Category: Death & Mourning

A Sea of Names: Healing our Imperfect Relationships through Mourner’s Kaddish
By Donna Harel
February 15, 2018
New boats come each week as the familiar ones start to leave. You connect, once a week, to the lost soul...
Design Your Own Ritual with a Little Help from a Rabbi
By Rabbi Kami Knapp
August 2, 2017
Ritual helps us pay attention. From the joy of a recovery to the grief of a funeral, ritual helps us inhabit the breadth of human experience.
Exploring the Soul in New Podcast "Kaddish"
By Ariana Katz
September 14, 2016
Here I was ... singing about the purity of souls with a room full of Reconstructionists: queers, gender outlaws, patrilineal Jews, and so many of us who are so used to being reminded that our souls are anything but.
Interview with By Your Side
By Ritualwell
August 8, 2016
As we enter the month of Av, which includes the holiday of Tisha b'Av, a day of mourning for communal tragedy, we are reminded of the power of ritual to sustain us during times of loss. However, for grieving families, the pain of loss can often make funeral planning challenging. In that spirit, we present an interview with Sharon Litvinsky and Jennifer Ross, founders of By Your Side, a funeral and memorial planning service in Princeton, NJ.
Dead of a Broken Heart
By Alden Solovy
May 9, 2016
Here’s our message: if you suffer, get help. You’re worth it.
First Person: The Stigma of Suicide and the Redemption of Speech
By Rabbi Yosef Goldman
May 9, 2016
After more than half a century of struggle with mental illness, mired in despair, my father died by suicide.  
Leaving Egypt: Suicide Prevention and the Questions We Must Ask
By Deborah Greene
May 2, 2016
Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved the whole world. (Talmud)
Jewish Grieving for a Non-Jewish Relative
By Erika Davis
July 20, 2015
I continued to wonder how a Jew-by-choice goes about honoring a dead loved one in a way that doesn’t offend non-Jewish relatives and honors my adopted Jewish traditions.
Mourning Our Way: Adapting Jewish Mourning Customs for a Special Needs Family
By Rabbi Amber Powers
July 13, 2015
Four months ago I was about to get ready for bed when my cellphone rang. I ignored it because it was from an unknown caller. When I ignored it a second time, the caller left a voicemail. It was my stepmother's friend, whom I had never met, calling from a hospital in Texas.
#ReimagineLoss Twitter Chat Archive
By Ritualwell
July 10, 2015
This past Friday afternoon, we hosted the third in our series of #ReimagineRitual Twitter chats, this one on #ReimagineLoss. We discussed ways to remagine Jewish mourning rituals, touching on subjects such as how ritual provides structure for our grief, making sense of the phrase "Baruch Dayan Ha-emet," and grieving practices in Jewish interfaith families. We appreciate the many voices represented in this chat. The aim of these chats is to be the first step in ongoing conversations.

The Reconstructionist Network

Learning to Say "We": Writing Identity

In this immersion, we will reflect and expand on our personal experiences of identity, using writing exercises and in-depth discussions to think about, challenge, discover, explore, and experiment with different ways to identify ourselves, to consider how those ways connect us to and separate us from others, and how they represent and misrepresent aspects of who we are.

Four sessions, starting June 15th

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