What Shabbos Nachamu teaches us about Grief

Grief is something that virtually every person will, at some point in their life, experience. Grief can occur after any loss that a person experiences. This can include the loss of a loved one, after the loss of a relationship, the loss of a job, the loss of one’s previous environment. Grief is not bound to one specific type of loss and therefore can be experienced in many different ways.

Because it is so commonplace, there is a common misconception that grief is simple, that is simply a set of hurdles that one has to get through to consolation. However, in most cases this can’t be further from the truth. 

In truth, grief is a much more complex and multi-faceted process, which can involve feeling many different, sometimes conflicting, emotions all at once. Grief can look different for different people and for different kinds of losses. Most importantly, is not linear, and a person’s progression through grief can look very different from day to day. While on one day a person might feel totally fine, they may struggle to get out of bed the very next day. 

In Judaism, here too it is understood that grief is not linear. It is not simply a set of stages to get through until the end where we feel better, but rather is a dynamic and shifting process that can look different on each day. In fact, our collective period of mourning during the year, the three weeks, is a prime example of the dynamics of mourning.

We start off the three weeks on the 17th of Tamuz, in a depressive-like state. Initially, we are not meant to eat, and we mark the first day of this time period with a day of mourning, a day of experiencing loss. As the weeks continue, we are not meant to engage in some of the activities we enjoy. Practices can vary, and we don’t listen to live music, we look disheveled as we avoid hair cuts and shaving, we act as mourners. Following this, the restrictions don’t get easier, but rather get more restrictive. Now we don’t eat the same foods, we don’t swim or engage in other recreational activities, we don’t take warm showers, we don’t wash our clothes. Rather than improving as time goes on, things appear to get worse.

Finally, we enter into the last phase of the three weeks, on the 9th of Av. Here, the mourning is at an all time high. We don’t eat at all, we don’t wash ourselves at all, we don’t greet others, we don’t sit in chairs, we don’t experience any comforts, we don’t even learn Torah, we are fully embodying mourners. Though it would seem that things would be better right now, we appear to be at an all time low. Things look as though they could not be worse. For many people experiencing grief, this is an exact representation of how they feel. They know that time has passed, but each day only seems harder than the last. They feel as if there’s something wrong with them, they feel as though they will never be able to manage the pain of their loss.

But then something happens, we reach a turning point and suddenly things start to change. We take ourselves out of the depths of mourning, out of the deepest phase of our despair, we quickly enter into a phase of comfort. We can start to sit up, we can learn again, we can even eventually eat again and take care of our appearance and we return to normal life. Finally, after all this mourning, Shabbos Nachamu marks an end to our status as mourners, as we now enter a period of time of consolation. Though we would expect that our grief would slowly get better, that we would slowly return to a point of comfort, according to Jewish tradition, this return to normalcy, to consolation, happens rapidly. We are told after all that mourning, to get up, to feel comfort, that things will get better. 

At first, this change might seem impossible, how do we just get up after sitting in so much pain? How can we adjust so quickly? In truth, this rapid shift from despair is not as rapid as it looks, as it comes after a process of sitting with these emotions and experiencing them. Emotions need to be experienced and felt to be able to work through them. When we allow ourselves to experience emotions, they can become more intense, and the only way out of our pain is by going through it, which will eventually lead to a diminishing of the intensity of grief and will bring us comfort. During this period of time in the Jewish calendar, how we move to that next phase of “comfort” is truly representative of how grief really works. 

Though we are meant to feel comfort, we are not necessarily meant to “accept” the loss. In bentching we remember Yerushalayim, in davening we ask for our return of the Beis HaMikdash, and when Shabbos is over, we will continue to have different reminders of our loss. So to it is with mourners, even when the comfort finally sets in, even when life starts to resemble something normal, the loss doesn’t just disappear, it is not something that is just “accepted”, it remains a part of us.

Shabbos Nachamu, and parshas Nachamu teach us that there are brighter days ahead, that there is an end to the seemingly endless grief. That comfort is coming even when the grief takes over every part of our lives. Parshas Nachamu is also a reminder that consolation comes not in the absence of grief but as a part of a dynamic and natural grieving process.