14 Oct SUKKOT: A COMMUNITY NEVER DIES IS IT NOT INSENSITIVE TO INTERRUPT SHIVAH FOR A HOLIDAY?

Interruption of
Shivah
A teaching in the
Mishna defines the
duties of a Jew who is
in mourning at the
outset of a festival.
“Regalim mafsikim,”
state the sages, “festivals interrupt shivah,” the
seven-day period of mourning following the
death and burial of a close relative (Moed
Katan 3:5).
In one of the most brilliant psychological
responses to death, mourners, in the Jewish
tradition, are supposed to step out of normal
life when they have suffered the loss of a loved
one. They don’t pretend to be brave and go on
as if nothing had happened. They take time to
grieve; their normal pattern of behavior is
disrupted as a way of recognizing that a
profound change has occurred in their life.
Thus the custom is that they stay home during
shivah, and people come to be with them, to
share in their grief. Jewish law recognized that
life will never be the same again, and the
dramatic transition requires time off.
But the Mishna is saying that if one of the
major Jewish festivals (Shavuos, Passover, or
Sukkos) begins while you are in the shivah
period you are supposed to put aside shivah
and join with the community in celebrating the
festival. So for example, if someone lost a
loved one on Sunday and buried them on
Monday, Shivah would only go till Saturday
night, when Shavuos begins. The mourner
takes part in a Shavuos celebration, attends a
Passover seder, goes out to eat in the Sukkah,
etc.
Why? At first glance this law seems insensitive.
Seeing how sensitive Jewish law is to someone
who suffered a loss, requiring them to stay
home for seven days, why suddenly in this case
do we display such brute insensitivity? How
can we be expected to put aside our grief and
go to a celebration? How can halacha command
us to suppress natural human emotions for the
sake of going through the motions of a ritual?
The Talmud, the commentary on the Mishna,
explains the reason for this ruling: “aseh
d’rabim” – a positive mitzvah incumbent on
the community, overrides “aseh d’yachid” – a
positive mitzvah incumbent on the individual”
(Talmud Moed Katan 14b). Celebration of the
festivals is a mitzvah of the entire community;
mourning is a mitzvah on the individual who
suffered the loss. The communal time of joy
overrides the individual’s time of grief.
But this does not seem to answer the question.
After all, if someone lost a loved one, how do
we ask of them to transcend their individual
state of mourning because of the communal
state of joy? Let the community celebrate, but
let the individual mourn!
If I Am Only For Myself…
Each and every Jew can experience himself or
herself in one of two ways, and they are both
equally true. We are individuals. Each of us has
our own “pekel,” our own baggage, our own
unique story and narrative. I got my issues, you

got yours; I got my life, you got yours. You
fend for yourself, I fend for myself. In the
words of Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who
will be for me?”
Together with this, we are each also an
indispensable part of “klal Yisroel,” of the
community of Israel. We are not only
individuals; we are also an integral part of
“keneset Yisroel,” the collective soul of the
Jewish people. Like limbs in a body, each limb
has its own individual character and chemistry,
but it is also a part of a single organism we call
the human body.
The difference between these two components
is critical. The individual life can die. But, in
the words of the Talmud, “tzebor lo mas,” the
community does not die (Talmud Horayos 6a).
The collective body we call “the Jewish
people” never dies, it only changes hands. The
very same “body” of “klal Yisroel” that existed
3000 years ago still exists today. Moshe was a
Jew and you are a Jew. Rabbi Akiva was a Jew
and you are a Jew. The Baal Shem Tov was a
Jew and you are a Jew. An individual can die; a
nation does not die (unless the entire nation is
obliterated.) Again in the words of Hillel: “But
if I am only for myself, what am I?”
The tyrants and Anti-Semites in history could
sadly wipe out individual Jews, but never the
Jewish people. “Tzebor lo mas.” The
community of Israel never dies.
Eternity
Now we will understand the explanation of the
Talmud, that shivah gets interrupted for a
holiday because the mitzvah of the community
takes precedent over the mitzvah of the
individual. This is not saying that the individual
who suffered a loss must forget about his or her
own pain because the community is celebrating.
That would be unfair. Rather the Talmud is
telling us something deeper.
When the community of Israel is experiencing
a celebration, a festival, marking a watershed
moment in the history of our people—that
celebration of the “tzebur,” of the collective
body of the Jewish people, includes also the
person who passed away, because that aspect
of us which is part of the community of Israel
never ever dies. The “Jew” in the Jew cannot
die, because it lives on in the collective body of
the Jewish nation.
When the mourner interrupts his shivah to
celebrate the holiday of Passover, Shavuos or
Sukkos, he is not diverting his heart from his or
her beloved one; rather he is given the ability
to connect to the central defining moments
defining Jewish history and eternity, and it is in
that drama that his loved one still lives on. In
the collective life of the Jewish people, and in
our collective celebrations of Jewish faith and
history, our loved ones continue to live.
A Lost Child
This may be of the reasons we recite Yizkor on
each of the three holidays. During Yizkor, we
don’t only remember our loved ones who
passed on; we also ensure that a part of them
never dies, by insuring that the collective
organism of Am Yisroel—the people of
Israel—survives and thrives.

