Hamakom y’nachem etchem b’toch sh’ar availai tziyon vee’yerushalayim.
If intersected by a Jewish holiday, shiva will be terminated before it runs its full course. For example, if shiva begins on Tuesday, and the festival of Sukkot begins on Wednesday eve, the mourners sit shiva only two days, for the holidays conclude shiva no matter when it had begun. On the other hand, if burial takes place during Chol Hamoed, shiva will not begin until after the entire holiday has ended. To compress this period somewhat, the last day of the holiday, the rabbinic second day, counts as the first day of shiva. Such a situation—delay of shiva—might be emotionally difficult, but the principle is perfectly consistent: there is no mourning during holidays. Contain your public grief a few days, said the Rabbis. And, somehow, people manage to do just that.
VISITORS
It is a mitzvah to visit people who are sitting shiva. When one enters or leaves, one does not give the usual greetings. In fact, there is no greeting at all. It seems awkward to come in and not be able to say, Hello, how are you? or to shake a hand, but that is the accepted custom and thus to do otherwise is the awkward manner. Another custom, which makes it easier for the visitor, is to wait until she/he is spoken to by the mourner. Many people, however, do not observe this strictly and whoever begins to talk first does so. What to talk about? About the deceased, about other members of either family, about what has happened in the community in the last day or so, about anything at all. Sometimes a mourner wants simply to be distracted. Survivors of the Holocaust who sit shiva are often reminded of that time and those people in their lives. A visitor should encourage them to talk and should feel it an honor to be able to hear their testimony.
People do not telephone a mourner during shiva, nor do mourners make or accept telephone calls unless it is something quite urgent. An exception is often made when family members are far away and can be in touch only by telephone. Although some visitors mean well, it is in poor taste to take flowers, candy, or gifts to the home of a Jewish mourner. The way to honor the dead and console the living is to give charity to a righteous cause in memory of the deceased.
Where there is only one person sitting shiva at a residence, members of the community often will organize shifts so that the mourner will not be left alone for long periods of time. In general, during the shiva period, friends and family come in to prepare and serve the meals to the mourners.
A visitor should not expect to be served. However, people do come from long distances to pay a shiva call and need to be refreshed. In some homes, a large automatic coffee urn is set up with hot cups nearby, so that a traveler can help himself to a cup of coffee without having to be served by the mourner. That is perfectly in order.
The last day of shiva is barely a half day. Often it ends before noon. The custom is for the rabbi or another close friend to escort the mourner for the first walk outdoors.
In addition to consoling the bereaved, shiva offers something at least as important to the consoler, what I would call living models of holiness. Recently, my husband and I made two shiva calls, each to a woman who was sitting shiva for her mother. The first, Elissa S., a native Californian, had brought her aging parents to New York to live nearby during these last few years. In the course of a conversation, she mentioned how grateful she was that her mother had been released from the hospital two weeks before she died, presumably to die at home. “It was so good to have her here at home these last few weeks. I had a chance to tell her how much I loved her, and what a wonderful mother she was to me all my life. …”
The second woman we visited was a survivor. Bertha K. told stories of the incredible daring with which her mother had rescued the family, literally, from the hands of the Nazis. Her mother had a low visa number, and could have left Germany several times, but she would not leave nor would she rest until she secured a visa and passage for her husband and daughter. They were so poor when they came to this country that for several years they lived in a tiny, one-room apartment with no facilities, but her mother always sang and told her stories to make her happy and hopeful. Moments later, an elderly woman, a friend of her mother’s, entered to pay her respects. She had not heard our earlier conversation but straightaway she commented on what a wonderful daughter Bertha had been, how she took care of her mother every single day, and how she always brought good cheer to her mother, how devoted she was to her mother all her life, what a wonderful son-in-law her husband had been. The mourner answered, “I never did enough for her. She gave me life and happiness, not once but a thousand times.” The novelists who caricature Jewish mothers are not the only voices to be heard.
SHLOSHIM
Formal mourning tapers off gradually, corresponding rather directly to the natural responses of a human being. For indeed, time and distance from an event of great loss do heal, though one never imagines at the moment that grief and pain will recede. After shiva concludes, the mourner goes about his/her daily business but observes shloshim, the thirty-day period following burial. During the shloshim, no weddings or parties with song, and no musical events or dances, are held or attended. Some people do not shave until the end of the shloshim as well.
KADDISH
If a parent has died, this period of mourning (avelut) is extended for twelve months. The avel (mourner) recites Kaddish, the memorial prayer, three times a day, every day, in the presence of a minyan. Kaddish is an example of the healing that goes on through the gentle and loving ties of a supportive community.
