Allowing Grief To Be Holy With Rabbi Anne Brener

Rabbi Anne Brener stumbled across traditional Jewish mourning rituals as she was preparing for her wedding. Her fascination with these ancient prayers plus knowledge of psychology and a collection of her own personal griefs called her to deeply explore the world of Jewish mourning and write the book Mourning & Mitzvah. Today we're talking about how God can be described as "a place" for mourners and how death requires our hearts and minds to jump from a physical to a spiritual relationship.

Transcript

Well,

Rabbi Brenner,

Thank you so much for coming on,

Coming back today to talk about where Judaism and psychology and grief all intersect.

I'm so excited to have you here.

Oh,

I'm so happy to be here,

And I'm so appreciative of what you do.

It makes such a difference for people who are grieving,

Because people who are grieving really need a place to go.

I want to go ahead and jump right into your lost story and kind of what it was that got you started in doing this work.

Well,

I don't know that I had a choice.

My life pretty much had the name grief on it.

When I was three months old,

My natural father died in an accident having to do with surgery that probably shouldn't have been done.

I was,

As I said,

Three months old.

And then my mother committed suicide when I was 24,

And three months after that,

My sister was killed in a car accident.

So I spent a lot of time—I was 24 years old when I lost my mother and sister,

And I spent a lot of time trying to be like other people who were 24 years old,

But I was failing miserably.

And at some point,

It occurred to me that maybe my life was trying to teach me something.

And so I did whatever I could to see what grief was about,

What I needed to learn.

And I have to say that as a result of it,

I not only wrote a book,

But I feel that I've come into a very different understanding of what it means to be human,

What it means to be a spiritual person,

What it means to be a religious person.

And I won't say that I'm grateful for what happened to me.

I would give anything to have them back.

But I feel that I've led a better life because of it.

I like that you say that because that's something that's so—how do I phrase that?

This is like what the world wants us to say,

Is that I'm grateful that I had this experience or that I'm so happy I learned from it,

Or something about the positive-only spin of the transformational power of grief.

The world is often insistent that we learn something from our losses and do something productive and make ourselves happy that we went through it.

So I'm really glad that you expressed this emotion of,

No,

I'm not really grateful.

I wish I had them back every single day.

And I empathize with you in this need to understand what I'm going through,

Especially being in your 20s.

Listeners at the show know that I lost my mom when I was 21 and learned to lean on the stories of others via books and podcasts and all these free resources to sort of construct a framework for me.

I want to know more about your family and your upbringing,

Kind of what got you started connecting the dots between religion and psychology and grief altogether.

Well,

It was a long journey.

It didn't go so easily.

In the beginning,

As I said,

I tried to be like other people my age and wasn't able to do it.

I finally retreated to a cabin in Mendocino County in Northern California,

And I gardened and I exercised.

I did a lot of yoga,

And I began to write in my journal and try to just by my own bootstraps pull myself up.

And then I decided,

Well,

Actually,

It was sort of connected with my getting married.

When I was getting married,

I married someone who was also Jewish,

And I began to look into what a Jewish wedding would be.

And then I became more and more interested in Judaism.

And I found out that the Jewish morning rituals,

If they had been observed,

Would have guided me through loss in a way that would have taken me to the kind of healing that I had to do all by myself,

Pulling myself up through my own bootstraps.

And so I began to learn more and more about Judaism and the Jewish morning rituals.

The Jewish morning rituals are incredible.

They're incredibly wise,

And they carry people from the very beginning of loss,

Acknowledging all of the emotions,

Making certain that the community surrounds someone who is grieving,

Making sure that they get their needs met and that they have permission to feel whatever they need to feel.

There's no denial of death in Judaism.

And we hear the sound of earth on the casket as people are buried.

The community,

Everybody lines up and helps to bury the person who died.

We don't embalm people.

We really have a sense of people need to return to the earth just as they are.

And then the mourners go to their homes,

And the community brings them food and stands around them,

And the community is actually encouraged to be very quiet and allow the mourner to have the space that they need,

While they also know that they're being supported at the whole time.

It's very interesting that in the blessing that is given to mourners,

The name of God that is used in Judaism,

We have about 71 different names for God,

And the name of God when we're blessing mourners is Hamakom,

Which actually means the place.

