Rant about Jewish mourning practices
Sunday, December 29th, 2013 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manFor years, I've been describing myself as the Jew with no neuroses, no guilt complex. But all that's about to change, because my mother is about to die,* and I really doubt I am prepared to hold by everything Jewish law requires of the mourner who has lost a parent for the full duration of mourning.
* In response to a few comments I have had recently: no, there is no chance she will recover; no, praying for a miracle isn't going to help; no, a cure being found now won't save her; yes, she's going to die soon even though I've been saying this since September. Yes, it's ridiculous that I've been having to hedge around everything I've been planning for for months with "my mother's health permitting", but that's the way it is. If you don't know the details of her medical condition, I'd kindly ask you to refrain from commenting on it.
A very brief summary, for those who do not know: Jewish law dictates exactly how you will mourn, including fine details of what you may and may not do, how long you will do it, and for which relations mourning practices apply. I have no objection to attending services three times a day, doing without entertainment on TV and radio, or attending parties (not to mention a host of easier-to-fulfill practices) for a month, as is required for relatives other than parents; what I object to is the way all these practices get extended to a full twelve (lunar) months for parents.
Now, maybe I'm just being a spoiled brat here, and demonstrating to what extent my personality is a product of western individualism rather than the community-centred living that traditional Jewish practice expects; however, that's who I am. You can't raise someone in one culture and expect them to suddenly make a seamless transition to another.
In particular, listening to music is how I support myself when I'm feeling down. I'll put up without it for a month—feeling down is part and parcel of the process of grieving after all, and maybe it's wrong to try and lighten that after losing a parent. But for a full year!?
Though this may make it sound like I don't care about my mother, that I don't want her death to impact upon my life, but that I'd rather just get on with living it the way I do, I don't think that's entirely justified. As I said, I have no objection to a shorter period of mourning, but setting the period of mourning so long and allowing no flexibility as to how individual people might best cope with bereavement makes me angry.
There's a scene in Dances With Wolves where, when the Indians realise Lt Dunbar is going to become part of their tribe, they think he'd make a good match for a white woman who's been part of their tribe since they rescued her as a child. But Stands With Her First is in mourning for her husband, and cannot get involved with anyone else whilst this is longer the case; and only the chief can release her from her mourning. She goes to see him, with her heart in her mouth; he says "You are no longer in mourning", and that's that. But such a ruling is arbitrary, and potentially capricious. I feel I am in a similar situation here.
Now, I realise that there are lots of people out there who do not keep all Jewish practices; indeed, I myself do not. (I'm at the level where the non-frum would call me frum, but the frum non-frum.) However, I have a sense that people are expected to keep a higher level of observance for mourning practices. Maybe this is just due to the siddurim they give out at shiva houses talking in the introduction about how bad it is that mourning practices are falling into non-observance, and how important it is that they are observed. But I also think mourning is different to almost all other Jewish practices, because one tends to take into account how the person you are mourning would have liked you to behave.
In this case, my mother has a simple faith, has had so all her life. She's always done what she's always done, and has never stopped to look into the theology of it. My father has said, and I think my mother too, that I should just try and do my best, and not try and take on more than I can, but that itself involves hard decisions (see below).
In a way it's strange; I'm prepared to do without music, or writing or lots of other things once a week, on the sabbath, and forego eating in non-kosher restaurants that are not fully vegetarian, so why should I find it difficult to do this? I think the answer to that is because it's easy to do what you've always been doing; it's much harder to take on a new practice. And mourning practices, though you might have been expecting to take them on all your life, are still something that you have to take on completely from scratch when the time comes.
In a way, this sudden taking on of mourning practices is a bit contradictory: before my mother dies, I'm listening to lots of music, to enjoy it whilst I still can, and going to pre-New Years Eve parties; but in a sense I'm already mourning her, and have been for a while: Though she's not dead yet, I've been living for months with her ghost: thinking of things I can suggest to her to do, which she'll never be able to do again.
So, anyhow, after all this spiel, what I'm actually planning to do at the end of the שְׁלוֹשִׁים is to reduce the number of services I attend to one a day (in the evening). Then I think I'll continue not listening to music for a period afterwards, I don't know yet how long, to symbolically mark that one mourns parents longer than the other relations, but I'll continue not listening to live music, or going to the cinema or theatre for the full twelve months.
Of course, there's never going to be a point at which I can say "I can't put up with this any longer; I have to cheer myself up by listening to the Blues Brothers now," so making an cut-off point will be arbitrary, and artificial. I'll probably end up feeling frustrated during the period leading to it, and guilty in the period afterwards, but I'll just have to live with that.