In Orthodox circles, Kaddish is said only by a male, as traditional law requires. Thus, if a woman’s mother died, and there were no male descendants of the deceased, then the bereaved’s husband might take on the responsibility to recite Kaddish. Or, she might engage a Kaddish zahger (a Kaddish sayer), often donating to a yeshiva at whose daily minyan someone would recite Kaddish in memory of her mother every day for eleven months. In the last decade, however, I have known several women who assumed the formidable responsibility of saying Kaddish regularly for a deceased parent. It did not matter to them whether they were or were not counted as part of the minyan. In most instances, they gradually came to be warmly accepted as a presence, if not a legal entity in the eyes of the Jewish law.
YAHRZEIT
The yahrzeit is another ritual that helps a human being confront and accept the finality of death. On the first anniversary of the death, and each year thereafter, a yahrzeit candle is lit in the home. It burns for a full day (which begins the night before). On the day of the yahrzeit each year, the mourner is called upon to lead the three prayer services, beginning with Maariv. On the Shabbat before the yahrzeit, the memorial prayer, El Maleh Rachamim, is chanted in the synagogue. The custom in most synagogues is to recite the El Maleh at Minchah on Shabbat afternoon, immediately following the Torah reading, in commemoration of all those whose yahrzeit will fall during the coming week.
Yahrzeit is many things. It is a moment of focused memories, of longing, even of pain, though the years have flown by. But with that also comes a firmer appreciation of what was and a renewed insight into what life is all about. Can yahrzeit actually accomplish all that? Yes, if one wills it.
PART THREE
Celebration and Remembering
CHAPTER • 15
JEWISH RHYTHM
Not only are there many links between nature and the Jewish calendar, there are many parallel lessons to be drawn as well. For example, nature teaches us a thing or two about human vulnerability. Oh, we might resist such notions, we might cling to comforting images of self-sufficiency, but nature’s lesson penetrates nevertheless. What the mind does not organize, what the lips do not form, the heart understands. Else why would its beat quicken as we cross a patch of ice or feel the momentary tug of undertow?
Another lesson of nature is one of hope, of optimism about what the next season will bring. The consistency of the rhythms of nature affords us promise, if not actual security. Life unfolds, new life comes; and with it comes new spirit and new hope.
So it is with the Jewish calendar. There is an old saw—“a Jew’s calendar is his catechism.” One could, in fact, teach all of Jewish history and dogma through the Jewish calendar, and it would be quite an exhaustive lesson at that.
But the old saw tells only half the story, especially for a Jew who lives the Jewish calendar with every fiber of being. The calendar is much more than catechism. It is the orientation of the whole self. In the process of internalizing the Jewish calendar, one inevitably engages the Jewish past and experiences the Jewish present; but simultaneously, one also becomes mindful of the Jewish future. The Jewish holidays—their meanings and memories—affect not only the way we recall and reflect upon history, but the way we understand life, including such things as a Jew’s vulnerability and a Jew’s hope.
Without this dual perception, without juggling these contradictory images, a Jew could not live in the real world. The Jewish calendar teaches us to have optimism; it also reminds us of how close to the edge we have always lived.
Another similarity exists between the Jewish calendar and the unfolding of nature—the sense of rhythm. There is an organic flow of the Jewish seasons, of this holiday to the next. On Purim, one thinks about Passover, on Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot. The psychic rhythm of a Jew’s life is tied to the holidays, the festivals, the feasts, the fasts, and Shabbat.
I came to understand and appreciate this rhythmic quality of the Jewish calendar in an odd manner. It happened during the course of writing this book. Throwing myself into the subject of Rosh Hashanah after Chanukah or writing about Passover before Purim were strange sensations indeed. I would awake mornings feeling thoroughly discombobulated. I found I had to keep switching gears between the real me, living the immediate Jewish calendar, and the other me, immersed in writing about a distant part of it. It was like having Jewish jet lag. I did not realize to what extent I had internalized the Jewish calendar, the rhythm of Jewish life, the ebb and flow of the special and the ordinary. It was in my blood, not just in my mind. So many years of celebrating the Jewish calendar had done this thing to me, this extraordinary thing.
THE ANNUAL CALENDAR
The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, with twelve lunar months and 354 days per year. Each lunar month consists of 29½ days. Since we cannot switch months midday, certain Hebrew months have twenty-nine days while others have thirty.
In order for the lunar calendar holidays to be synchronized with the proper seasons they celebrate—for example, Passover as a spring festival—a leap year is added every few years. In every nineteen-year cycle there are seven leap years: the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth years. (That is why your Hebrew and Gregorian birth dates will coincide every nineteen years of your life, no matter into what part of the cycle you were born.)
The Jewish leap year, however, is not like the Gregorian leap year, when one day is added on to February’s end. A Jewish leap year adds on an entire month to close the gap between 354 (lunar) and 365 (solar) days per year. Since the month of Adar (approximately February-March) is the last month of the year, it was given the honors: we have Adar I and Adar II, which assures us that the holidays will be celebrated in proper season.
