CHAPTER SEVEN - Death and Mourning: End of Life Questions

A: BACKGROUND

11. Introducing the Shiva: The Shiva as Theology

There are a number of central shiva traditions to mention.

• Firstly, the mourners will not sit on regular chairs. Rather, they sit on low stools, closer to the ground;
• Mourners put on soft (non-leather) footware as a symbol of going barefoot;
• Shaving, haircutting and washing for pleasure are all foregone by the mourners;
• Mourners do not change clothes for pleasure, not do they wash them;
• A mourner may not have sexual relations during this period;
• Nor can he or she marry;
• Nor can a mourner work;
• In addition, a mourner is not supposed to greet another person;
• Moreover, the mourner must not study Torah.

These prohibitions are either taken from Biblical precedents, or extrapolated from Biblical references.

It is clear that they change the position and the behaviour of the individual mourners, but the following questions must be asked:

• What is the principle that unites all of these rules?
• Why, in other words, do these practices constitute the essential bare bones of the behaviour of the mourner?
• What is it that unites them and makes them suitable symbolic representations for a mourner?

They should be raised, because the classic sources do not provide an explanation of these rituals as a system: we are told that these are the obligations of a mourner; we are given the links with the Biblical sources and we understand how the rules were arrived at – but we are not given the rationale for the rules.

One convincing approach was provided a number of years ago by Rabbi Emanuel Feldman, an American Orthodox Rabbi who later moved to Israel, who argued that there is an integrated rationale uniting all of the mourning practices incumbent on the mourner during the time of Shiva.

He suggests that the common denominator to all these practices is the idea that the mourner has come close to experiencing death, which has interrupted the ability of the individual to serve G-d in the way that Jews are traditionally instructed to do. The individual experiences a type of desacralisation, a condition of non-holiness that makes her or him unable to serve G-d in the right way.

It is not just a question of any ideological questions that the individual might harbour on a subjective level, but an entirely different condition. There has been an objective contact with the unholy and the desacralising in the form of death, so that the whole objective relationship of the mourning individual with G-d has been knocked off course. There is, therefore, a need for an intermediate period to allow the individual to be brought back into a relationship of potential holiness.

According to this view, all the specific practices are aspects of this “derailment” from the potential service of G-d.

The experience of contact with death has made of the mourner a diminished person. He, or she, has been touched by the force of “anti-life”, the force that goes contrary to all that is sacred in Judaism. In a situation of anti-life a person cannot serve G-d. All the various rules are there to emphasise the depersonalisation of someone removed from the usual intimate relationship with G-d.

After the days of Shiva, the individual will be able to start resuming a normal relationship with G-d. He, or she, will once again become a full person in theological terms.