CHAPTER SEVEN - Death and Mourning: End of Life Questions

THE JEWISH LIFE CYCLE
By Steve Israel

C: Educational Activities

34. The “Ideal” Shiva
(At least two hours: may be split into two activities).

The aims of this activity are:

• To examine the mechanism of the shiva;
• To explore and integrate the meanings of this central part of the mourning process.

The opening question to participants is whether they have ever been involved in the mourning process for anyone close to them.

• What do they remember of the process?
• What elements can they specify, if they try to think back to what was? List the elements on posterboard.

The group, with the facilitator, now try to put the elements that they have mentioned in some kind of chronological order.

The facilitator should add any elements of the mourning process that have been omitted, to ensure a full list.

One of the elements will be the shiva:
Presumably, there will be participants in the activity who will have been in a shiva house. Briefly discuss the place of the shiva in the mourning process from a technical point of view (where it comes, where it takes place etc).

In small groups, the participants are asked to “plan the ideal shiva”. In order to do this, they must first try and work out their aims for the shiva.

• What is it meant to do?
• Who is it for?
• Having worked out their aims they should make a list of a number of elements (5? 10?) calculated to best achieve those aims, as they have been defined by the group.

Back in the larger group, each team shares their ideas with everyone else, explaining them and emphasising what they think the shiva is actually there to do. It may help to list the ideas on posterboard.

This leads to a brief, open discussion of the ideas.

At this point, the facilitator should present the two dimensions that are outlined in the background section, namely the theological and the sociological.

This is then opened to the group, who are asked to address in what way the elements of the shiva are intended to achieve the desired results in both spheres.

One or two adults who have been through the mourning process (but at some distance in time) should be invited to talk about their experience, along the following lines:

• What in the shiva – if anything - was good for them?
• What, if anything, was hard for them?
• What, if anything, was bad for them?
• What, if anything, would they change?

Finally, participants should sum up what they have heard with reference to the ideas and review them alongside their earlier suggestions in relation to their ideal shiva.