An Invitation to Rise from our Communal Mourning
Na’ama Levitz Applbaum
Effie and Oshrat Shoham invite Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin to rise at the end of shiva for their son Hersh. Credit: Mishael Zion.
Na’ama Levitz Applbaum is Director of Wellspring Camp and Experiential Education Initiatives at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
On October 7, 2023, the brutal Hamas attacks in southern Israel shattered lives, communities, and a collective sense of safety for Jews in Israel and outside of it. The images and stories that emerged, of families murdered in their homes, hostages taken across the border, and entire kibbutzim destroyed, sent shockwaves across the globe. In an instant, Jews everywhere were thrown into collective mourning and grief, grappling not only with the magnitude of their loss but with what it meant for Jewish identity, safety, and solidarity.
For Israeli Jews like me, the experience of mourning over the past year and a half has been deeply personal and immediate. The war has touched nearly every household, whether through the loss of a loved one, the extended call-ups for reserve duty (miluim), or the ever-present concern for personal safety. Here in Israel, our grief is immediate and personal: friends lost, communities shattered, lives forever changed. It is also ongoing and prolonged, layered with the uncertainty of what comes next. There is also a deep sense of disillusionment, as trust in state institutions, the army, and the government has broken.
For North American Jews, the experience has been markedly different but no less significant. Many have felt a deep sense of responsibility and worry from afar, grappling with the obligation to support Israel while also struggling to understand and evaluate the complexity of the situation. Many express fear that Jewish unity is fraying under the increasing weight of political and generational divisions. At the Hartman Teen Fellowship Shabbaton last November, I witnessed North American high school students trying to make sense of the war and Israeli politics. One teen asked about the desire for revenge expressed by some Israelis. Another asked how they could stay connected to their Israeli peers despite having different political views. Some worried that voicing empathy for both Israeli and Palestinian lives might be seen by other Jews as betrayal. The college students we work with at Hartman have shared the challenges of navigating rising antisemitism on their campuses, and they are feeling more isolated than ever. The pain in their questions is real—and so is their yearning to stay in community. Beneath their questions was a deepening concern: how can North American Jews—who have also been shaken by the events of October 7—attend to pressing needs at home while standing in solidarity with Israelis still enduring its direct consequences? More recent events of violence against American Jews in Washington, DC and Boulder, CO are making this question more difficult than ever.
My top priority over the last 21 months has been caring for my community. For the past three years, I have had the privilege of serving as one of the leaders in a lay-led community of approximately 200 families in South Jerusalem. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an ordinary volunteer position, managing a set of week-to-week tasks for a few years before rotating out of leadership. But on October 7, 2023, more than 130 members of our community were drafted overnight, and one family’s son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, z”l, was taken hostage from the Nova music festival. We were devastated, worried, and in survival mode. In the days and weeks that followed Hamas’s attack, we had to shift from our usual priorities to new ones: creating new support structures, forming committees to check in on people’s needs, and trying to make sure that everyone felt seen and cared for during an uncertain and painful time. Mourning as a community and as a society has meant rallying together, showing support where needed, organizing meals, rallies, and vigils, fundraising with urgency, standing in solidarity at funerals, and sometimes simply showing up.
But my job also includes a significant amount of work building bridges between North American Jews and Israel, work that was challenging before October 7 and is exponentially more challenging today. Not only are we not speaking the same language or sharing lived experiences—we are each trapped in our own kind of paralysis. Israelis are struggling with disillusionment and exhaustion. North American Jews are grappling with their own rapidly changing domestic politics. They are also unsure what sorts of opinions they are “allowed” to have with regards to Israel, fearful that expressing discomfort or critique might sever their ties with Israel or with their local Jewish community. They are struggling to understand their own Jewish identities at a time when Jewishness is contested and targeted.
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I don’t think it’s surprising that when we look at Jewish history, we can see a paradigm of navigating national loss by turning toward communal ritual. Participating in ritual, especially communal ritual, connects us to our tradition and offers structure when emotions can be overwhelming. It offers grounding and perspective, both of which we have needed so badly. In the case of mourning, the Jewish ritual framework enables a grieving person to move forward, acknowledging that the pain does not simply vanish, and that life must continue despite it. In addition, this framework creates a space in which both mourning and renewal can coexist, ensuring that no one navigates the shift from one to the other alone. In this way, the rituals of mourning become more than just a way to mark time; they are acts of communal care, guiding us through moments of loss and helping us find a way to move forward.
After the death of a loved one, Jewish law outlines a deeply structured approach to mourning, guiding individuals and communities through loss, with distinct customs for each stage on the journey. The first and most intense period is shiva, the seven days following burial. During shiva, mourners remain at home, sit on low stools or the floor, refrain from shaving and wearing leather shoes, and do not greet others in the usual way. Meals are provided by the community, beginning with the seudat havraah, the meal of consolation, which traditionally includes eggs or lentils—foods symbolizing the cycle of life.
