But First, Sit With the Mourners
My mother’s yahrzeit is approaching, and I have been thinking about something that frustrated me deeply when I sat shiva for her.
People came to comfort us. Most did. But some walked into our home and, instead of allowing us to mourn our mother, began telling us about their own losses. Suddenly, in the midst of our grief, we found ourselves comforting them.
I know they meant well. Grief reminds us of grief. Someone else’s loss opens the door to our own memories. But there is a time for that. And there is a time to simply sit with someone else’s pain.
At an October 7 memorial service this week, my younger daughter met the father of a fallen hero who was killed at Kfar Aza on that terrible day. She told me afterward that she didn’t know what to say to him. So she didn’t say anything. She hugged him, and that was enough.
I hate to bring a pop-culture example into a conversation about grief, but this season of Ted Lasso offers another beautiful lesson. There is a show-stopping scene in which Coach Ted goes to comfort a struggling Coach Alice. He doesn’t offer an explanation. He doesn’t compare her suffering to someone else’s. He doesn’t try to make sense of what she is experiencing. He sits with her.
It is a scene straight out of the Book of Job. When Job experiences unimaginable loss, his friends come to him. And before they become the famously terrible comforters we remember, before they begin explaining, rationalizing, and telling Job what his suffering means, they do something profoundly right. “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights. None spoke a word to him, for they saw how very great was his suffering.” (Job 2:13)
Jewish mourning practice takes that wisdom seriously. When we visit a shiva house, traditionally, we do not initiate conversation. We allow the mourner to speak first. We follow their lead. The mitzvah is nichum aveilim, comforting mourners, not explaining their grief to them, contextualizing it for them, or asking them to make room for somebody else’s pain.
Sometimes comfort means words. Sometimes it means a hug. And sometimes it means sitting quietly beside someone whose heart is broken.
New York City’s mayor should take that lesson directly: when Jewish New Yorkers gather to mourn October 7, his first responsibility is not to qualify their grief or redirect their attention, but to sit with them in it.
His failure to do so revealed a troubling lack of compassion and sympathy. Rabbi Avi Weiss put the criticism more starkly. In an open letter to the mayor, he wrote: “Today I do not cry out against your distorted positions on Israel. No: I am crying out against your lack of humanity, your lack of decency.”
October 7 is still an open wound for Jews in New York, in Israel, and around the world. Families are still mourning their loved ones, marking yahrzeits, living with injuries and trauma, and trying to understand lives divided permanently into before and after.
When Jews gather to remember the people murdered on October 7, that is not the moment to ask them to carry someone else’s grief too. There are other tragedies in this conflict. There are other people whose suffering deserves acknowledgment and compassion. Saying that does not diminish the point. It reinforces it.
Because compassion is not only about what we say. It is about knowing when to say it. A shiva call is not the moment to tell the mourner about your own mother. A grieving father does not need a stranger to find the perfect words. And an October 7 memorial is not the place to qualify Jewish grief with an all but absent “but.”
There will be time for political arguments. There will be time for policy. There will be time to talk about everything that has happened since October 7. But first, learn to sit with the mourners.
My daughter understood that instinctively when she met a bereaved father and simply hugged him. The writers of Ted Lasso understood it when they wrote the scene of him sitting beside Alice. And our Jewish tradition understood it thousands of years ago.
Sometimes the deepest act of compassion is not finding the right words. It is having the humility to say nothing at all. Giving Jewish people one day to grieve is not an act of heroism. It is an act of humanity.
