Saying Kaddish: How to Comfort the Dying, Bury the Dead, and Mourn as a Jew
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel notes, “There is no craving for death in the history of Jewish piety…Earthly life, mortal life, is precisely the arena where the covenant between God and man must be fulfilled…Life here and now is the task.”
Sarah Hurwitz • Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)
But the one crucial thing we can do for them after their death is to let them be witnesses for God and for life, rather than, by our despair and loss of faith, making them “the devil’s martyrs.”
Harold S. Kushner • When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Birth, Breath, and Death: Meditations on Motherhood, Chaplaincy, and Life as a Doula
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suffering and death in someone close to us bring us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength and love and cheer-fulness, if it leads us to discover sources of consolation we never knew before, then we make the person into a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection.