The Jewish Book of Grief and Healing , livre ebook

Thank you for purchasing this Jewish Lights e-book!
Sign up for our e-newsletter to receive special offers and information on the latest new books and other great e-books from Jewish Lights.
Sign Up Here
or visit us online to sign up at www.jewishlights.com .

Send Us Your Feedback
Click here to send us your feedback and be entered into our quarterly drawing for a $100 gift certificate for Jewish Lights books.
Contents
Preface by Rabbi Anne Brener, LCSW
Foreword by Dr. Ron Wolfson
Jewish Mourning
Mourning Rituals
Rabbi Margaret Holub
The Work of Mourning
Dr. Ron Wolfson
How Am I Supposed to Feel?
Rabbi Anne Brener, LCSW
Practice: How Do Mourners Behave?
Practice: How Did Those Close to You Deal with Intense Feelings?
God s Judgment
Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky
What Happens to Us after We Die?
Rabbi Edward Feinstein
The Afterlife and the End of Time
Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD
Does the Soul Survive?
Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz
Broken Open
See My Pain
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
Darkness and Disarray
Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky
Praying in Crisis
Rabbi Mike Comins
Struggling with Reality
Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar
Resiliency
Rabbi Shira Stern, DMin, BCC
Being Present to God
Translated and Annotated by Rabbi Rami Shapiro
Yearning for God
Rabbi Nancy Flam
Responding to Suffering
Rabbi Dayle A. Friedman, MSW, MA, BCC
Practice: Reflecting on Reality
Crying Out
Thou Shalt Not Take the Name
Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, PhD
Where Is God When We Feel Alone?
Rabbi Daniel F. Polish, PhD
Immobilized by Anger and Fear
Rabbi James L. Mirel and Karen Bonnell Werth
Surrendering to Grief
Rabbi Anne Brener, LCSW
Practice: Beginning the Process
A Prayer for Prayer
Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman
Finding Our Center
Rabbi Lori Forman-Jacobi
No Guarantees
Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, DHL
Praying in Hard Times
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD
Releasing Yourself
Experiencing Your Pure Soul
Nan Fink Gefen, PhD
Practice : Neshamah Meditation
Letting Go of Self-Accusation
Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
The Great Silence of Doubt
Rabbi James L. Mirel and Karen Bonnell Werth
Healing to the Point of Forgiving
Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz with Erica Shapiro Taylor
Practice: Tools for Healing
Tikkun : Healing the Dead
Rabbi David A. Cooper
Practice: Repairing the Soul
Remembering and Letting Go
Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, PhD, and
Rabbi Nancy H. Wiener, DMin
Saying No
Rabbi Naomi Levy
Lingering Grief
Rabbi David Lyon
The Angel of Losses
Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
Courage in the Darkness
The Echo of Your Promise
Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
Crying Out for the Light
Rabbi Arthur Green, PhD
Hope and Transformation
Rabbi Nancy Wechsler-Azen
God Is Right Here and Right Now
Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler
Receiving Divine Light
Nan Fink Gefen, PhD
Practice: Divine Light Meditation
Choose Life
Rabbi Rachel Cowan
May God Remember
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD
Troubles
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
Living with Uncertainty
Dr. David Hartman
Singing in Despair
Rabbi Maurice Lamm
Restoring Your Soul
Facing a Cascade of Losses
Rabbi Dayle A. Friedman, MSW, MA, BCC
How Can We Go On?
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, DHL
Crying and Sighing
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov
How to Become a Blessing
Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz with Erica Shapiro Taylor
Why Didn t You Enjoy All the Permitted Pleasures?
Rabbi Dannel I. Schwartz with Mark Hass
Practice: Exercises for the Soul
Who Will Lead the Seder, Now That I Stand Alone?
Rachel Josefowitz Siegel
The Ultimate Call
Dr. Norman J. Cohen
Recovering Wonder
Rabbi Edward Feinstein
Shattered and Whole
Debbie Friedman
Memory s Price
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
Acknowledgments
Notes

About the Author
Copyright
Also Available
About Jewish Lights
Sign Up for Email Updates
Send Us Your Feedback
Preface
Rabbi Anne Brener, LCSW

