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Na’ama Levitz Applbaum is Director of Wellspring Camp and Experiential Schooling Initiatives on the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
On October 7, 2023, the brutal Hamas assaults in southern Israel shattered lives, communities, and a collective sense of security for Jews in Israel and out of doors of it. The photographs and tales that emerged, of households murdered of their properties, hostages taken throughout the border, and full kibbutzim destroyed, despatched shockwaves throughout the globe. Right away, Jews in every single place had been thrown into collective mourning and grief, grappling not solely with the magnitude of their loss however with what it meant for Jewish identification, security, and solidarity.
For Israeli Jews like me, the expertise of mourning over the previous yr and a half has been deeply private and speedy. The warfare has touched almost each family, whether or not by means of the lack of a beloved one, the prolonged call-ups for reserve obligation (miluim), or the ever-present concern for private security. Right here in Israel, our grief is speedy and private: associates misplaced, communities shattered, lives eternally modified. Additionally it is ongoing and extended, layered with the uncertainty of what comes subsequent. There may be additionally a deep sense of disillusionment, as belief in state establishments, the military, and the federal government has damaged.
For North American Jews, the expertise has been markedly totally different however no much less vital. Many have felt a deep sense of duty and fear from afar, grappling with the duty to assist Israel whereas additionally struggling to know and consider the complexity of the state of affairs. Many specific worry that Jewish unity is fraying beneath the rising weight of political and generational divisions. On the Hartman Teen Fellowship Shabbaton final November, I witnessed North American highschool college students making an attempt to make sense of the warfare and Israeli politics. One teen requested concerning the need for revenge expressed by some Israelis. One other requested how they might keep linked to their Israeli friends regardless of having totally different political beliefs. Some frightened that voicing empathy for each Israeli and Palestinian lives is likely to be seen by different Jews as betrayal. The school college students we work with at Hartman have shared the challenges of navigating rising antisemitism on their campuses, and they’re feeling extra remoted than ever. The ache of their questions is actual—and so is their craving to remain in group. Beneath their questions was a deepening concern: how can North American Jews—who’ve additionally been shaken by the occasions of October 7—attend to urgent wants at house whereas standing in solidarity with Israelis nonetheless enduring its direct penalties? Newer occasions of violence in opposition to American Jews in Washington, DC and Boulder, CO are making this query harder than ever.
My prime precedence over the past 21 months has been caring for my group. For the previous three years, I’ve had the privilege of serving as one of many leaders in a lay-led group of roughly 200 households in South Jerusalem. Underneath regular circumstances, this could have been an bizarre volunteer place, managing a set of week-to-week duties for just a few years earlier than rotating out of management. However on October 7, 2023, greater than 130 members of our group had been drafted in a single day, and one household’s son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, z”l, was taken hostage from the Nova music competition. We had been devastated, frightened, and in survival mode. Within the days and weeks that adopted Hamas’s assault, we needed to shift from our ordinary priorities to new ones: creating new assist buildings, forming committees to examine in on folks’s wants, and making an attempt to ensure that everybody felt seen and cared for throughout an unsure and painful time. Mourning as a group and as a society has meant rallying collectively, exhibiting assist the place wanted, organizing meals, rallies, and vigils, fundraising with urgency, standing in solidarity at funerals, and generally merely exhibiting up.
However my job additionally features a vital quantity of labor constructing bridges between North American Jews and Israel, work that was difficult earlier than October 7 and is exponentially more difficult in the present day. Not solely are we not talking the identical language or sharing lived experiences—we’re every trapped in our personal form of paralysis. Israelis are battling disillusionment and exhaustion. North American Jews are grappling with their very own quickly altering home politics. They’re additionally not sure what types of opinions they’re “allowed” to have almost about Israel, fearful that expressing discomfort or critique may sever their ties with Israel or with their native Jewish group. They’re struggling to know their very own Jewish identities at a time when Jewishness is contested and focused.
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I don’t suppose it’s stunning that after we take a look at Jewish historical past, we are able to see a paradigm of navigating nationwide loss by turning towards communal ritual. Taking part in ritual, particularly communal ritual, connects us to our custom and affords construction when feelings will be overwhelming. It affords grounding and perspective, each of which now we have wanted so badly. Within the case of mourning, the Jewish ritual framework allows a grieving particular person to maneuver ahead, acknowledging that the ache doesn’t merely vanish, and that life should proceed regardless of it. As well as, this framework creates an area through which each mourning and renewal can coexist, making certain that nobody navigates the shift from one to the opposite alone. On this approach, the rituals of mourning grow to be greater than only a solution to mark time; they’re acts of communal care, guiding us by means of moments of loss and serving to us discover a solution to transfer ahead.
