This Ritual Life Archive

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Here you will find out about ways to enhance your holiday experience, to celebrate or mark a meaningful life cycle event, and to deepen your experience of the everyday. Our authors are especially interested in hearing your responses to what they have written. So after reading, visit the Ritual Life discussion forum where you can join in conversation with CLAL faculty and other readers.

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From Mourning into Life

It is a custom that when shiva, the period of mourning, ends, the mourners leave their house and walk around the block. The first step out the door is surely symbolic of the return to the larger world outside of hearth and home which, for a week, was a holding place for very wounded hearts. In their home, the mourners were not permitted to greet or be greeted by their visitors, a harsh rule, cutting through the pleasantries and to the bone of things. A living room without greetings makes the abruptness of human presence and absence visceral. Stepping outside their home for the first time in a week, the mourners may greet and be greeted by others they meet along the way. Terribly jarring at first, in the fullness of time, being woven back into a less heavy world will become second nature.

MEDITATION

May it be your will that I slowly accept your comfort into my heart, O Lord. Help me to return to your broken world by greeting all whom I meet with "Shalom" (wholeness and peace) and wishing tem "Shalom" as we depart. Eternal one whose name is peace, grant my heart healing and shalom.

Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya'aseh shalom, aleinu v'al kol yisrael, v'imru amen.

May the one who grants peace and wholeness above grant peace and wholeness upon us and upon all Israel, and let us say, Amen.

RITUAL

At the conclusion of shiva, the mourners leave their house and walk around the block. Returning back home does not mean that mourning and being comforted are over, but it does signify that it the time has come to restore connections to a living world and to begin to seek healing of ones broken heart.

BLESSING

(upon returning home)

Blessed is the one who comforts me, deepens my memory of my loved one and who helps me return to life.

TEACHING

Your lovingkindness sustains the living…

(Amidah)

Your sun will not go down again Your moon will not depart; For the Eternal One will be your light forever, And your days of mourning ended.

(Isaiah 60:20)

Saying hello and goodbye are so often covers for the many things that we would prefer not to say or don't feel safe saying. In the shiva house, we learn to be silent or to say what we mean.

(Steven Greenberg)

Shalom aleikhem May you know wholeness and peace

Hayom katzar, v'hamlakha m'rubah The day is short, the task is great.

(CLAL faculty)

CLAL's National Jewish Resource Center develops and publishes rituals that help to bridge the gap between our contemporary lives and the ancient wisdom of the Jewish tradition.