On What it Means to Grieve - 6/30/2024

Hello everyone and thank you for coming to our community Kaddish. Today marks the 267th day of the on going genocide in Palestine. At this point, over 38,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Zionist war machine, thousands are missing, under the rubble, and injured. Each of these people is so much more than a number, and the devastation across Gaza and the West Bank is really indescribable and has been for so long. We also have no true understanding of the extent of the devastation given that public health institutions have already been destroyed. Saying that I am praying for the living and grieving the dead feels empty because as the numbers grow, and as the horrors persist, it becomes harder and harder to imagine how many ways Palestinians are experiencing ever crueler and more dire circumstances.

As I was thinking about what to say today, I have come to realize that I may never have actually talked about what it means to grieve in a Jewish context. Every culture has its practices, norms, and rituals for grief and Judaism is certainly no exception. 

In Judaism, there are really specific rules to how a person is buried - in a box with no nails and in a cotton shroud that will decay. People are buried quickly and then mourners gather for 7 days - called shiva which means 7. Friends, families and community members come to the house of the mourners and bring food, and make sure that the people most impacted are taken care of. In between eating and storytelling, the group stops to pray and in that, they will read the words of the mourners kaddish just as we do. 

People in the close circle of the person who died have to follow a number of additional customs. They cover all of the mirrors in their house and do not shave for the first week. After this 7 day period, they are largely expected to go back to their regular routines, except, they have to say the mourner's kaddish daily for a year and then yearly on the anniversary of the person’s death. Normally, these rituals are just for immediate family: parents, siblings, spouses, children - but certainly it isn't unheard of for someone else to take on parts of all of these customs as well. 

It might seem odd, especially those who do not come from a Jewish background that the grief rituals happen so quickly. A friend of mine died very suddenly in October and I was shocked that the funeral wasn't even until a week after his death. I had never been to a Catholic funeral and it was such a different experience than any I had been a part of before. 

It felt like it took extra long to find any closure - though to be honest it has still been a process and it is impossible to predict when the waves of grief will completely flatten me. Grief is malleable and can fill as much as much space as you give it. And, as I was going through the rituals set out by Cameron’s family, I kept thinking about why it is that Jewish ritual makes sense to me. It’s comfortable, it is familiar, it also places the mourner in the center of a community of people whose job it is to care for them.

And so while I understand how to grieve a person, and how to do it in a way that is comfortable for me, I realized this week that I still do not know that I truly understand how to grieve for all of those killed across Gaza and the West Bank. People who live in a different part of the world, speak a different language, and whose faces I cannot imagine. 

In Deuteronomy (14:1), we read that: You are the children of your God. You shall not gash yourselves or shave the front of your heads because of the dead. From this, we are taught that you are not supposed to go too far in how you express your grief. You should not harm yourself, instead, we are supposed to turn to God - and as someone who thinks of God as existing in the interactions between people, I see this meaning that in grief, we turn to community and to the ways we grieve together while also keeping some grounding in the terrestrial world.

It makes sense to me that we are all holding grief for the on going genocide in Palestine, as well as all the other unnecessary death and suffering that is all around us, but how do we actually do this? There is no script, or a ritual that I have seen that walks us through a step by step process of how we even do the work of sharing so much loss together, especially loss that feels a little further away. 

Sure, we do gather here every week for this process, but can 30 minutes once a week hold all it is that we are carrying?Especially when things are busy, when I have to balance work, and organizing, and relationships and taking care of myself, I personally stop feeling. My emotions take a back seat to to do-lists and responsibilities and the energy it takes to get one foot in front of another. One thing that this weekly kaddish has forced me to do is to at least feel my feelings for the time it takes to prepare and then facilitate our weekly Kaddish. 

A ritual can give us a place and a container for all of the many things that we are feeling, but in no way does it tell us how to feel or how we should go on feeling as we leave the container that we create together. There are weeks where I get in my car and think to myself: I feel a little better for having owned the grief that I am feeling and for doing that in a collective. There are other weeks where my thoughts range from: I feel nothing at all, to how can I or anyone else for that matter ever heal - and I do not think we ever will. 

Even if we are not the ones experiencing this genocide, our familes are not the ones in danger it makes sense to me that we would still feel grief and sadness and anger and much else watching humanity engage in its most evil impulses. And though ritual is imperfect and incomplete, it is at least a tool that can help to navigate some of the things that feel unnavigable. I love so many things about Judaism, and one of them is that there is often a script and a set of practices that carry us from event to event and in the circumstances where there is no script, there is no step by step process to follow, I feel a little lost, a little less grounded and less sure how to keep going.

As trite as it is, we do live in extraordinary times, finding new ways to feel grief and we create the rituals that we need.