physical death itself, that is, of the attention being on the needs of the one who no longer exists. This ritual is enacted with movement: when the mourners turn away from the grave of their loved one and, with community lined on each side of them, leave graveside to return home. Their ritual limbo is over as the process of shiva begins and they become part of an elaborate ritual that is a placeholder for shock, grief and disbelief. Mourners now step out of time, a Shabbat not in commemoration of creation, but a stopping ritual for the unmaking of a world. It is a suspension of reality from the physical leaving of the dead body, the first tentative steps to an interim state before the beginning of a new kind of creation, the creation of a new normal. The time for recreation has not yet arrived as onenim become avelim, moving seamlessly from one non-state of being to another. For as the corpse is entombed/enwombed, the mourners begin a process of enwombing that is shiva.
If the paradigm of creation is the making of a world with human as its center, imitating God with once-weekly rest, the paradigm of shiva is the unmaking of a world, the loss of humanness, the deconstructing of a world and the accompanying depths of emotions. After a person dies and is buried, immediate loved ones and the community begin a process where life for the mourners is stripped of its normal functioning outside of what humans need to exist in their most basic state.
As onenim they were free of religious obligation and normal obligations of life; as avelim they no longer inhabit the world that was, yet this is not yet the beginning of the long road back to a new normal. Shiva offers an intermediate state, a time where the survivors are alive, but may not experience living, as the depths of grief are experienced most acutely.
To compare shiva to a womb is to tease out the nature of the self-contained world that shiva creates for the mourners and by extension the community. A womb provides for all the needs of a gestating fetus. Attached to the mother, the fetus receives all that it needs to grow until birth. It is a world unto itself. So it is for shiva. For the mourner is in no condition to provide for their needs, physical, psychological, or spiritual. Shiva is a suspension of normal time and place where one is responsible for one’s self and for others. In shiva, humans find the time and the place to exist on the most basic level—breathing, sleeping, eating, expunging. There is no place to go, nothing to do except be. The ecosystem that normally supports life comes into the shiva house from the outside to meet the needs of the mourners where they are and how they are. It is an outer-worldly experience—as is being in the womb.
Observing shiva stops time, or slows it down, to create an experience of “other-worldliness” that comes from the immense sense of loss in death’s aftermath. The singular and irreplaceable nature of a human being is what makes the death of a human so world-shattering. Immersed in grief, it is almost incomprehensible that for one who lives it is possible to create a new normal. Yet where Shabbat is a palace of time, shiva is a placeholder that allows time to stop, taking life out of gear and putting into neutral:
The seven days of shiva represent a kind of inversion of God’s seven-day week. Unlike God’s seven days, which begin with life and the creation of the world, the mourner’s begin with death, as if to indicate that, at least for a week, the human response to death, the work of grief, reverses the divine order of creation.
Shiva is a study in contrasts: intensely private but takes place in community; observed at home, but with the privacy of the home replaced with the taking on the role of prayer space, meal space, communal crossroads.
The ritual enactment of shiva, the state of living while not living, is indicative of how survivors often feel—like not living:
Shiva highlights the difficulty to return to the living. One way this is accomplished is by creating certain symbolic parallels between the two. During the shiva the mourner is allowed, even encouraged, to seem helpless, dependent on others, as if acting out the helplessness of the deceased who truly can do nothing for themselves.
The performance of shiva has its well-dictated norms which create this acting out of nothingness: the mourner stays in the home (usually of the deceased) for seven days, wears the same clothing torn as a sign of mourning, does not wear shoes, minimally bathes, does not greet the visitors, prays at home—leaving only on Shabbat but then quickly returning home without participating either in Kabbalat Shabbat singing or in after-davening Kiddush or oneg.
Boundaries that normally enforce privacy become porous. For the home, the usual source of the ecosystem for that family’s normal domesticity is replaced with a rhythm that is unique to shiva—a private space becomes communal. A place that is organized to meet the needs of its inhabitants becomes inadequate on its own. At home a space that is normally functions as refuge looks physically familiar, but the environment is anything but.
I felt a fever of excitement during those first few hours after returning from the cemetery. I could not stop to eat or to sit on one of the cardboard boxes the driver of our limousine had left in our living room. Like the tall shiva candle standing on a table in the corner of the living room, also provided by the funeral parlor, the cardboard boxes were astonishing reminders that ours was a home unlike other on our street that day and unlike anything it had ever been before.
Kitchens overflow with food but none of it is prepared by the person who knows where the milkek and fleishek pans are kept. Doors open, doors close, people come, people go: often the mourner is unaware of who is present in their home because the mourner never rises to enter the home, nor greets the people who come. Mourners sit close to the ground and are discomfited. Mirrors are covered, vanity is discouraged. These changes are all constitutive of the change that will ultimately be the work after shiva: how they saw and experienced themselves in relation to the person who has died is to be no more. A new status is to evolve where the memory of the person lives on in sights, sounds, smells, and memory.