After shiva comes the period of shloshim, which ends thirty days after the burial. During shloshim, some mourners will gradually begin to reenter the world: they may return to work but might still refrain from participating in joyous activities. For those mourning a parent, a third stage continues for a full year, with customs such as reciting Kaddish daily and avoiding communal festivities.
The length of each mourning period is defined, then, not by the mourner’s emotional readiness, but by preset halakhic timing. After the seven days of shiva, mourners are prompted to rise—physically and symbolically. They change their shoes, step outside the shiva house, and take a short walk, often accompanied by friends or family. This ritual doesn't signal that their grief is over but rather that it is changing shape. It acknowledges the mourner’s ongoing pain while also insisting upon a small gesture of forward motion. In this way, our tradition offers a rhythm for grief: not rushing it but still ensuring that the mourner does not become mired in it. This halakhic structure gives mourners something to hold onto when nothing else feels steady, and the ritual affirms that the path ahead, while uncertain, begins with a single, supported step.
The structure of Jewish mourning practices honors the dead and protects the living. In Moed Katan 27b, the Talmud teaches: “Three days for weeping, seven for mourning, thirty for refraining [from cutting hair and wearing freshly laundered clothes] .... From this point on, the Holy One, Blessed be He, said: ‘Do not be more merciful with the deceased than I am.’” While grief is honored, it is also bounded and limited. Prolonged mourning, the rabbis caution, can prevent a person from reengaging with life. Jewish tradition, through its time-bound rituals, grants mourners permission to feel and express loss, while also guiding them—step by step, with communal support—through reentry into the world.
Remaining in mourning for too long is not only spiritually harmful—it risks dishonoring life itself. Maimonides speaks of this delicate balance in his book on the laws of mourning, warning that one who mourns excessively, beyond what tradition prescribes, is not acting out of righteousness but out of a refusal to accept reality: “A person should not grieve excessively ... this is the way of the world” (Hilkhot Avel 13:11). How, then, do we honor the ongoing pain of a people still actively living through loss while also heeding the Torah’s call in Deuteronomy (30:19) to choose life, וּבָחַרְתָּ בַּחַיִּים?
A second paradigm for mourning, this one specifically communal, might be able to provide some further direction at this moment. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish people found themselves not only in exile, but also having to reimagine what Jewish life would look like in a post-Temple era. The loss of the Temple was, not unlike October 7, a loss that changed reality for all Jews; we can, as Jews today, understand how easy it would have been for the community to remain paralyzed by grief.
In Bava Batra 60b, the Talmud quotes Tosefta Sota 15:11, which describes a debate among the rabbis about how to respond to the loss of the Temple. Some have adopted ascetic practices—refusing to eat meat or drink wine—believing that if the Temple no longer exists, they cannot partake in foods once used for ritual. But Rabbi Yehoshua challenges them, pointing out the unsustainable logic of this mourning: If one rejects meat and wine, why not also bread, fruit, and water, which are also linked to Temple ritual? One by one, the group’s arguments unravel until they fall silent.
This debate leads the rabbis to offer a more enduring solution: rather than giving up all joys of life, they choose to institute symbolic, sustainable rituals of remembrance such as leaving a small portion of a wall in one’s home unpainted. This idea of leaving a zekher lechurban, a remembrance of the destruction, is not a sign of being unable to move on; it is a way to ensure that the destruction is not forgotten as one moves on. An unpainted section becomes a powerful reminder that they can move forward and rebuild their lives without erasing the past. They can bridge the past and future. It offers a model of mourning but also of hope, a reminder that even after the greatest of losses, we can rise again, rebuild, and find new meaning in a world that is forever changed.
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When it comes to our personal mourning rituals, the halakhah is clear, and we know when shiva ends. The mourner rises after seven days, whether or not they are emotionally prepared, because the structure insists, and the structure carries us. But without a formal structure for communal mourning, we Jews today don’t know when the mourning will end. There is no fixed date to mark the transition, and in the meantime, our grief continues for so many reasons: not all the hostages are home, the war continues, the future is still so uncertain. We are asking: Is it time yet to get up from shiva? When will it be time to look forward?
Moreover, what does it look like when an entire society gets up from shiva?
In Israel, every possible path forward is fraught with political, moral, and existential uncertainty. For many of us, the very idea of a day after is almost unbearable. Some resist even imagining it, feeling that doing so might dishonor the dead or mean forgetting the hostages still in captivity. Others feel trapped in a cycle of trauma, unable to envision a return to anything that resembles normalcy. In addition to all this, Israelis are utterly exhausted, especially those who have been called up to serve again and again, as well as those fighting and protesting for the release of the remaining hostages. War has taken an immense emotional and physical toll.
