CHAPTER SEVEN - Death and Mourning: End of Life Questions

A: BACKGROUND

10. Homecoming – The Shiva as Mourning Framework

Together with the mourners, we move on to the next stage of mourning, the return to the “shiva” house. The term, "Shiva" ( - seven), refers to the process of the seven days of mourning for a dead person. It takes place in the intimacy of the house of the person that died, or of one or more, of the mourners.

The shiva is a long and drawn out, week-long ceremony, carefully ritualised and precisely orchestrated, which can be viewed as a kind of healing tunnel that the mourners are required to walk through in the process of their mourning and their slow return to life and community.

It is significant and deeply symbolic that the shiva takes place in a private house, rather than in a community institution. Yet one of the central facets of the shiva - and, indeed, the whole mourning process - is the community dimension, within the private home itself. Here, Judaism sets up a complex support system for the mourners to enable them to find their way slowly back to a psychological and emotional equilibrium - and the role of the community in this process is paramount, much of this taking place at the shiva.

One major aspect of this process is that the seat of the shiva is in the private houses and the community assembles there, taking care of the various needs, physical and ritual-spiritual of the mourners. Thus, instead of the individuals having to go to the community, as happens in many landmarks of life, here, the community comes to the mourners.

The mourners can remain fairly passive in the mourning process.

It is a time when they are drained of initiative and where their will is severely limited, focused as they are on the deceased - and they set the tone and lead the conversation, or silence.

On the other hand, the initiative is largely taken by the community and its representatives, as it is they who come to the house, which is “open” for people at times of prayer, or to visit, throughout the days of the shiva.

A few words, first, about the technical side to the shiva.

When the mourners return from the cemetery to the shiva house to begin the shiva they are served a meal that has been prepared for them by their friends and relatives. This meal goes by the name of (seudat havra’ah), the meal of condolence or recuperation.

The very food prepared has symbolic meaning. Usually it includes round foods, such as eggs or lentils, with the roundness indicating the cyclical nature of life, reminding the mourners that death is a natural part of life and that ultimately all will share the same fate.

The entire shiva takes place in the mourning house, apart from Shabbat, when the tradition is to leave one’s house and go to the synagogue.

At all other times, the regular services, which necessitate a minyan (quorum) are said in the shiva house and people come to the house in order to make up the minyan. Since the Kaddish prayer cannot be said without a minyan, this ensures a built-in dependence on the presence of others.

On Shabbat, the minyan is the regular synagogue services, where the mourner first tastes the reality of community outside the comfort of his or her own home. The mourner does not enter the prayer room until after the initial Kabbalat Shabbat prayers on Friday night.

It should be pointed out that if there is no possibility of a minyan of ten people in the home of the mourner, the mourners are allowed to leave the shiva house every day to go to the synagogue and pray.

The functional purposes of shiva visiting are threaded into a tapestry of conventions for the behaviour of guests in a shiva house, which vary with traditions in different communities, but are very specific and designed to play a particular role.