After the demise of a beloved one, Jewish regulation outlines a deeply structured method to mourning, guiding people and communities by means of loss, with distinct customs for every stage on the journey. The primary and most intense interval is shiva, the seven days following burial. Throughout shiva, mourners stay at house, sit on low stools or the ground, chorus from shaving and carrying leather-based footwear, and don’t greet others within the ordinary approach. Meals are offered by the group, starting with the seudat havraah, the meal of comfort, which historically contains eggs or lentils—meals symbolizing the cycle of life.
After shiva comes the interval of shloshim, which ends thirty days after the burial. Throughout shloshim, some mourners will step by step start to reenter the world: they might return to work however may nonetheless chorus from taking part in joyous actions. For these mourning a mum or dad, a 3rd stage continues for a full yr, with customs comparable to reciting Kaddish each day and avoiding communal festivities.
The size of every mourning interval is outlined, then, not by the mourner’s emotional readiness, however by preset halakhic timing. After the seven days of shiva, mourners are prompted to rise—bodily and symbolically. They modify their footwear, step outdoors the shiva home, and take a brief stroll, usually accompanied by associates or household. This ritual does not sign that their grief is over however reasonably that it’s altering form. It acknowledges the mourner’s ongoing ache whereas additionally insisting upon a small gesture of ahead movement. On this approach, our custom affords a rhythm for grief: not speeding it however nonetheless making certain that the mourner doesn’t grow to be mired in it. This halakhic construction provides mourners one thing to carry onto when nothing else feels regular, and the ritual affirms that the trail forward, whereas unsure, begins with a single, supported step.
The construction of Jewish mourning practices honors the useless and protects the dwelling. In Moed Katan 27b, the Talmud teaches: “Three days for weeping, seven for mourning, thirty for refraining [from cutting hair and wearing freshly laundered clothes] …. From this level on, the Holy One, Blessed be He, stated: ‘Don’t be extra merciful with the deceased than I’m.’” Whereas grief is honored, it is usually bounded and restricted. Extended mourning, the rabbis warning, can forestall an individual from reengaging with life. Jewish custom, by means of its time-bound rituals, grants mourners permission to really feel and specific loss, whereas additionally guiding them—step-by-step, with communal assist—by means of reentry into the world.
Remaining in mourning for too lengthy isn’t solely spiritually dangerous—it dangers dishonoring life itself. Maimonides speaks of this delicate stability in his e book on the legal guidelines of mourning, warning that one who mourns excessively, past what custom prescribes, isn’t performing out of righteousness however out of a refusal to simply accept actuality: “An individual shouldn’t grieve excessively … that is the best way of the world” (Hilkhot Avel 13:11). How, then, will we honor the continued ache of a folks nonetheless actively dwelling by means of loss whereas additionally heeding the Torah’s name in Deuteronomy (30:19) to decide on life, וּבָחַרְתָּ בַּחַיִּים?
A second paradigm for mourning, this one particularly communal, may be capable of present some additional path at this second. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish folks discovered themselves not solely in exile, but in addition having to reimagine what Jewish life would seem like in a post-Temple period. The lack of the Temple was, not not like October 7, a loss that modified actuality for all Jews; we are able to, as Jews in the present day, perceive how straightforward it might have been for the group to stay paralyzed by grief.
In Bava Batra 60b, the Talmud quotes Tosefta Sota 15:11, which describes a debate among the many rabbis about how to reply to the lack of the Temple. Some have adopted ascetic practices—refusing to eat meat or drink wine—believing that if the Temple not exists, they can not partake in meals as soon as used for ritual. However Rabbi Yehoshua challenges them, declaring the unsustainable logic of this mourning: If one rejects meat and wine, why not additionally bread, fruit, and water, that are additionally linked to Temple ritual? One after the other, the group’s arguments unravel till they fall silent.
This debate leads the rabbis to supply a extra enduring resolution: reasonably than giving up all joys of life, they select to institute symbolic, sustainable rituals of remembrance comparable to leaving a small portion of a wall in a single’s house unpainted. This concept of leaving a zekher lechurban, a remembrance of the destruction, isn’t an indication of being unable to maneuver on; it’s a approach to make sure that the destruction isn’t forgotten as one strikes on. An unpainted part turns into a strong reminder that they’ll transfer ahead and rebuild their lives with out erasing the previous. They’ll bridge the previous and future. It affords a mannequin of mourning but in addition of hope, a reminder that even after the best of losses, we are able to rise once more, rebuild, and discover new that means in a world that’s eternally modified.
