"Children of God: Finding Balance in Grief"

"Children of God: Finding Balance in Grief"

In this week’s parashah, Re’eh, the Torah teaches us about mourning and about the boundaries of grief.

Devarim (Deuteronomy) 14 opens with these words:

“You are children of the Lord, your God.”

“Do not cut yourselves, and do not make a bald spot between your eyes for the dead.”

The Torah forbids the ancient practice of harming one’s body as an expression of grief.

Because the Jewish people are holy, chosen, and beloved by God.

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch explains that many nations saw death as something that diminishes the living.

When a loved one died, they felt that part of their own self had died as well, leaving them broken and incomplete.

Their rituals of cutting the body or tearing out hair were visible signs that they were no longer whole.

Our parashah teaches a different truth.

No human relationship, no matter how deep or precious, erases or defines our essence.

We are not absorbed into another.

Our truest and deepest bond is with God, Who is eternal and unbreakable.

We are God’s children, and that identity remains whole and untouched, even through the pain of loss.

This is why the Torah prohibits excessive mourning.

Of course, we cry, we ache, and we long for those we love.

Mourning is sanctified and is a mitzvah.

It is something that both honors the dead and acknowledges our human pain.

But to give in to ongoing despair, to stop living because of loss, is not the Jewish way.

Grief is real.

As our sages teach, when one limb hurts, the entire body feels pain. When someone dear to us dies, we cannot help but feel it deeply.

Jewish wisdom does not deny that pain, in fact, it allows, even encourages, the tears, the sadness, the emptiness.

But it also sets loving boundaries.

We weep, we mourn, we honor, but not endlessly.

For we believe that our loved ones have not disappeared into nothingness.

They have ascended to the eternal realms, to the embrace of God.

We, the mourners, are not left shattered or abandoned.

Our lives are not defined only by what we lose, but by the eternality of our relationship with God.

We remain children of God, held, supported, and comforted in our grief.

God lifts our loved ones to eternal life, and God promises us that we are never truly diminished.

Our bond with God is everlasting, and through that bond, we find strength to live, to give, and to hope again.

Much love and wishing you a good Shabbos.

Elissa