Mourning: Jewish style

3 years ago I was given the book Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2003). Raised in the Jewish faith tradition, she became a Christian while at university in NYC. She wrote this book 7 years after her conversion to Christianity. While happy to be a Christian, she wrote: "Still, I miss my Jewish ways. I miss the rhythms and routines that drew the sacred down into the everyday. I miss Sabbaths on which I actually rested. I have even found that I miss the drudgery of keeping kosher. I miss the work these practices effected between me and God." (p. viii)

I remember being fascinated with her chapter 3 titled "mourning," which is avelut in Hebrew.

She writes: "Judaism understands mourning as a discipline, one in which the mourner is not only allowed, but expected, to be engaged. Rather than asking the mourner to paper over his grief, the Jewish community supports him in mourning. (My priest, who is always urging me to pray the despairing Book of Psalms, says that Judaism mourns well in part because Jews understand lament. 'Christians,' he says 'do not know how to lament.'") (p. 28)

She continues: "Jewish bereavement marks the days, and then the months, and then all the years after a death. The first space, called animut (literally "burial"), comprises the days after death and before burial...Then the counting starts. The next demarked days are shiva or 'seven,' the first week after burial. In that first week, mourners 'sit shiva.'...The next unit of mourning time is shloshim, thirty, the first month after death...It is the edging back to worldly concerns and quotidian rhythms after the intense cocoon of shiva...After this thirty days comes the ful year of mourning, a period designated especially for those who mourn their parents."

She continues: "This calendar of bereavement recognizes the slow way that mourning works, the long time it takes a grave to cool, slower and longer than our zip-zoom Internet-and-fast-food society can easily accommodate. Longer after your friends and acquaintances have stopped paying attention, after they have forgotten to ask how you are and pray for you and hold your hand, you are still in a place of ebbing sadness. Mourning plateaus gradually, and the diminishing of intensity is both recognized and nurtured by the different spaces the Jewish mourning rituals create--the harrowing shock of animut, the pain of shiva, the stepping into life and world of shloshim. (The rabbis would be quick to point out that we do not observe the calendar of mourning because it is psychologically beneficial, but because it is commanded--and that is true, but why should it be surprising that God commanded something that therapists might now applaud?)" (pp. 33-34)