M ourning is not simply adjusting to the loss of someone or something central to our lives. It is also a profound encounter with what it means to be human, as well as what is holy in the face of the reality of death.
Many of you may experience mourning as an earthquake that buckles the ground beneath your feet, shattering your assumptions about the world you inhabited before grief struck. In addition to the needs to turn your physical connection with the person who died into a spiritual one-continuing the conversation that seemingly ended with the loss-and to resolve unfinished issues, grief can raise questions about justice, mortality, God, and the afterlife. With proper guidance, these questions provide initiation into the fact of mortality, helping you to reclaim your connection with who or what has been lost, to make peace with a world in which living things (and those we love) die, and to forge a new relationship with God.
Mourning can open doors you may not have imagined before your life was shaken by loss. This book provides keys to those doors and a way into the rooms beyond them. Whether you stand at grief s threshold or give counsel to someone who does, this book can offer guidance.
As each door opens, it issues an invitation into one of the essential conversations that will enable the birth of a new vision of yourself, allowing you to thrive in a changed world. While this possibility is beyond imagination at the onset of grief, it is real. Healing comes from a mysterious place. It will come, if you are willing to surrender your assumptions and be curious about the unknown: the unknown rooms beyond the doors that these existential conversations open to you.
This collection gathers treasures from the books that Jewish Lights Publishing has brought us in the last quarter century. It assembles a community of wise and caring authors, each of whom has gone beyond the threshold to wrestle with the challenging questions that grief calls forth. With words of wisdom, ranging from comforting to provocative, each author stands at the entrance to one of mourning s doors, extending a hand to offer the key you will need, inviting you into one of these deep conversations.
When Jewish Lights began, in the last decade of the last century, it promised to deepen the Jewish conversation by publishing books that reflect the Jewish wisdom tradition for people of all faiths, all backgrounds. Speaking in a language accessible across the spectrum of Jewish life and beyond its borders, these books have shepherded in a new paradigm for Jewish thought and experience, which is, in fact, anything but new.
The focus of Jewish Lights on Judaism as a path of spirituality and healing restores an ancient vision of the faith. This vision is articulated in Psalm 90, in words attributed to King David and said to be written for the dedication of the Jerusalem Temple. I believe that these words reveal an intention that the Temple be a place for healing: You have turned my mourning into dancing.
This book helps to choreograph that dance. It accompanies mourners and their supporters through grief s often painful twists and turns, in the dance of healing facilitated through the Jewish mourning rituals. I welcome you to the Jewish Lights community. I am confident that you will find companionship in these pages.
Foreword
Dr. Ron Wolfson

G rieving the dead is one of the most challenging experiences of being alive. It is a process that engulfs the whole of us-our minds, our hearts, even our bodies. Grief sweeps over us like waves crashing on the beach, threatening to drown us in salty tears of mourning and loss. Yet Judaism provides a wise path on the road to healing.
When my mother, Bernice Paperny Wolfson, died, I thought I was ready. I had written a book about mourning and comforting, taught a university course on the subject, and offered lectures and workshops for the bereaved. And then I learned a powerful lesson about life: nothing adequately prepares you for confronting the reality of death.
The phone call came from my brother Doug. Mom is in the hospital. She s in a delirium. My wife, Susie, and I were at a wedding in Indiana. We immediately flew to Omaha and rushed to Mom s bedside. To calm her from her delirium, the doctors had induced her into a coma. Tests were taken. Shadows appeared on the scans, indicative of tumors. Much later, we would learn that Mom had refused all screening for cancer. If she had it, she didn t want to know. After a few days, she awoke and we had almost a week with her. On the Monday she was scheduled to transfer to the Hospice House, she died, peacefully.
Quickly, that very afternoon, we gathered with the rabbi, wrote an obituary, and made the arrangements with the chevra kadisha and the cemetery. We set up the meal of condolence. Word spread quickly that the funeral was the next day.
As we pulled into Beth El Cemetery for the graveside service, I thought I was ready. I knew the prescribed rituals. I anticipated the thud of dirt on the casket. I was sixty years old, but from the minute the coffin was placed in front of me, I cried like a baby. Not a few quiet sobs. Completely, unexpectedly, I was overwhelmed by an uncontrollable, sustained wail of tears for Mom. The service was meaningful, the words of the kaddish resonated, and the crowd of family and friends offered comfort. I thought the worst of it was over as the shiva period began.
But that night, as I lay restless in bed, the grief suddenly took on a physical dimension. I had heard of, indeed written about, this manifestation, but now it was settling in my lower back, as if I had torn a muscle. Soon, the pain spread throughout my body. It was difficult to fall asleep, my mind racing with memories and stories and images of Mom. I thought I was ready but I was not.
As you will read in the pages of this important and insightful resource, there is no timeline for grief. Yes, Jewish tradition wisely delineates the calendar for mourning-the seven days of shi