Shelter Rock Jewish Center

Dear Friends,

Today is a red-letter day for me, and for our congregation: I've just managed to send the final corrections to Zot Nechamati, our new Siddur volume meant for us in houses of mourning, to the printer and told him to go ahead and, once the corrections are made, to print the books. We should have them in a few weeks. I'm very excited and very enthusiastic about this project, and I hope you will all be as pleased by the book as I'm hoping will be the case. The volume presents the afternoon and evening services from Tzur Yisrael, but in the margins of all 120 pages appears a longer work by myself, the work properly called Zot Nechamati (which means "This is My Comfort," a phrase from the 119th Psalm), which is a kind of guide to the whole process of loss, bereavement and restoration. It isn't a manual of customs or laws, and but one almost of philosophy: the book presents my retelling of many stories from the Talmud about the deaths of famous rabbis and the circumstances that led to those deaths, and attempts to draw relevant, useful lessons for moderns from the details of those stories about coping with loss, surviving the grieving process, and coming to terms with the challenge of beginning a new stage of one's own life after the death of a loved one.

I hope Zot Nechamati serves our congregation well; the book contains most of what I've learned over these many years of being a rabbi and escorting people through the grieving process, but it is also a kind of distillation of what I learned from the experience of losing my mother and then, twenty years later, my father. In the end, most of what I know about the whole process of coming to terms with loss, I have learned not from reading books, but from watching others...and from trying to decide in my own heart what distinguishes those people who manage to live on after loss from those who seem to be unable to disengage from their own unhappiness. It clearly isn't a matter of intelligence or moral fortitude, but neither does it, I don't believe, have solely to do with the good or poor fortune of the individuals involved. Instead, I have learned that there are attitudinal stances to try to develop and ideas to cultivate, and specific issues to force oneself to ponder on the path from bereavement to a restored sense of personal wholeness. There are traditional values to embrace, rituals not merely to perform but to use creatively and thoughtfully as springboards towards inner reconciliation, towards coming to terms with how things are in the wake of devastating loss. All this, I try to explain in the book.

We will be using Zot Nechamati in our shiva houses, of course. But some of you may wish to purchase your own copies and to read what I have written in a less hectic setting than while davening in a shiva house. I will be very flattered for Shelter Rockers to read what I have written and then to wish to discuss the concepts put forward. In May, I will have been a rabbi for exactly thirty years. (I can't quite believe that myself, but it appears to be true. Of those thirty years, I’ve spent twenty-two in the congregational rabbinate.) In the course of all those years, I have officiated at many, many funerals and visited shiva houses too numerous even to begin to count. I have watched and seen a lot, and, indeed, the most important reason I went to work on this project so soon after the publication of Tzur Yisrael was because I wished, and still do wish, to share with you all what I've learned in the course of all those years of serving people grappling with loss. It's a dour part of my job, but also a very satisfying one...and Zot Nechamati is my way of giving back to all those from whom I've learned so much over so much time by paying it forward to others, and by not keeping all those lessons just for myself.

I also wish formally to mention that the full cost of producing Zot Nechamati was covered by a very generous gift from the Resnick family, owners of Sinai Memorial Chapel in Fresh Meadows. I feel very grateful to them, and I know you all join me in acknowledging their generosity and thanking them for their support.

I hope none of us knows any sorrow in the future. But if the worst should happen, I also hope that those among us who must deal with loss find comfort in the pages of this new book. I am proud of this slim volume, and I look forward to sharing it all with you in the near future. But you have to promise to tell me if you take issue with anything I've written—I want to know all about that too!

Sincerely yours,