‘What You Actually Do During Shiva: A Mourner”s Guide’

By Aaron Mandel

You have just come home from the cemetery. The chairs in the living room have been lowered, or someone has set out a few stiff cushions on the floor. A candle is burning on a side table where the lamp used to be. People keep arriving with covered dishes, and you do not know whether to greet them or to stay where you are sitting. Somewhere underneath the strangeness of it all is a question no one has answered plainly: what exactly are you supposed to do now, for seven whole days?

This is the quiet difficulty of shiva. The tradition asks a great deal of you and explains almost none of it in the moment. So let us walk through it slowly — what you refrain from, what you receive, and why each of these still motions carries the grief somewhere it could not go alone.

You stop. That is the first thing you do.

Before shiva tells you to do anything, it tells you to cease. You do not go to work. You do not cook for yourself or for your guests. You do not bathe for pleasure, wear leather shoes, or tend to your appearance as you would on an ordinary morning. To a mind trained to keep moving, this can feel like neglect. It is the opposite.

The tradition understands that under ordinary conditions the soul is pulled outward, toward surfaces and tasks. The Duties of the Heart names this plainly: the soul was bound to “this coarse physical body in order to test it, how it would guide the body” ((Duties of the Heart, Tenth Treatise on Devotion to God 1:1–2)). Shiva loosens that outward pull for a week. By forbidding the small vanities and labors that normally fill your hands, it clears a space the soul can finally occupy. The covered mirrors belong to the same logic. As Tzava’at HaRivash observes, “even though you contemplate the spiritual aspect of what you see, nonetheless you only see the physical” ((Tzava'at HaRivash 90:9)). For seven days, you are asked to stop looking at the surface — even your own.

You sit, and you let yourself be visited

The word shiva means seven, but the act at its center is sitting. You sit low, near the ground, and you wait. You do not rise to host. You do not perform reassurance for those who come. This reversal is deliberate: in shiva, the world comes to you, and your only task is to be present to your own grief while others surround it.

When comforters arrive, you are not obligated to speak first or at all. If words come, they may come. If they do not, the silence is not a failure of the visit; it is the visit. Much of what passes between you and those who sit with you is wordless, and the tradition trusts that wordlessness. This is, in its own way, the soul beginning to do its work — turning inward, away from performance, toward what is true. Bahya calls love of the Creator “the longing of the soul — and its turning, on its own, to the Creator” ((Duties of the Heart, Tenth Treatise on Devotion to God 1:1–1)). Shiva does not demand that longing of you. It simply stops the noise long enough that, if it stirs, you will hear it.

You take account, gently

Grief opens a strange clarity. Sitting in that lowered chair, you find yourself reviewing a whole life — theirs, and your own beside it. This is not morbidity. It is one of the oldest spiritual labors Judaism knows: the examining of the soul, cheshbon hanefesh.

You need not force it or systematize it during these raw days. But know that the inward reckoning shiva makes room for is the same one the tradition prizes. The Duties of the Heart describes its fruit as “the results which the soul develops after attaining a clear grasp” of the ways of spiritual accounting and “understanding the truth of their obligation” ((Duties of the Heart, Eighth Treatise on Examining the Soul 4:1–5)). In shiva, you do not study this account; you live inside it. What did this person give me? What do I owe the time I still have? The chair is low so that these questions can settle.

You pray, and you say Kaddish — with others

Three times a day, a minyan gathers in the shiva home so that the prayer services can be held where you are, and so that you can rise to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. You are not asked to find words of your own for this. The liturgy supplies them; your task is to mean them.

That, too, is a discipline the tradition takes seriously. When the prayer feels hollow — and in grief it often will — you say the words anyway and let the meaning catch up. Tzava’at HaRivash counsels exactly this patience: “If necessary, do this a number of times during a single prayer, at first bonding to the body of the word and then investing the word with soul” ((Tzava'at HaRivash 58:2)). You begin with the syllables. The soul arrives later. Kaddish, said morning and evening in a room full of people who came for you, is how grief learns to lift its eyes without being asked to stop grieving.

You let the flame keep watch through the night

A single candle burns in the shiva house for all seven days. You do not bless it; you do not perform anything over it. You let it burn. It marks the soul of the one you have lost and gives your eyes something steady to rest on when the room empties and the visitors have gone home.

The nights of shiva are the hardest, and the tradition knows it. There is a particular openness to those quiet hours: “A man is more free from his affairs during the night than he is during the day” ((Duties of the Heart, Tenth Treatise on Devotion to God 6:24)). When the dishes are put away and no one is sitting across from you, the candle keeps a kind of company. It does not ask anything. It simply burns, the way grief simply continues, until it does not.

You let yourself be carried

Perhaps the most counterintuitive thing you do during shiva is the least active: you allow others to feed you. The first meal after the burial, the seudat havra’ah, is brought to you by someone else, because a mourner should not have to provide for themselves in the first hours. Through the week, the food keeps coming. You did not earn it and you cannot refuse it gracefully. You simply receive.

This is its own teaching. Judaism does not pretend that love is easy when love is tested; it expects the difficulty. Mesillat Yesharim says the truest love “should be like the love of a son for his father… The test of this type of love comes during times of difficulties and troubles” ((Mesillat Yesharim 19:87–88)). Shiva is one of those times. To let the community carry you — to eat what they cook and sit while they stand — is not weakness. It is the precise shape devotion takes when you have nothing left to give and must, for once, only receive.

When the seventh day comes, you will rise, walk to the door, and step outside, often around the block, back into the moving world. The candle will have burned down. The chairs will be lifted. But the inward turning that shiva began does not end at the threshold; it walks out with you, quieter now, into the thirty days and the year ahead. For now, you do not have to do any of that. For now, you sit. That is enough. That is, in fact, the whole of what is asked.

Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.