With the exception of Heshvan, the eighth month of the year, every single month of the twelve lunar months has some sort of special day or special observance. Some are connected to the harvest, others to the plantings, but more than their links to agriculture and nature are their connections to history, to faith, and to peoplehood.
The names of the months are not Hebrew but Babylonian. An important Jewish community lived in Babylonia at the time the calendar was fixed. The Bible refers to the holidays only by the order of the months and not by the Babylonian names, which were ascribed much after the canonization of the Torah. For example, the Torah gives the date of Yom Kippur as the tenth day of the seventh month; the date of Pesach is the fifteenth day of the first month.
The month of Heshvan sometimes goes by the name Mar Heshvan. There is a special explanation for this: the Hebrew word Mar has two meanings: bitter and mister. One tradition has it that because Heshvan contains no holiday or special observance, it has a taste of bitterness to it. Another more endearing tradition is that the Rabbis felt sorry for the month of Heshvan, with its lack of any special day, and therefore, to puff it up a bit and to give it some honor, they called it Mister Heshvan.
In addition to all of the special dates, there are twelve or sometimes thirteen other special days. The twelve holidays, or thirteen if it is a leap year, are called Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the new month. And, of course, there is the holy Shabbat which comes every seventh day.
These special days in the calendar do not all carry the same weight. Some of them are of Biblical origin—therefore, a special significance is attached to them. These are Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur; also, the three festivals Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, and the holiday of Shemini Atzeret; also the special days of Rosh Chodesh. The holidays of rabbinic origin are Cha-nukah and Purim; also of rabbinic origin are five fast days: Tzom Gedaliah, Asarah B’Tevet, Shivah Asar B’Tammuz, Tisha B’Av (all four connected to the Churban, the destruction of the Temple), and Ta’anit Esther. In the Talmud, we also find Tu B’Shvat, the New Year of the Trees, and Lag B’Omer, the thirty-third day of the counting of the Omer, during which the Hadrianic persecutions miraculously ceased.
There is one more commemoration, rabbinic in origin, which I have not listed on the calendar, nor do I deal with it below. It is Birkat Ha’chamah, the day of special blessing over the sun. This day comes only once every twenty-eight years, when the sun completes its grand cycle through the heavens (as viewed from earth) and returns to its original position at the time of creation. The last time it came was in spring 1981; by the time it comes around again, those of us alive will all have passed the year 2000. The central core around which an entire liturgy has been constructed is the blessing:
Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, Who does the work of creation.
Birkat Ha’chamah, celebrated at dawn, captures the magic and awe of God’s creation, and expresses the most profound appreciation of nature.
Contemporary Jews live in extraordinary times, epoch-making times. Events have occurred in our times that are equivalent in mystery and majesty to the events of Biblical and rabbinic eras: the tragic Holocaust, the rebirth of Israel as a Jewish nation-state, the reunification of Jerusalem, events so new and so awesome that the community has barely begun to formalize, ritualize, and sacralize them. The generations who make history are never the ones who encapsulate it. That task falls to those for whom there is a comfortable distance from the event itself. One can predict that a century from now the special days marking these events will be as sacred a part of the Jewish calendar as the most sacred days in our long history. It will take volumes for historians and sociologists of the twenty-first century to describe the ways our great-grandchildren will prepare for, celebrate, commemorate, retell, and reenact those events that our generation actually lived through. Meanwhile, the process is just beginning. These days are Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day; Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day; also Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Reunification Day; and Yom Hazikaron, Israel Memorial Day for those fallen in the struggle for the Third Commonwealth of Israel.
A JEWISH TIME LINE
Since all of our holidays, with the exception of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are all connected to special events in history, a Jewish time line is offered below for quick reference. Although Jews count by a traditional calendar, which places us currently in the year 5743, events in Jewish history are also dated according to the world calendar which, by convention, dates everything in relation to the birth of Jesus. However, rather than use the Christian referents of
B.C. and A.D., Jews use the letters B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era).
B.C.E. (Before the Common Era)
Year
Historical Event or Personality
Holiday
Ca. 1750
Abraham
Ca. 1250
Moses, the Exodus from Egypt, Revelation, wandering in the desert
Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot
Ca. 1000
King Solomon builds the first Holy Temple in Jerusalem
586
Babylonians destroy the Temple
Tisha B’Av
522
The second Temple is rebuilt
Ca. 460
The Jews of Persia are saved. (Although there is much controversy over the historicity of Purim, this dating is the most widely held.)
Purim
165
Rededication of the second temple under the Maccabees
Chanukah
C.E. (Common Era)
Year
Historical Event or Personality
Holiday
70
Romans destroy the second Temple
Tisha B’Av
Ca. 135
The Bar Kochba revolt
Lag B’Omer
Ca. 500
The main redaction of the Babylonian Talmud
How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household Page 30