And when I said earlier how grateful I am that you created a place for mourners,

It's in some ways saying that you're creating a holy place,

Because the blessing,

There's so many words in Judaism for God,

As I said,

But the fact that the word for God for mourners is the place indicates to me,

And I think to others as well,

That we don't want to prescribe how mourners should feel.

We want to just create something around them that helps them to feel safe,

So that they can feel whatever they need to feel,

Always supported by community,

Always taken care of,

Always under the watchful eye of those who care for them,

So that they can walk through this very difficult path.

I'm getting chills as you're saying that because there's a few other podcasts I listen to,

Including the Robcast,

Which is a Christian-leaning podcast,

But his intense study of the Bible and the Hebrew language as well,

He displays a lot of different words for God,

And you said the number was 71?

Yeah,

Well they say there's 71 faces of God,

Although that isn't really true because we believe that everyone is a face of God,

So there's really an infinite number of faces of God.

Whenever I approach a mourner,

Or really anybody who I'm working with in any kind of capacity to try to help them or comfort them,

I always sort of tell myself a face of God is approaching you.

Act appropriately and try to really see the holiness that they're carrying just by virtue of being a human being.

What happens to grief when we choose to view it through this holy lens?

Well,

I think that by allowing grief to be holy,

And that's one of the things that I've really tried to do in my book,

Is to recast the various stages of grief that people go through as holy spaces,

So that they will have the sense that this is not just something they have to get through because it's a terrible thing,

But that each of these places,

And I use the word place again,

That mourners have to experience,

Tells them something profound about what it means to be a human being,

Something profound about what it means to live on a planet where living things die.

So much in our culture is about denying that truth,

Denying the fact that living things die.

We are in a lot of trouble as a result of that because we've been dumping things into our oceans and our rivers,

And we've been polluting our earth and building tall buildings as if they would last forever.

And in it is just this basic denial that mourners really know,

Which is that life is like a roller coaster.

There are ups and there are downs,

And we have to treasure each moment,

We have to treasure life and really respect it,

And not just think that we have the capacity to live forever.

And with that,

When we come to terms with the fact that we're finite beings on this planet,

We begin to take our lives much more seriously.

We cherish each day,

And we know that we're responsible for our actions and we're responsible for our planet.

I think that when we fully grieve,

We learn compassion for ourselves,

We learn compassion for others,

And we ultimately come to take responsibility for making sure that the world is a place of compassion.

In Judaism,

There's a prayer that we say,

And we usually say it at funerals and we say it at memorial services.

It's a prayer that asks that people who have died,

That their souls be gathered under the wings of the Shekhinah,

Which is another name for God.

The prayer is called El Mal'erachamim,

Which means God filled with compassion.

And the word for compassion in Hebrew has the same root as the word for womb.

So the sense that we get is that when a soul dies,

When a soul leaves the body,

It should be gathered up into the womb of holiness.

And this tells us that life is a journey from womb to womb,

And that in between,

There's the hope that we can stay aligned with this path of compassion.

And I think that when we face the fact that we're finite,

When we are there for people who are grieving,

We begin to understand this understanding of compassion.

We begin to embrace compassion.

I have this sense that if people would fully grieve,

They would come to a place of compassion and we would have a lot less war on our planet.

I think that very often one of the first things that people can feel when they've gotten past the heavy weight of grief,

The first thing that activates them is this feeling of anger.

And my sense is that that anger is what ricochets all down the generations so that people just keep acting out their anger instead of taking their grief to the fullness that it is and taking it through all of the stages that it needs to experience so that they can come to a place where they have compassion for the world,

For God,

For other people,

And for themselves as well.

That compassion,

I think,

Could heal the world.

I think that insight is right on.

And I love your literary breakdown of life is womb to womb because also in my own grief brain,

I heard that also as life is going from room to room,

Like with hard colors,

And in the sense of creating a place for grief,

Creating space for grief,

Where in essence giving it its own room.

We're giving its own room,

It has its own womb,

Like all of these things are tying close together.

Well,

In my book,

My book has just come out in a third 25th anniversary edition,

And there's a lot more in it than was in the original edition 25 years ago.

