Sadness and the Rituals of Mourning

The High Holiday season focuses on our mortality, and so in this session we will discuss rituals not of the high holiday season but of mourning and death. Many find the rituals of mourning helpful as they navigate their grief. In this final session, Elana Stein Hain will explore the many layers of the emotional experience these rituals are meant to generate – not only for the individuals who are mourning but for the families and communities that surround them.  

REGISTER

Ritual and Emotion: Exploring the High Holiday Season
Many Jews find it hard to connect to Jewish ritual, and yet, Jewish ritual has the potential to deepen our emotional lives. In her three-part series, Elana Stein Hain explores three rituals and how each one might strengthen our capacity to express and harness emotions, like anger, joy, or grief. Elana takes us through the High Holidays by examining three key moments of the season. The course opens with Kol Nidre, a central ritual of Yom Kippur, moves into Sukkot as a ritualized expression of joy, and concludes with the rituals of avelut or mourning, reflecting the consciousness of mortality that hovers over this period.

Other sessions in this series:

• Anger and Kol Nidre
• Joy and Sukkot

This program is part of Ideas for Today, curated courses by Hartman Institute scholars on the big Jewish ideas we need to think better and do better.