“I don’t know what to say.”
It is hard to find the right words whether trying to help someone dealing with the loss of a loved one or in a community trying to cope with a disaster. But Jewish scholars say the place to look for answers is in our own tradition. Today, some insights into grief and consolation from the Internet.
The Mishpacha Web site reminds us about this scene from the Torah: “Jacob tore his clothes, he put sackcloth on his loins and mourned his son for many days. All his sons and daughters arose to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. He said: No, I will go down to my son in mourning, to the grave” (Genesis 37:34-35).
The Mishpacha Web site then comments: “The regular rhythms of life cease when someone close to us dies. Overcome with grief we lose interest in the normal activities of daily life. At times the loss is so wrenching it seems almost as if our own lives have ended. Indeed, in the wake of death we wonder: How can we go on? Jewish mourning rituals both honor the dead and provide a structure for the mourning process.” The site then explains the stages of mourning — death, burial, shiva, shloshim (the first 30 days), the first year and remembrance — and explains that that structure is crucial in aiding the grieving process. The site is at www.mishpacha.org/deathintro.shtml
Mishpacha also has a bulletin board where people can share their feelings about loss and grief. For related thoughts, see Mindy Moline Botbol’s “The Psychological Significance of the Jewish Way of Burial” at www.biomed.lib.umn.edu/hw/psychj.html
Rabbi Naomi Levy, author of “To Begin Again: The Journey Toward Comfort, Strength and Faith in Difficult Times,” offers this lesson: “There is a beautiful legend that describes God coming to visit Abraham when he is in pain after his circumcision. What is fascinating about this scene is that God goes to all the trouble of visiting Abraham but doesn’t cure him. You would think that God, after all, could just repair the wound. But that is not what God does. God simply offers the healing power of comfort, of being by Abraham’s side in a time of pain.” See www.beliefnet.com/story/6/story_608_1.html
Patricia Fischer’s son Gregory was killed in Lebanon in 1982. In her moving article from Reform Judaism magazine, “On Being the Kaddish,” she traces her feelings from the day she heard the news and then over the next year and a half. I highly recommend her piece for its insights into loss and mourning — and into healing and living. It’s at http://uahc.org/rjmag/301pf.html
At JewishFamily.com — www.jflmail.com/articles/1469.htm — Judith Bolton-Fasman suggests that the just concluded festival of Sukkot can teach us a lesson about dealing with grief: “Here is a holiday that celebrates both the power and fragility of life. We are commanded to erect temporary dwellings and expose ourselves to the beauty and the cruelty of nature. On the first Shabbat of Sukkot we read from the Book of Kohelet — Ecclesiastes. The narrator, a man who wrestles with his own psyche, realizes that his fate is totally out of his control…The most famous passage of Ecclesiastes — www.breslov.com/ bible/ecclesiastes3.htm — proclaims that there is a season for everything, ‘a time for being born and a time for dying.’ That cycle is celebrated during Sukkot. On the seventh day — Hoshanah Rabah — we seek salvation. On the eighth day — Simchat Torah — we celebrate the cycle of the Torah reading and its stark juxtaposition of passages about life and death. We recount the death of Moses in Deuteronomy and immediately follow it by reading about the creation of the world in Genesis. The message is simple, almost too obvious: life goes on.”
And David Sacks of Olam has looked at the most famous phrase of consolation in Judaism, “May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” He points out that the Hebrew word used for God’s name is HaMakom, literally, “the Place.”
“As much as we think there’s a separation between a departed parent and us, or (worse) between G-d and us, it’s not the case. So G-d consoles us by saying, ‘I am the Place, so wherever you go and whatever you feel, I am with you.'” His article is at www.olam.org/magazine/issue4/treasure.cfm?treasure_id=12
To all of us coping with grief, may we be comforted among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.