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Call us, any hour
If you are sitting shiva, or arranging it for someone: call and we will help put a minyan together in the house so Kaddish can be said, organise the meals, and get chairs, prayer books and a candle to the door. There is no membership and nothing to arrange first.
Lifecycles
The seven days after a burial: what they are for, what a shiva house is like, and — if you are the one visiting — what to say when you get there.
Shiva means seven, and it begins the moment the family returns from the cemetery. For those seven days the mourners stop. They do not go to work, do not go out, do not shop or cook or answer the door. They stay in one house and the world comes to them.
That is the design. Grief left to itself becomes solitary very quickly, and the week of shiva makes solitude practically impossible: there are people in the house from morning until night, there is a minyan twice a day, and somebody else is doing the cooking. Then, on the seventh morning, it ends — abruptly, by design. The mourners get up, walk around the block, and re-enter the world.
The seven relatives sit: parent, child, sibling, spouse. Shabbat is counted among the days but the visible practices are set aside for it, and the mourners go to shul. If a festival falls during the week it ends shiva early, sometimes after a matter of hours — a rule that lands strangely on a family who expected a week, and one the rabbi will explain if it happens to yours.
You will notice these things when you walk in, and each of them means something.
The door is open, or unlocked, and you let yourself in. Nobody comes to greet you. This is not coldness; it is the whole point. A mourner is not a host.
The mourners are sitting low — on low chairs, on cushions, sometimes on the floor. It is where grief physically is, and it makes plain who is being visited.
The mirrors are covered. Sheets, cloths, whatever the household had.
A candle burns for the whole seven days, and is not put out.
Nobody is dressed up. Mourners do not wear leather shoes, do not shave or cut their hair, do not launder or wear new clothes, and wear the garment they tore at the funeral. They do not bathe for pleasure, do not work, do not listen to music, and do not study Torah except for the parts that deal with grief.
There is a lot of food, none of which the family made. The first meal after the burial is the seudat havra’ah, the meal of consolation, brought by others: eggs, lentils, bread — round foods, which have no mouth and say nothing, and which come round again the way life does. After that, neighbours keep the table full all week.
There is a minyan, usually morning and evening, so that the mourners can say Kaddish in their own house without going anywhere. Ten people is not always simple to find. That is one of the things to call us about: 408-910-2034.
Go. That is the whole of the advice, and everything below is only detail. People stay away because they are afraid of saying the wrong thing, and the wrong thing said badly is worth infinitely more to a mourner than the right thing left unsaid at home.
Let yourself in. Do not say hello — the customary greetings are suspended in a shiva house, which feels odd for about four seconds. Find the mourner, sit down near them, and wait. Traditionally the visitor does not speak first. If the mourner wants to talk they will; if they want to sit in silence with you there, that is a complete visit and you have done your job.
When they do talk, follow them. If they want to talk about the death, talk about the death. If they want to talk about basketball, talk about basketball, and do not steer them back.
The best thing you can bring is the person. Say their name out loud. Tell a specific story — something they said, something they did for you, a habit of theirs, the thing they always got wrong. A mourner’s deepest fear in the first week is that the world has already moved on and that their person is going to be forgotten. A stranger arriving with a story is the direct answer to that fear, and people remember those stories for decades.
When you leave, the traditional line is: HaMakom yenachem etchem b’toch she’ar aveilei Tzion viYerushalayim — may the Omnipresent comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. In English is completely fine. Saying it in English badly is completely fine. If you cannot manage either, “I’m so sorry” and a hand on the arm has never once been the wrong thing.
Every one of these is said with love and lands badly, which is why they are worth naming.
Check whether the family has posted visiting hours, and keep to them — mourners need to sleep, and somebody arriving at eleven at night is a burden however well meant. Bring food rather than flowers, in a dish you are not expecting back, and check whether the house keeps kosher before you cook. Do not expect to be offered anything to drink and do not accept if you are. Twenty minutes is a full visit. If the room is crowded, sit for a moment and go, and come back another day when it is quieter — the fifth day is usually emptier and harder than the first.
If you cannot get there, write. A letter that names the person and tells one story is worth more than an attendance, and it can be read again next year, which a visit cannot.
On the seventh morning, after the service, it is over. The mourners are told to rise, and they walk around the block — a short, deliberately ordinary walk back into the world. Nothing about the grief is finished. What has finished is the week in which it was allowed to be the only thing.
What follows is sheloshim, thirty days, and for a parent a year: fewer restrictions, a return to work, Kaddish every day. That is set out on the year of mourning. If you visited during shiva, the most useful thing you can do next is call in week three, when the house has gone quiet and everyone else has stopped.
Seven days, counting the day of the burial as the first — so it is more like six days and part of two. It ends on the morning of the seventh day, shortly after the morning service. Shabbat is counted in the seven, though the outward practices of mourning are set aside for it. A festival falling during shiva cuts it short entirely, sometimes after only an hour or two, which surprises families and is nevertheless the halacha.
The seven relatives: father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister and spouse. Others grieve, sometimes just as hard — a grandchild, a close friend, a partner who was never married — and shiva as a formal obligation still falls on those seven. Anyone else is welcome to be in the house all week, and often is.
Seudat havra’ah — the first meal the mourners eat after the burial. It is prepared and brought by other people, because a mourner should not have to feed themselves on that day. The traditional foods are round: hard-boiled eggs, lentils, a bread roll. Round because they have no mouth and nothing to say, and because grief comes round, and so does life.
Several reasons are given, and they point the same way. A house of mourning is not a place to attend to your appearance. Prayer is not said facing one’s own reflection, and there will be prayer in this house all week. And grief is one of the few weeks in a life when how you look is genuinely beside the point.
Mourning is physically enacted rather than only felt — the low chair puts a person nearer the ground, which is where grief actually sits. It also does something practical: it makes the mourner visibly the one being visited, so nobody arrives and mistakes them for a host.
Check whether the family has posted times — most do, and visiting outside them is not a kindness. Beyond that, no: you do not need to be invited, you do not knock, and you do not ring the bell. The door is left open so that the mourner is not made to answer it.
Food, in a container you do not want back. Not flowers — Jewish practice does not use them. If the family is being fed already, a gift of tzedakah in the person’s memory is the other traditional answer, and it can be as small as you like.
Twenty minutes is a complete visit. A room that is already full is a reason to sit briefly and leave, not a reason to stay longer. Going at all matters far more than how long you were there.
The first hours, and what happens before shiva begins.
What comes after the seven days: sheloshim, Kaddish, the stone.
Ten people, every day, for eleven months. How that actually works.
Meals, a visit, a lift, an ear. Ask, at any point.
If you are not sure whether something applies to your family — a shiva interrupted by a festival, a mourner who cannot take a week off work, a family spread across three time zones, a death nobody has told the children about — ask. Every one of those is asked often, and every one of them has an answer. 408-910-2034, or write to the rabbi.