Among diaspora Jews, there is no consensus on what Jewish solidarity means, nor on what kind of voice they are allowed to have. In both societies there is also an element of fear—fear of being judged, of saying the wrong thing, of losing our community or our moral clarity, and more and more, of violence. So we find ourselves stuck in many ways, one day bleeding into the next, in an ongoing state of worry that wears us down and makes it even harder to muster the strength to be able to imagine, let alone work together toward, a future.
One thing is clear to me: The act of rising must begin with mutual care. It requires that we talk to each other, not past one another. It demands that we care about each other—not only in crisis, but during the fragile process of rebuilding. In a real relationship, one has no choice but to play two roles: sometimes as mourner and at other times as comforter. If we are to remain in meaningful community across the Israel–Diaspora divide, we all must step up for one another—whether or not it’s comfortable, whether or not we feel ready. Just as shiva compels us to show up for mourners even when we don’t know what to say and even though it may be uncomfortable, so too this moment demands that we comfort one another, even through discomfort.
There are two powerful moments that stand out in my own community’s experience during the war. The first happened after the murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, z”l. After a year of fighting a heroic battle for his return, Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin sat shiva, where they received thousands of visitors in a mourning tent. At the end of the week, Oshrat Shoham, a founder of our community, stood before them and uttered the traditional words, kumu m’evlekhem, rise from your mourning. She then extended her hand and lifted them up, signaling that it was time to move to the next stage of grief.
Then, a few months later, in a devastating turn, the Goldberg-Polins found themselves on the other side of this ritual, lifting the Shoham family up from shiva after their son Yuval, z”l, was killed in Gaza. These two moments were simultaneously incredibly moving and heart-wrenching. Both times, you could almost hear everyone in the tent sigh with relief—not relief that something good was coming, but relief that this intense stage of mourning was over. The community was now offering support and even permission for the mourners as they moved on to what would come next.
I believe that the specific ritual that ends shiva, with its steps of offering and then accepting an invitation to rise, offers a model for our moment: a structure that honors collective pain while insisting on movement forward. And after we stand, just as we leave a zecher lechurban on the walls of our homes—a reminder that even as we build, we remember—we must build a future that bears the imprint of our grief without it being consumed and defined by it. For this to happen, we must reach out to one another—across oceans, across political divides—and ensure that no one rises alone. We must remember, as our tradition does, that the work of healing is communal.
Jews in North America and around the world have a little more distance from the destruction of October 7, and they are the ones we Israelis need to extend us a hand and help us move on to the day after. And when that hand is extended, Jews in Israel must accept it. North American Jewry, too, needs an invitation to rise, in their case from grief for acts of violent antisemitism. And whether we are the ones extending a hand or accepting it, moving toward the day after is not a luxury—it is a necessity. In doing so, we can begin to build the kind of future our tradition commands us to pursue: a world redeemed not by forgetting pain, but by transforming it into responsibility and action. To care about the day after is to say that we care so deeply about each other that we refuse to allow the trauma to become what defines us, or to allow it to separate us. Taking responsibility for what might be possible—even when the road is unclear, even when speaking of it is hard—this will be the new meaning of solidarity.
In imagining this way forward, I am also inspired by a message offered by Dr. Erica Brown, Vice Provost of Yeshiva University, at the beginning of the war. She taught that the book of Exodus tells us that, during the battle against Amalek, as long as Moses held his hands up, the Israelites prevailed; as his arms grew weary and lowered, they began to falter. Seeing his struggle, Aaron and Hur stepped in, each supporting one of his arms, ensuring that he could continue leading his people to victory. In her remarks, Brown likened North American Jewry at that moment to Aaron and Hur, there to support the Israeli community in its time of need, making sure we knew we were not alone. For me, as an Israeli at that moment—my partner drafted, trying my best to manage our children's wellbeing while navigating our community’s needs—these words were deeply moving, and they reminded me that we were, in fact, not alone.
What does it look like to extend or accept a hand? To invite or be invited to rise? Both must begin with honest conversations in our own communities and with one another about what it means to be in relationship with Israel while mourning all human loss. It means cultivating a language that holds grief, loyalty, and hope together—one that reflects one of our core values, the belief that every human being is created betzelem Elohim, in the image of God. We must invest in education, community building, and meaningful dialogue. This might look like speaking up at a Shabbat table, delivering a d’var Torah, attending a rally, or having a hard conversation with students or friends. We must refuse to stay silent or hover in the background. In my own community, it means gathering for public prayer and organizing events calling not only for the return of all hostages, but for our leaders to be worthy of their people. Being responsible for one another—not only in crisis, but also in the fragile, uncertain path toward healing—requires all of us to move beyond solidarity in grief and toward solidarity in rebuilding, imagining what a renewed Jewish future looks like in Israel and around the world.
It is time to get up.
