Grief These Days

“How is it,” opens the Book of Lamentations, “that she came to sit alone?” Likening the destroyed city of Jerusalem to a widow, the traditional reading on Tisha B’Av reminds us of the loneliness of grief. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross wrote about grief, ”The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss…; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.” If the Jewish people rebuilds life anew after each destruction, how might Jewish wisdom help us navigate the unrelenting grief all around us of late?

This was one of the key questions we asked in setting out on a year-long exploration of grief through Shomer Collective, a start-up non-profit focused on talking about death, Jewishly. Recognizing that too many of us know well the crises that occur when we don’t talk about or plan for the inevitable, Shomer Collective seeks to bring Jewish wisdom and tradition about death back into the Jewish communal square. So too, we surmised, could we help to bring old wisdom together with new language in addressing the many griefs our people and society are experiencing today. 

Last week, in the midst of the mourning period of the 3 weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av on the Jewish calendar, Shomer Collective convened a group of professionals – Jewish educators, grief therapists, social workers, funders, and more, for a Grief Lab. Spending half a day together by zoom, we came from across the country, across denominations, affiliations, backgrounds, and interests, to learn from grief experts and to think together about how we might do more and better around grief, Jewishly. Our exploration was modeled on the kind of exploration we undertook two years ago on the topic of shiva, bringing together groups of professionals and stakeholders, dreaming up potential new ideas worth testing. That project led to the creation of Shiva Circle, a new initiative designed to make sure “no one grieves alone,” thanks to the support of trained Shiva Guides, curated educational resources, and technology powered by OneTable platform customized to help you organize shiva.

Our Grief Lab asked the question, “what might Jewish wisdom have to offer to support us in these days when grief is all around us?” We started by learning from our patriarch Jacob, among the most helpful ancient role models for how talking about and planning for end of life can help us to live better. We teach often the story of Jacob asking his son Joseph to promise to follow Jacob’s wishes for what will happen to his body after his death – it’s the earliest example in our tradition of advance care planning. Yet earlier in Jacob’s life, we learn important lessons from him about mourning. We see his fear of the prospect that his son Joseph, who is missing at this point in the story, and whose technicolor dreamcoat was just found with blood on it – that Joseph might be dead. Jacob refused to be comforted in his grief, the text tells us. He vowed to mourn his son all the days of his life.  Jacob gives us permission to grieve, recognizing the distinct possibility that we will live with grief forever, and that the ways we live may forever be impacted by this experience. 

Later in Jewish thinking, Maimonides, in his effort to set up specific boundaries around mourning, suggests that there can too much crying for the dead. He demonstrates a desire to contain mourning, to stage it, to move from grief toward joy. Co-founder and co-author of Modern Loss, Shomer Collective board member Gabi Birkner helped me to understand how Jewish practice schedules time for grief – shiva, shloshim, kaddish, yahrzeit, yizkor – all according to a schedule. While we might read into this scheduling a hierarchy of grief, the Jewish practices are not intended to invalidate one grief as compared to another. Rather, they acknowledge the ways that our experiences change as we move through grief, and remind us that we must also continue living.

During Grief Lab, we had an opportunity to learn with Claire Bidwell Smith, author of 5 books on grief, grief therapist, and teacher/trainer of grief professionals. She helped us understand that there are many kinds of grief, including anticipatory grief, ambiguous grief, complicated grief, disenfranchised grief, and a relatively new category of grief – suffocated grief, a term coined by Dr. Tashel Bordere. Suffocated grief occurs when someone is punished or penalized for their normal grief reaction. Claire suggested that we see a variety of suffocated grief in systems of oppression and discrimination right now, including our experiences of anti-Semitism in this country and globally. Studying an overview of current professional theories about grief helped us to recognize the necessity of taking a new look at the kinds of griefs we’re experiencing and feeling these days. We recognized that the many griefs we are experiencing today include all of these types of grief. Naming them empowers us to be able to begin to deal with them. 

Participants in GriefLab spent time in small groups – “listening circles” – to enable us to bear witness to one anothers’ griefs as professionals and as peers. Participants told us they are grieving the deaths of parents, children, spouses, and friends, deaths that were expected, unexpected, and/or traumatic. They are experiencing the collective pain about the wars in Israel and Ukraine, the hostages still in captivity, the resurgence of antisemitism locally and globally, climate change, threats to democracy and political polarization.  Infertility and pregnancy loss, divorce, loss of friendships, relationships, homes, health, and communities. And so much more.

In the second half of our time together, we learned from bereaved parents Myra Sack and Matt Goldstein. In Myra’s book 57 Fridays, and in their presentation, Myra and Matt graciously shared their family’s experience with the death of their daughter Havi to Tay-Sachs disease. They explained how they sought but didn’t find what they needed Jewishly, soon after Havi’s diagnosis. And yet thanks to their strong Jewish identities and confidence in the need to make meaning, they didn’t abandon Jewish ritual, but instead reimagined it. The title of Myra’s book, 57 Fridays, refers to how, after Havi’s terminal diagnoses, the family turned every Shabbat dinner into an opportunity to celebrate life in the form of a birthday party each week from diagnosis through Havi’s untimely death 57 weeks later.

Myra and Matt inspired us, as Jewish communal professionals, and as Jews, to think creatively about how we can make space for and attend to griefs without responding from a place of fear. Following our learning with Myra and Matt, participants once again worked in small groups, this time, to begin the process of thinking collectively about how we can do more and better around grief, Jewishly. Many ideas began to surface about unmet needs and opportunities to normalize talking about, and dealing with grief, Jewishly. 

As with all of our work around life and death, coming together to explore grief last week reminded us that professionals who are called to support others benefit from addressing their own relationships to the topics at hand. One participant reflected that coming together with other professionals to talk about grief Jewishly “was… an important moment for me to acknowledge and feel my own grief.” Another remarked, “I felt less alone, seeing all these people that are doing/thinking/working in this area.” And yet another said, “It reinforced my sense that we still have a long way to go before conversations about grief are… normalized and moving our communities to understand that grief is not isolated around funerals and shiva.”

As we observe Tisha B’Av this weekend, acknowledging our communal grief as the Jewish tradition requires us to, let us also consider how we can normalize talking about grief, Jewishly, not just when it’s scheduled on the calendar, but in our everyday conversations and interactions.  In the coming months, we will be sharing ideas and opportunities for doing so, and we look forward to continuing our conversations about living, dying, and mourning.