Transcription:
The most important is called Shiva. Shiva is genius. Shiva is an idea that a family, after a person passes away, should not be working, should not be occupying themselves with the mundane things of life. They should be solely occupied with taking care of themselves and beginning a process of healing.
So you don’t leave your home. Everything is brought to you. The food will be brought to you. The prayer service will be brought to you. Your friends and your family will show up at your door just to say hello, to check in on you. That’s the idea. You are not doing anything. You become passive and everybody else around you becomes active.
It is seven days, but it’s really not seven days. Very often there’ll be a Shabbat. So on Shabbat, we don’t sit Shiva. So that’ll cut down the day of Shiva. Also, we don’t sit the full day on the seventh day. So, it really is as long as a Shiva can be is really only six days.
And then the day of the burial, maybe the burial will only happen in the afternoon. So you’ll only get a short day of Shiva. You know, there are many people now who are cutting down Shiva. They say, well, I’ll only do one or two days. Look, very often a full Shiva could only be three or four days. So I’m a conservative rabbi. Conservative rabbis believe in the power of tradition. There is nothing in Judaism that says that a short Shiva is permitted. A full Shiva should be sat for somebody to show the extent of the loss and to show respect to the life that they lived.
I don’t know if it’s okay for me to say that on this, because there’s some rabbis in the community who will be okay with a short Shiva. But you asked the wrong guy. You asked a conservative rabbi. I’m going to say you sit a full Shiva for a loved one. And I find sitting less days to be disrespectful. It’s a lousy custom that some people are doing, and it should stop.
To sit a full Shiva means setting some hours aside in your day to receive people at home. And you will feel the love of the community. And you will feel that one important relationship has been lost. But, look how many beautiful relationships I still have that are still there for me. And they’re going to help me get through. And they’re going to be there for me as the days go by, because healing doesn’t happen in a linear way.
Some days you have are happier. Some days you have are more difficult. And you need to know that you’re surrounded by important people in your life, people you love, who are going to be there for you. And at that moment of Shiva, they’re there to remind you that they are there.
At the Shiva, there’s this custom that you sign your name in a book. And that’s the reason. It’s because there’s so many people in the house, you might forget who was there. But then one day you’ll sit down and you’ll open up the book and you’ll say, Oh, I didn’t even remember that they were there. That was so nice that they came.
And I think that you’re looking for that in the year of mourning, human kindness, the relationships that are there to pay tribute to the person that you’ve lost, maybe because they impacted them in some way. The person who visited maybe, they had a relationship that and sharing the depth of that relationship brought you comfort during the Shiva. Or maybe they’re there for you.
And you found somebody present in your living room that you hadn’t seen in a few years. And I can tell you many, many stories about how visits like that have led to tears of joy. And just wonderful, wonderful moments in a Shiva that have brought rays of sunshine into a time that would otherwise be dark and cloudy.