Tract by William Carlos Williams | Poetry Foundation
Kriah is supposed to be socially outrageous and primal. Mourners are not raising awareness for a cause, they are expressing the sense that their world has been torn apart. Kriah is Judaism’s way of providing mourners a controlled outlet for the almost feral despair they may be feeling—the impulse to just shred everything around them.
Sarah Hurwitz • Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)
Today, most of us lack the direct experience of being witness to a meaningful and family-centered dying process. We have outsourced the washing, dressing, and burial of the body of our beloved. Furthermore, just as grief is too often viewed as an illness to overcome, death, too, is seen as something to “fight.”
Amy Wright Glenn • Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go
But listen to the rebuke those ascetics received from the great Rabbi Yehoshua: "Okay, no meat or wine," he said
"But then you really ought to stop eating bread, too, became the meal offering can no longer be made after the destruction."
"That's fine," they said. "We can live on produce."
"Well, but you really shouldn't eat fruit either," Rabbi Ye-hos
... See moreDeath Tractates by Brenda Hillman
app.thestorygraph.com
Of course, even in our carefully crafted realities, death still exists, even if we can’t easily make space for honest discussions about it, even if we find it really hard to sit and listen to the dying. We shield ourselves from reflecting on mortality, loss, and fear because these topics constitute the collective shadow of our busy, consumer-driven
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