CHAPTER SEVEN - Death and Mourning: End of Life Questions

A: BACKGROUND

15. From Mourning to Remembrance

Once the period of mourning is over, be it after a month or a year, a new phase in the cycle of remembrance is reached.

The concept behind this is that the individual mourner is now beyond the period of solid mourning and has reintegrated into a normal life, touched deeply by the experience - but no longer functioning in the world under the shadow of the death in question. The act of mourning is thus transferred to ritualised remembrance, whereby the individual is brought back at regular intervals into a direct, ritualised relationship with the departed, through the act of remembrance.

This takes place in two different annual cycles simultaneously. There is the private annual cycle, and the collective annual cycle, and the two are not the same.

First, the private cycle:

This is a private commemoration in that it takes place on an individual basis a year to the day (according to the Hebrew calendar) after the death. In the Ashkenazi world it is called by the Yiddish term, Yahrtzeit (the “year-time”).

• There is to be sure, however, a community element, because on that day, the traditional Jew will go to synagogue for the three daily services, beginning with the evening service, which according to the Jewish way of reckoning time, begins the day.
• Essentially, it is a day of private intimate introspection where the mourner remembers his or her departed relative. A candle is lit in the house of the mourner: in Judaism, a candle is often seen as a metaphor and a symbol of the soul.
• A person might decide to fill the day with special content, such as studying or fasting or giving charity.

These are all highly personal decisions. In that way it is a private commemoration.

The communal commemoration is connected to certain set times in the Jewish calendar:

Four times a year, at the time of the three traditional pilgrim festivals, Pesach (the eighth day), Shavuot (the second day) and Sukkot (the eighth day), as well as on Yom Kippur, there is a special service in the synagogue called the Yizkor (remembrance) service. This is an integral part of the regular festival service for that day.

The Yizkor service is usually understood as a special mourners’ service. To that end, it is the custom in many synagogues to send all whose parents are still living and who have not themselves been involved in direct mourning, out of the synagogue. There is, to be sure, a direct mourners’ component in the service: part of the service is the recitation of a special memorial prayer and a Kaddish for the departed relatives of each individual.

However, to interpret the Yizkor as a service only for mourners, is to misunderstand the meaning of the ritual. The Yizkor should properly be seen as a communal and national memorial service, in which individuals take part, not just in their capacity as direct mourners, but in a more general capacity, as a member of the community and of the people.

It is ironic that, for many, the communal aspect, the original raison d’etre of the ceremony, has been forgotten and has been replaced by that later feature – the personal commemoration of mourners.

The service originated in the Middle Ages to commemorate the lives and deaths of those who had been martyred within the Jewish communities of Europe. At a certain point, the individual mourner’s remembrance of their own private family members, who had died in any way was grafted onto the communal commemoration.

It should be understood, therefore, as a time of bonding of the entire community through historical memory that adds the personal component to the collective in an indissoluble bond.

It is interesting to note that many synagogues have added extra circles of collective memory in the form of remembrance prayers for those who died in the Holocaust or in Israel’s wars. These additions accentuate the collective national aspects of remembrance, without dwarfing the individual experience of mourning.

In terms of the individual mourner, this is a time of merging individual memory with that of the collective.

Setting or Unveiling the Stone:

A last act that should be mentioned in this context is the setting up, or unveiling of a gravestone on the grave of the deceased:

This is done to identify the specific place where the dead person is buried and to keep the memory alive, by providing some relevant details of the deceased, in writing, on the stone. It is usually marked by a ceremony at the graveside.

There is a question when this should be done.

• It can be any time after the end of the shloshim (when a visit to the graveside is made, especially in Israel), or even after the shiva, if necessary; the prevailing custom in the western world at least is to “unveil” the tombstone a year after death, when a memorial Kaddish will be recited in a minyan at the graveside.
• The traditional idea behind waiting a year is that if the gravestone is set up too early it might imply that the deceased is being easily forgotten, and that the memory requires artificial means to keep it alive, which is considered a violation of the principle of kavod hamet.
• There are however, authorities who argue the exact opposite, namely: that it constitutes a breach of the principle of kavod hamet to leave a grave unmarked and identified for a long time. For that reason, it is argued, the stone should be set up as soon as possible after the shloshim, so that the dead person has a fitting symbol of respect, in the shortest possible time.

It is fascinating to see how different understandings of the same idea are used to pull in totally different directions.