My dad died the day after Yom Kippur. The ambulance was taking him from short-term hospice to long-term hospice. Eleven days later was October 7. Somewhere in those 11 days, I turned to my almost 13-year-old son and said, “I’m sorry, I have to take a break. I need to go be sad.” He said, “How long will you be?” And then, because he is so heart-wise, he responded for me, “Oh yeah, you don’t know.” I think I took 10 minutes; it was the best I could do. I had never taken a break to be sad before. Honestly, I keep trying to take such breaks, and as an eternal “doer,” I always multitask. But I know that I just can’t multitask sadness. And I certainly can’t multitask grief.
Also, somewhere between Yom Kippur and October 7, I began having a hard time breathing. Then it became nearly impossible to breathe, even while sitting down. I went to the doctor. They told me it was grief. One month later, after going to the hospital to bring a beloved friend a blanket from our monthly interfaith group, I checked into the ER at the same hospital. Six hours later, the doctor assigned to me told me that my lungs looked like constellations of stars in a night sky. I spent two days in the hospital turning blood clots back into spaces to breathe.
Mary Frances O’Connor (an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress Lab) writes about grief and the body. O’Connor developed multiple sclerosis shortly after her mother’s death, when O’Connor was 26 years old.
“In my family, we have a history of multiple sclerosis, but we can’t overlook the idea that my symptoms emerged in the context of the stressful experience of my mom dying and the grief that I was having.”
While she is clear that her grief didn’t cause her MS, her research is based on the effects of grief on our bodies, which can exacerbate underlying problems and bring them to the surface.
Is there another way we can encounter grief? Perhaps some way to avoid bodily or other harm?
There are some answers to be found in this past week’s double Torah portions: Chukat and Balak. The first Torah portion begins with laws around the red heifer (cow) and ends with a wise, talking donkey. The expanse between cow and donkey covers several different instances of grief.
The Chukat part of the Torah portion starts with the unique rituals for people who have come into contact with a dead body. They involve sacrificing a red heifer, burning it to ashes, and using it for a purification ritual. These rules around death are different from the thoughtful and supportive Jewish traditions of shiva and mourning for close family members. The Torah rites for purification from coming into contact with a dead body include seven days of seclusion, rather than the seven days of shiva when you are surrounded by community. Instead of meals of mourning, there is a ritual of ash and water. While mourners are the focus of shiva, the red heifer ritual involves many helpers, each of whom become briefly impure themselves in the process. To me, this element reminds us concretely that death and grief affect many people who seem ancillary to those most directly impacted.
After the laws around death and the red heifer, the Torah narrative moves to Miriam’s sudden death. And just as suddenly, the narrative jumps to the community moving on to their next stop in their wandering. But they get into trouble. The people and their leaders. When I think of the Israelites, Moses, Aaron, and God’s outsized responses in this moment, I think again of Mary Frances O’Connor and how she notes,
“I am often struck by the intensity of the emotions. Grief is like someone turned up the volume dial all of a sudden. The emotion that I think often interferes with our relationships and friendships when we’re grieving is anger, because the anger feels so intense.” (NPR)
Earlier in the Exodus story, when Miriam was ill with tzaraat, a spiritual skin disease, the community paused their desert journey for a week (Numbers 12:15-16). Miriam, who wisely saved Moses when she was just a child herself, and who then led all the people in song, celebration, and body-based relief through timbrel tapping and ecstatic dance after fleeing their Egyptian captors at the Reed Sea, is not always counted as a leader of her people. Perhaps this is why a mourning period for her doesn’t seem to take place, at least in the Torah text. Miriam’s death, unlike many of our first forefathers’ and mothers’ and unlike Aaron’s and Moses’s deaths to come, is left unritualized. As O’Connor shares,
“In psychology, we have a term for this. We call it disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief means this is something you’re grieving that your social network doesn’t understand to be a loss.” (University of Chicago)
Miriam played the role of a leader, and whether she is officially recognized as such at this juncture or not, her loss is felt by the community. The result is heightened feelings, the inability for the people to sympathize with Moshe and Aaron and their loss, and Miriam’s siblings’ inability to sympathize with the people and their loss. As O’Connor says,
“One of the things that we know is that grief is tied to all sorts of different brain functions we have, from being able to recall memories to taking the perspective of another person.” (NPR)
A few Torah verses later, the people, or God, or both, perhaps learn from their mistakes: The people mourn Aaron’s death for 30 days. And the narrative leaves the realm of the Israelites’ complaints and Moses’ mistakes for a full chapter afterward. Maybe 30 days of mourning, where everyone is included, is effective enough to prevent the emotional dysregulation that can come from truncated mourning.
The personality that best embraces grief, to me, in these two Torah portions is Bilam’s donkey. (Side note, there’s a short video from 2016 of donkeys seemingly mourning the loss of one of their own; in general, these domesticated animals do seem to mourn their community members.) In Numbers 22:28, Bilam’s donkey can see what Bilam himself is blind to, namely, a dangerous angel in his path planning to kill Bilam rather than allow him to continue his journey. His donkey tries to protect him by veering from the path. Bilam responds to this by beating the donkey, who is finally given the power of speech by God and asks, “What have I done to you that you have beaten me these three times?” and 22:30 “Look, I am the donkey that you have been riding all along until this day! Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?” The donkey is giving voice to the loss of relational trust, the kind that can end relationships when unspoken Bilam hears her and validates her feelings: “And he answered, ‘No’” (Numbers 22:30). This moment isn’t generally considered integral to the plot, nor do things necessarily end well for the donkey. However, she does teach about expressing messy grief, not only from relationships lost to death but also to relational breakdown while the two parties are still living.
This again brings me to O’Connor, who sees actual grieving
“as a form of learning… and the things that get in the way of learning often get in the way of grieving. If we’re avoiding going to class, if we’re avoiding reading the textbook, we’re probably not going to learn very much.” (University of Chicago)
So what does this week’s double Torah portion, through the lens of O’Connor’s expertise, show us might be helpful when grieving?
- Take real time to sit with the enormity of the loss; the first stage of grief might take a month or more.
- Talk about the loss with others. Even, or especially, when the loss is connected to those who are still alive but who have caused deep emotional fissures or even estrangement.
- Make space to name the questions this loss brings up that live in your heart, both logistical and spiritual.
- Let the feelings well up and be released, rather than try to move on without expressing them. Otherwise, they can bubble up with outsized intensity.
- Make space for all of the people who need to mourn, not just those most centrally impacted. And do not discount yourself or others if you’re not “typically” considered among the affected people; if you feel unmoored, if your life is deeply changed in this moment, then you are affected.
- Give yourself time to recognize that this is a time of learning, you don’t know how to live this life with this loss just yet, but you will. Eventually. Rituals, community, and your own heart will teach you how.
This is how I newly understand the verse at the closing of the passage about the red heifer. The Torah states, “This law is for all time” (Numbers 19:21). While the red heifer ritual has been paused since the Second Temple was destroyed two thousand years ago, we will always have grief. The truth of grief for all time is that we will always need ritual and each other, and to recognize that more than the obvious grievers, a large community is touched by this grief and requires ritual too.