And one of the things I've done is to look at the stages of grief that we classically speak of when we speak of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and a lot of the people who have followed her,

And to look at them through the metaphor of something that we call Sukkot.

Sukkot are these fragile dwellings that we live in during a holiday period in the fall also called Sukkot.

And they are reminiscent of the tents in which people dwelled when they lived,

When they journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land.

And what I like to say about those tents,

Those Sukkot,

Is that we're commanded to dwell in them,

But it's just temporary.

So by going into each of these Sukkot,

Which correspond with the different stages of grief,

Knowing that they're temporary,

I'm hoping that people will take the time to learn what they can learn in each of those Sukkot.

Now,

There's an irony in that this time,

This week in the fall when we're living in these fragile tents,

Is also called the holiday of Sukkot,

But it's also called the time of our joy,

Z'man Simchatenu.

So in essence,

This I think is perhaps the most profound spiritual teaching,

Is that we live in vulnerable,

Fragile tents,

And we must be happy.

We must learn to be happy.

And so that is the ultimate paradox,

Which I think we come to if we experience grief fully,

If we live in all of these Sukkot,

And if we experience all the things that we need to experience,

Which allows us to come to peace with loss,

To come to peace that people we love,

Or people that we were in conversation with,

Whether or not it was an easy or difficult conversation,

Have left the planet,

And that we need to find a life for ourselves without them.

And if we can come to peace with that by feeling all the feelings that grievers,

The people who grieve,

Need to feel,

Then we can come to this place of making peace with the fact that we live in these fragile tents,

And we can still feel the awe and amazement that life is actually quite exquisite.

I want to circle back to your own personal losses and kind of that lightning bolt moment when you started diving into Jewish mourning practices.

What exactly happened to your own griefs for your father,

Your mother,

Or your sister,

Or all three,

When you discovered these rituals?

Did you kind of recreate them for yourself?

Or how did you find your own peace and that fragility after discovering the structure and the holiness of these rituals?

Well,

I didn't discover them right away.

I had done a lot of work with,

As I said,

With yoga and gardening and psychotherapy and a lot of dark,

Lonely nights.

And then I discovered them many years later,

And I began to look at the rituals and to try to mine them for what was psychologically sound in them.

What were these rituals trying to do for people?

And so in my book,

What I do is I use the structure of the Jewish mourning path,

Which as I said,

Holds people very tight in the beginning.

And then as time goes on,

Allows them to not be held so tightly,

But to have places,

Again this word place,

During each year,

Even after the year of mourning,

When people are allowed to have the conversation when people,

We have a number of Memorial Days every year.

And each of those days allows people to find where they were in those conversations,

Because everybody dies in the middle of a conversation.

And so the work that we have to do is find where was I in that conversation,

Because if I don't find where I am in that conversation with the person who died,

Then a part of me dies as well.

So you asked me to be very specific about my own experience,

And I'll tell you,

I was very lucky in that I went back to Berkeley,

Where I had been living before I had had the losses.

I grew up in New Orleans,

And that's where my mother and sister died.

I went back to Berkeley,

I did a lot of yoga,

And one day I was doing the bridge,

Where you're on your back and you push your hands and your feet up and your body forms a bridge.

And when I came down from that pose,

I began to weep and weep and weep.

And somehow,

Some part of me instinctively began to chant the Shema,

Which is the basic prayer in Judaism,

Which basically says,

Listen,

Israel,

And by Israel they're saying the name of the patriarch Israel,

And therefore it's almost like,

Listen,

Anne,

The Lord is one,

Or God is one.

And I realized,

As I had come down from that position,

I had felt this sense that curtains had been pulled away,

And that the curtains that separated the worlds of life and death were very permeable at that moment.

And I felt that I hadn't really lost my mother and my sister.

And I experienced in a very visceral way what I realized was what the Shema was all about and what Judaism is all about,

Is this sense that everything is connected and we don't lose that connection.

So I was very lucky right after that to meet someone named Rabbi Zalman Shactor Shalomi,

Who was a rabbi who had come from Europe,

Had narrowly,

Very narrowly,

Escaped the Holocaust and was living in the United States.

