Until I was married, I had not encountered death close up. No funerals, no shiva calls. Some time during the first few years of my marriage that changed. It was a very difficult transition. In those years I was terribly shy and insecure. Going to pay a shiva call was almost unbearable. Where do I sit? What do I say? If I send my husband more than once, will they notice that I did not come at all?
Then, when I was 34 years old, my father died. I was the one sitting shiva. In those seven days I became an adult member of the Jewish community. During the year of mourning I learned to be comforted and also how to comfort. Funerals no longer frightened me. I no longer felt ill at ease when I paid shiva calls to people I hardly knew. Suddenly I seemed to know what to say. I could offer to make meals, to take care of children. I became a member of a hevra kadisha with the most wonderful, caring women. I learned what it meant to come late to a show or miss a dinner completely in order to perform the mitzva of preparing the dead for burial.
When my father died all those years ago, there was very little my sisters and I could do to engage in the mourning process. Though we asked whether we could say kaddish, it was almost unheard of for a woman to take on that obligation. When my mother died in 1999 however, things had changed. Now my sister and I decided to say kaddish. The daily minyan I went to at Kehilath Jeshurun was warm and welcoming. The men cared about us, worried about us when we were away (tell us when you go, they said), and never forgot to pass the tzedaka plate to us. Not so in most of the other synagogues I went to. One had to be really dedicated to take the pain that was often administered. I will never forget the man who was putting on tefillin in the women’s section of one shul and would not move to make a place for me. So I sat outside and listened through the window. Nor will I forget the many times I knocked on the mehitza to ask them to pass the tzedaka box to me.
I remember a number of men telling me how hard the year of mourning was and how they couldn’t wait for it to end. For me the ending was the hardest. How would I get up every morning and not put aside time to think of my mother? Would I now forget her? That last kaddish of the year felt as if my clothes were being torn once again— the pain was so intense.
This issue of the Journal is filled with personal stories and articles about individual and communal mourning. There is much to learn about the role of mourning in Jewish life, but I hope you will also take away something else. When my sister Judy died, my eldest daughter was about to be married. How could I make a wedding in 9 weeks when I was in mourning for my sister? How could I send out invitations as if nothing had happened? And then I remembered the words of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes):
לכל זמן ועת לכל חפץ תחת השמים…
עת ספוד ועת רקוד…
To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven…A time for mourning and a time for dancing…
(Ecclesiastes 3:1-4)
A full life will, by necessity, include sad times; times for weeping. I hope that we will continue to be a community that gives and gets comfort at those times, and that after the healing we will not forget to take the time to celebrate the joys of life.