CHAPTER SEVEN - Death and Mourning: End of Life Questions

A: BACKGROUND

12. The Shiva as Sociology

The above is a particularly profound theological reading of the meaning of the process of Shiva. But, as previously suggested, there are additional aspects of Shiva to be mentioned. If it is true that the mourner’s relationship with G-d is interrupted and that, theologically, the individual is knocked out of his or her normal relationship of equilibrium with G-d, it is no less true that the relation with the human world has been badly shaken.

The normal fabric of daily social interaction with friends, relatives and neighbours is clearly damaged from the point of view of the mourner. The small interactions that make up the body of human contact on the everyday level seem no longer relevant to the person who has experienced the death of a loved one. Mourners have other things on their minds: not for them the continuation of normal socialising. For the days after their loss, they need to find a new level of functioning, of social interaction, based on an agenda that they themselves need to dictate. This is one of the most profound psychological aspects of the shiva: people come to the shiva and accept the emotional agenda of the mourner.

One of the principles of the shiva is that people do not come to be entertained in the shiva house - they come to support the mourner(s), which is assured on a social level by a simple, but profound rule: the visitors are not meant either to greet or to initiate conversation with the mourners. Instead, they sit and wait for the mourners to initiate conversation with them - at whatever level the mourners choose to do so: they are there to reflect and answer the needs of the mourners.

• If the mourners at that particular moment want to talk about the death or about the life of the dead person, the visitors should take their clue from the conversational opening provided by the mourners when they decide to speak.
• If they have talked too much about the dead person and they wish to turn to other matters, then their wish is to be respected.
• If they do not wish to talk at all, that wish, too, is to be respected.

This ensures that the agenda is set by the needs of the mourners, rather than the needs of the visitors, as under the usual conventions of hosting and entertainment.

The shiva is thus a time when the community, (represented by family, friends and acquaintances and, often, congregants and officials from the synagogue), rallies round the mourners and, by taking their point of departure from them, acts as a support mechanism.

One facet of this is to help the mourners understand that they are not alone in their pain, which is true on two levels.

• In the general sense, it is true because of the support being given by the visitors.
• However, there is another sense in which it is true. This is well symbolised by the traditional formula used to part from the mourners: HaMakom yenachem etchem bein she’ar avlei Tzion v’Yerushalaim - May G-d comfort you among the rest of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
  The implication is clear: mourners are to remember that they are not alone, that others have gone through grief before them and will continue to experience it in the future. They are, in fact, part of a community of mourners: all experience grief; it is the human condition.

There is a familiar Jewish story told in this connection of a Rabbi who found a way to explain this dimension of the grieving process:

A woman came to him and was inconsolable over the loss of a loved one. He told her that she needed to bake a cake and that that would calm her down. The astonished woman listened, without understanding how making a cake could help her in any way. The Rabbi then explained that there was only one condition that she had to observe while baking the cake. She must collect the ingredients from other people in the community and she must borrow only from people who had known no sorrow through death in their family.

She accepted the condition and went around the community asking them if they had experienced sorrow, and if they had not, whether she could borrow something with which to make her cake. All day she went around, but could not find one household from which she could borrow even a single item.

It was then, exhausted from her efforts that she suddenly understood the Rabbi’s words. Everyone experiences grief. To understand that does not lessen your own grief, but it provides a certain perspective and enables you to understand that death is part of the human community. Death can bind you to the human community in a deeper way.