And I told him about my experience and he said,

Yes,

That's exactly what the Shema is about.

That oneness is a oneness that connects all people,

All things,

All worlds,

Both life and death.

And that connection is really what God is all about.

And so I was able to learn from that.

And that was really the moment where I began to once again explore Judaism.

And it made a great difference in my life.

And from there I began,

As I said,

To really mine these rituals and try to understand them,

Not just as something that we do because we're told to do them,

But as something that was kind of a proto-psychological path.

That religion was really,

At least Judaism,

Was really established as a way of helping people to grow,

To connect with holiness,

To seek justice,

To make peace with the fact that we are finite creatures.

And I began to,

I was able to really spend the rest of,

Really the rest of my life,

I've been trying to both explore it for myself and share it with other people as well.

I love that story so much.

And this is the piece where I want to segue into what people can expect from Morning in Mitzvah,

Because from what I've read of it and what I've seen other reviewers say of it,

It sounds like it's a mixture of both wisdom and exercises.

So my book,

Which is called Morning in Mitzvah,

A guided journal for walking the mourner's path through grief to healing,

Attempts to take people's hand and guide them on the path of grief.

What I do is use the Jewish rituals as a template for creating exercises,

Writing exercises mostly,

Although there's meditations in there as well.

And to ask people questions,

Give them an opportunity to explore different aspects of their grief,

And give them an opportunity to feel.

I try very hard to make people have a sense,

Or to allow people to have a sense that I'm with them as they do this difficult work.

And to write,

And I spoke earlier about the word for God in the mourner's blessing that Judaism used is hamakom,

Which means the place.

So I try to create places in which mourners can experience the fullness of their grief with the hope that the wisdom of this template that takes mourners from the moment of hearing a death,

About a death,

Through a whole year of grieving,

To dealing with all of the different issues that might come up for them.

I try to anticipate a lot of it and I think I've done it.

And then there's something in Judaism that I think is so incredibly wise,

In that we have these memorial services each year,

There are four of them each year,

And they correspond with different aspects of grief.

So it makes it very clear to people that grief doesn't just end.

We wouldn't want it to end,

It would mean that our relationship ended.

And so I create,

And the Jewish rituals create,

Places during the year where we can,

Again,

Show up,

Experience our grief again,

And hopefully see how we've grown.

What is our grief like now?

How has it changed?

How has our relationship with the person who's died changed?

How are we different?

And ironically,

Or magically,

How are they different?

Because one of the hardest things that people have to do in their lives,

As human beings,

Is to go from having a physical relationship with someone who's gone to having a spiritual relationship with someone who's gone.

And so what I try to do,

And what I think I really am just using the wisdom of the Jewish morning rituals to guide me,

Is to try to create a place where people can make that transition from a physical relationship to a spiritual relationship.

And I try to hold people's hands as they make that transformation,

And come out the other side and figure out ways in which they memorialize people,

They want to remember them,

How they still experience them in their lives,

How they can still have a conversation with them.

All of that is there.

I love this so much because I've never heard it phrased this way,

The transition from a physical to a spiritual relationship.

And there are a lot of growing pains that happen in that because in most cases,

In the case of a death,

It happens overnight.

All of a sudden,

They're here on the planet and then they're not.

Well that transformation doesn't happen overnight.

Of course the loss happens overnight.

But it takes a long time.

And I think that in our culture,

We're urged to just get over it and get back to normal.

Well,

It's a new normal.

And part of the work of that new normal is finding a new relationship so we don't feel that we have completely lost someone who has died.

People come to me and they talk about unfinished business or things they wish they'd said.

We undervalue the imaginal world.

In the imaginal world,

These things can happen and they can have an impact on what we,

The so-called real world.

If I have a conversation with somebody who's dead in my imagination,

That conversation will impact me and it will change me.

And a great deal of healing will come.

But it takes a long time before we're willing to relinquish the physical connection.

I know people very often hold onto articles of clothing and they can still smell the person who died.

They wrap it around them.

It's perfectly understandable and normal.

It's very hard to surrender that physical connection.

But once we do,

It is just amazing,

The kind of healing that can happen.

And in my book,

I try to encourage people to do this work and also try to gently,

Gently create these places where they can do it so that it will not be such a traumatic experience.

