Days of Comfort
How are you in this moment?
For real. THIS one. Not the last one. Not how do you think you’ll be in the next one.
Right now.
How are you right. now?
I have lived many days when the question, “How are you?” is just way too big.
Not only hard to answer - impossible to answer.
When I’m so many things all at once, when I’ve been so many things just moments or hours ago, when I know I will be so many things again in the near future, how can I possibly answer?
But this question: How are you in this particular moment? That I can answer.
My answer might be, “I don’t know,” but I can have an answer for this one particular moment.
On Sunday morning as I was preparing to lead minyan I found, and then offered, a teaching from Moed Katan 21b that speaks directly to the questions we ask one another in times of grief and illness and hard things. It reads:
One who meets another mourner within the twelve months [of mourning] tenders them [words of] consolation, but does not enquire about their ‘peace’. After twelve months, one enquires about their ‘peace and does not tender them [words of] consolation, but may refer to their sorrow indirectly.
This text invited me to look up the difference between “inquire” and “enquire.” American English uses these words roughly interchangeably, and rarely uses “enquire” at all. However, British English distinguishes a general question - enquire, and a specific and formal question - inquire. Words create worlds, don’t they? Within the twelve months of early mourning after a death, one may not ask general questions about the mourner’s “peace” - which can also be understood as wholeness or well-being. No general “how are you?”
My dad died on July 9th, the 20th of Tamuz. August 7/8 will be the end of shloshim for me, the end of the first 30 days of mourning. Then I’ll have another ten months to bring me to the end of my eleven months of saying kaddish for him, and one more until his first yahrtzeit. If you’d like to know more about the timeline of Jewish mourning, here’s a place to start. The main thing to know is that in Jewish mourning, we aren’t asked to get over loss quickly. In fact, we aren’t actually asked to ‘get over’ loss at all.
I saw a post on Instagram recently that resonated with the way I understand Judaism’s response to deep grief. Nurse Hadley is a hospice nurse and she teaches that in early grief the rest of life becomes very small. Grief takes up a lot of space in comparison to everything else. Grief, she says, does not get smaller over time, but life expands around it. That means when we touch that grief again, even years later, it may be just as painful as it was at the beginning, but in comparison with the rest of our lives it won’t take up as much space.
There are seven weeks between Tisha b'Av, our communal day of mourning, and Rosh Hashanah. Forty-nine days between the spiritual low point of our year, and the newest of new beginnings. These days parallel the 49 days of the Omer between Passover and Shavuot. In the spring we move from liberation to revelation. Over the summer and into the fall we begin with what we can discover and reveal in what’s lost and buried and journey toward the wide open gates of teshuvah (return) and spiritual renewal . . . liberation.
These seven weeks of 49 days are a time of consolation.
They are a time to ask ourselves and to ask each other questions so specific we can answer them in this particular moment. Where am I right now? How am I right now? What do I need right now? What good can I bring into the world right now? What is one thing I can do to comfort someone right now? What comfort do I need right now?
How can I expand my life - right now.
These are the right now weeks.
They are tender.
Let’s be gentle in them - with ourselves and with one another.
If you would like a playlist of comfort for these days, you could try mine. You’ll find it right here.