Shiva is also unique insofar as it is for the mourners, but it is performed by the extended community. The community needs to be part of the process of mourning and of acknowledging the breach that has occurred:
Jewish custom and tradition recognize that the dead and the immediately bereaved are not the only ones who suffer the aftereffects of death. The community does as well. No less than the bereaved need to find a way to ease the pain of their loss, the group needs to feel that it still has the capacity to heal, to provide order to those shaken by death. For neither is the funeral enough. In its aftermath, both the bereaved and the community must find some way to mend more completely the tear in the fabric of life that death has wrought and to knit themselves together again. . . By helping to repair and renew the bereaved, it also can repair and renew its collective self.
In a time when normal cycles for eating, sleeping and working are disrupted, prayer is the one ritual that through its performance provides a minimum level of daily structure and some level of functional response from mourners to the loss they have experienced. A profoundly powerful ritual for mourning is the reciting of the Kaddish Yatom, the
Mourners’ Kaddish. From the moment of burial through a specified period of time—for a parent, for example, 11 months, the mourner says kaddish three times daily. Post-shiva, it provides a daily interruption of the slow progress toward building a new normal. Another sign of the unique status of the unmade world that is shiva is that fulfilling this obligation would normally require leaving the home for a synagogue to find a minyan of ten in order to recite. During shiva, however, the home takes on an additional function as beit ha knesset, as a synagogue, a meeting place (literally) where the thrice-daily tefillot can be offered. Normal home-bound rituals such lighting candles, reciting Kiddush, and blessing before and after eating are joined by those rituals that require the presence of a minyan, such as reading the Torah, reciting kaddish, and praying the time-bound services. The ritual items of the home are supplemented by those normally found in the synagogue: a sefer Torah, siddurim, kippot, tallitot. The table that once was where cards were played or dinner ate becomes the amud where the shiliach tzibur leads prayers and reads from the Torah. Covered with a tablecloth, it takes on a lofty function.
The mourners do not leave their home, but the ritual of prayer functions as a time marker. The rhythm of the day becomes ritualized around the three main services, as people gather at seven or so in the morning for Shacharit and late afternoon/early evening for Mincha and Maariv. Words of Torah are often taught between services in memory of the deceased. Often times friends of the bereaved’s family will lead the praying. These are the times of the day where the household will swell with visitors and unstructured time becomes structured with the order of the prayer service.
The presence of all these sacred items along with the recurrent assembly of worshipers, morning and evening, make the house connected to death and mourning into the most holy and pure public space the Jewish community can create. This constitute s a symbolic reversal of the highest order, a true consecration of the house.
While the house indeed takes on an exalted purpose for prayer, at other times it quickly reverts to a place that is neither the home it was nor the home it will be. Signs are everywhere of the deceased—clothing, photographs, books, mementoes, projects. The activity of shiva, which is the lack of activity, the act of slowing down, is a distraction from all of what is to come.
The end of shiva can feel as abrupt as its beginning. As a child leaves the self-contained world of the womb to enter a room full of light and a smack on the rear end to begin breathing, those observing shiva are helped along with their leaving the womb of shiva and taking those first tentative steps.
Seven days passes and it is time to end shiva—for as the tradition tries to keep the time between death and burial as short as possible, the suspension of the real world must end sooner, rather than later. Which is why shiva is seven days long, but observing a partial day counts as a full day: the withdrawal of life is a temporary shelter, and unlike death, it is a withdrawal that is impermanent. Thus, on the seventh day of shiva, after the morning prayers, it is time to enact the ritual of reengagement, and with it, the first small step toward renewing creation.
Like the physical leaving of the cemetery denoted a change of status, so, too, does movement signal a change of status at the end of shiva. When mourners come to the end of shiva, the end it not by marking time on a clock, but by physically enacting the ritual of “getting up.” Every day until now the mourners have received those who came to pray. Today those who come exhort the mourners to rise, to “get up from shiva” and to begin the process of emerging as they are induced to life. The community joins one last time in the household for the morning service and immediately thereafter, the mourners rise from their seats close to the ground.
The torn clothing is removed. Shoes cover feet. The door of the domicile is opened, and unlike during shiva when the door opened and closed and the mourners seldom knew who was entering and leaving, this is a highly conscious crossing of a boundary: from the safety of the shiva into the light of the outside world. and the mourners take their first, somewhat tentative, step toward a new normal. The mourners step across the doorstep followed closely by the community who has been part of the shiva. As it was at the outset of the funeral, so it is at the end of shiva: the dead go their way and the living go back to life. The mourners are now entering another period, that of shiloshim, the 30 day period after death. Here they may expect to undergo a metamorphosis, emerging from their confusion and sometimes paralyzing grief.
This is the time when functioning in the land of the living begins anew, the slow, painful creation of a new normal, the remaking of a life where the living find their way back by again being in the world.
“No more shall your sun set: nor shall your moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall be your everlasting light, and the days of your mourning shall be ended.” Isaiah 60:20
“As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you; and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” Isaiah 66:13
Bibliography
Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, New York, 1992.
Goldberg, Sylvie Anne, Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague,, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996.
Gorer, Geoffrey, Death, Grief, and Mourning, New York, 1965.
Heilman, Samuel C., When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Sun, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001.
Kay, Alan, A Jewish Book of Comfort, Northvale, 1993.
Rabinowicz, Rabbi Tzvi, A Guide to Life Jewish Laws and Customs of Mourning, Northvale, 1989.
Weiss, Rabbi Abner, Death and Bereavement
posted by Rabbi David Novak at
Monday, December 19, 2005