That's maybe one or two of the biggest conversations you've had with your loved ones in a spiritual way.

Well,

You know,

As I said,

My mother committed suicide and it was so painful.

And I had all kinds of feelings.

Of course,

I had a great deal of guilt.

I had a great deal of anger.

And I had to find a way to express those things.

Let me talk a little bit about guilt and then I want to come back to your question.

Because I think that for a lot of people,

The feeling of guilt is easier than the feeling of helplessness,

Of recognizing that we really have no power over the great mysteries of life and death.

If I could believe that I was responsible for my mother killing herself,

I could believe that I mattered.

I could believe that I could have made a difference in her life.

So I held onto that guilt for a long time.

People would rather feel guilty than feel that powerlessness.

Feel that completely stand on the edge of the abyss for which we have no real answers.

So by saying,

Because I was dating who I was dating,

Because I didn't fulfill certain expectations that she had of me.

If only I had done this,

If only I had done that.

I mean,

I hear it from people,

I'm sure you hear it from people all the time.

If only I hadn't left the room.

If only I had seen another doctor.

If only,

If only,

If only.

People say that so often.

It's a thought that they have,

But then they begin to believe it and they make it true as if it were true.

Because it's so much easier.

We have a saying in Judaism,

It's from a Hasidic rabbi who lived,

I think,

In the 17th century,

And he said,

Life is a narrow bridge and the most important thing is not to be afraid.

The truth is,

Life is a narrow suspension bridge over a great abyss.

And one of the most important things that we can learn from grieving fully is that we have no answers.

And we must live with the great mystery and the great unknown.

And to be able to come to a place where we can live with that great mystery,

Where we can recognize that we don't have answers,

And to not be afraid,

That is to have really come through grief,

To a very,

Very high sense of what spirituality is all about.

Many religions try to tell us,

Many fundamentalist religions try to tell us exactly what happens and where people go,

And what happens after death.

We don't know that.

We don't know the answers to these things.

We don't know why people die.

We don't know really what it means to be human.

You know,

We have five senses,

Maybe six if we're really enlightened,

Maybe even seven if we're enlightened.

There are probably so many other ways of perceiving reality that we don't even have access to.

How can we really know the truth about God,

About life,

And about death?

How can we even know what it fully means to be human?

So to be able to come through that place that grief demands us to go,

To ask those difficult,

Difficult questions for which there really are no answers,

And to come to peace with that,

That is what the spiritual journey really is.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the spirituality on this side of complexity,

The fundamentalist spirituality does not compare to the spirituality that can handle the great paradoxes of life and death.

When we can hold what Carl Jung called the tension of opposites,

Where we can hold that bad things happen to good people,

That we don't have the answers for the great questions that we're always asking,

When we can hold that and still experience joy,

We're able to come to a much higher understanding of spirituality.

I once had a wonderful teacher,

Rabbi Jonathan Omerman,

Who lives up in Berkeley right now,

And he used to say,

Everybody's always looking for the right answers,

But what we need are better questions.

And the best question of all is what is the question for which my life is the answer?

So the question for which my life is the answer,

I think,

Is how does one deal with grief?

My life gave me so much grief.

So that was apparently what I was put on the earth to try to explore.

This is the great question for which there's no answer.

But asking the question has propelled me through life and given me,

I think,

A really wonderful spiritual connection to God,

To the people that I've lost,

To being a person on this planet.

I think that's right on the mark.

And I think it's such a neat reframing to ask ourselves what are our lives here to answer,

As opposed to us asking,

Why am I here?

Yeah,

Yeah.

I think that's so powerful.

Reviews

Remarkable interview with a brilliant spiritual guide and teacher, Rabbi Anne Brener.

This was such a powerful talk for me as I am grieving a son who crossed over last year at the age of 23. I resonated with so much and welcome the ideas for reframing my experience with the grief and the transition to an energetic relationship with my son. Thank you so much for this! 🙏🏼

life altering conversation. my husband of 35 years passed away four months ago. i’ve had people die in my 66 years but nothing that has created the overwhelming emotions like this current experience. this talk inspires me to explore more instead of feeling like a victim to life’s cruelty. thanks 🙏