And of course, I can't know now how I'll feel about any of this once I actually am mourning. Maybe, one month into the mourning process, I'll feel differently about it all, and none of the above will apply. But, knowing myself to the extent I do, I doubt it.
[See discussion of this post on Facebook.]
* In response to a few comments I have had recently: no, there is no chance she will recover; no, praying for a miracle isn't going to help; no, a cure being found now won't save her; yes, she's going to die soon even though I've been saying this since September. Yes, it's ridiculous that I've been having to hedge around everything I've been planning for for months with "my mother's health permitting", but that's the way it is. If you don't know the details of her medical condition, I'd kindly ask you to refrain from commenting on it.
A very brief summary, for those who do not know: Jewish law dictates exactly how you will mourn, including fine details of what you may and may not do, how long you will do it, and for which relations mourning practices apply. I have no objection to attending services three times a day, doing without entertainment on TV and radio, or attending parties (not to mention a host of easier-to-fulfill practices) for a month, as is required for relatives other than parents; what I object to is the way all these practices get extended to a full twelve (lunar) months for parents.
Now, maybe I'm just being a spoiled brat here, and demonstrating to what extent my personality is a product of western individualism rather than the community-centred living that traditional Jewish practice expects; however, that's who I am. You can't raise someone in one culture and expect them to suddenly make a seamless transition to another.
In particular, listening to music is how I support myself when I'm feeling down. I'll put up without it for a month—feeling down is part and parcel of the process of grieving after all, and maybe it's wrong to try and lighten that after losing a parent. But for a full year!?
Though this may make it sound like I don't care about my mother, that I don't want her death to impact upon my life, but that I'd rather just get on with living it the way I do, I don't think that's entirely justified. As I said, I have no objection to a shorter period of mourning, but setting the period of mourning so long and allowing no flexibility as to how individual people might best cope with bereavement makes me angry.
There's a scene in Dances With Wolves where, when the Indians realise Lt Dunbar is going to become part of their tribe, they think he'd make a good match for a white woman who's been part of their tribe since they rescued her as a child. But Stands With Her First is in mourning for her husband, and cannot get involved with anyone else whilst this is longer the case; and only the chief can release her from her mourning. She goes to see him, with her heart in her mouth; he says "You are no longer in mourning", and that's that. But such a ruling is arbitrary, and potentially capricious. I feel I am in a similar situation here.
Now, I realise that there are lots of people out there who do not keep all Jewish practices; indeed, I myself do not. (I'm at the level where the non-frum would call me frum, but the frum non-frum.) However, I have a sense that people are expected to keep a higher level of observance for mourning practices. Maybe this is just due to the siddurim they give out at shiva houses talking in the introduction about how bad it is that mourning practices are falling into non-observance, and how important it is that they are observed. But I also think mourning is different to almost all other Jewish practices, because one tends to take into account how the person you are mourning would have liked you to behave.
In this case, my mother has a simple faith, has had so all her life. She's always done what she's always done, and has never stopped to look into the theology of it. My father has said, and I think my mother too, that I should just try and do my best, and not try and take on more than I can, but that itself involves hard decisions (see below).
In a way it's strange; I'm prepared to do without music, or writing or lots of other things once a week, on the sabbath, and forego eating in non-kosher restaurants that are not fully vegetarian, so why should I find it difficult to do this? I think the answer to that is because it's easy to do what you've always been doing; it's much harder to take on a new practice. And mourning practices, though you might have been expecting to take them on all your life, are still something that you have to take on completely from scratch when the time comes.
In a way, this sudden taking on of mourning practices is a bit contradictory: before my mother dies, I'm listening to lots of music, to enjoy it whilst I still can, and going to pre-New Years Eve parties; but in a sense I'm already mourning her, and have been for a while: Though she's not dead yet, I've been living for months with her ghost: thinking of things I can suggest to her to do, which she'll never be able to do again.
So, anyhow, after all this spiel, what I'm actually planning to do at the end of the שְׁלוֹשִׁים is to reduce the number of services I attend to one a day (in the evening). Then I think I'll continue not listening to music for a period afterwards, I don't know yet how long, to symbolically mark that one mourns parents longer than the other relations, but I'll continue not listening to live music, or going to the cinema or theatre for the full twelve months.
Of course, there's never going to be a point at which I can say "I can't put up with this any longer; I have to cheer myself up by listening to the Blues Brothers now," so making an cut-off point will be arbitrary, and artificial. I'll probably end up feeling frustrated during the period leading to it, and guilty in the period afterwards, but I'll just have to live with that.
And of course, I can't know now how I'll feel about any of this once I actually am mourning. Maybe, one month into the mourning process, I'll feel differently about it all, and none of the above will apply. But, knowing myself to the extent I do, I doubt it.
[See discussion of this post on Facebook.]