A moving story is told by the Yiddish writer
Shalom Asch, about an elderly Jewish couple
in Russia forced by the government to house a
soldier in their home. They move out of their
bedroom, and the young man, all gruffness and
glares, moves in with his pack, rifle and
bedroll. It’s Friday night, and the couple
prepares to sit down for Shabbat dinner. The
soldier takes his place at the table. Only now is
it apparent just how young he is. He sits and
stares with wide eyes as the old woman kindles
the Shabbas candles. And he listens as the old
man chants the Kiddush and Hamotzie. He
quickly devours the hunk of challah placed
before him, and speaking for the first time, he
asks for more. His face is a picture of
bewilderment. Something about this scene —
the candles, the chant, the taste of the challah,
captures him. It touches him in some
mysterious way.
He rises from his seat at the table, and beckons
the old man to follow him, back into the
bedroom. He pulls his heavy pack from the
floor onto the bed, and begins to pull things
out. Uniforms, equipment, ammunition. Until
finally, at the very bottom, he pulls out a small
velvet bag, tied with a drawstring. “Can you
tell me, perhaps, what this is?” he asks the old
man, with eyes suddenly gentle and imploring.
The old man, takes the bag in trembling fingers
and opens the string. Inside is a child’s tallis, a
tiny set of tefillin, and small book of Hebrew
prayers.
“Where did you get this?” he asks the soldier.
“I have always had it…I don’t remember
when…”
The old man opens the prayer book, and reads
the inscription, his eyes filling with tears:
“To our son, Yossel, taken from us as a boy,
should you ever see your Bar Mitzvah, know
that your mama and tata always love you.”
You see, this boy was one of the cantonists. On
August 26, 1827, Tsar Nicholas published the
Recruitment Decree calling for conscription of
Jewish boys between the ages of twelve and
twenty-five into the Russian army. These boys
were known as Cantonists; derived from the
term ‘Canton’ referring to the ‘districts’ they
were sent, and the ‘barracks’ in which they
were kept. Conscripts under the age of eighteen
were assigned to live in preparatory institutions
until they were old enough to formally join the
army. The twenty-five years of service required
that these recruits be counted from age
eighteen, even if they had already spent many
years in military institutions before reaching
that age.
Nicholas strengthened the Cantonist system
and used it to single out Jewish children for
persecution, their baptism being of a high
priority to him. No other group or minority in
Russia was expected to serve at such a young
age, nor were other groups of recruits
tormented in the same way. Nicholas wrote in
a confidential memorandum, “The chief
benefit to be derived from the drafting of the
Jews is the certainty that it will move them
most effectively to change their religion.”
During the reign of Nicholas I, approximately

seventy thousand Jews, some fifty thousand
who were children, were taken by force from
their homes and families and inducted into the
Russian army. The boys, raised in the
traditional world of the Shtetle, were pressured
via every possible means, including torture, to
accept baptism. Many resisted and some
managed to maintain their Jewish identity. The
magnitude of their struggle is difficult to
conceive.
This thirty-year period from 1827 till 1856 saw
the Jewish community in an unrelieved state of
panic. Parents lived in perpetual fear that their
children would be the next to fill the Tsar’s
quota. A child could be snatched from any
place at any time. Every moment might be the
last together; when a child left for cheder
(school) in the morning, parents did not know
if they would ever see him again. When they
retired at night after singing him to sleep, they
never knew whether they would have to
struggle with the chappers (kidnapper, chap is
the Yiddish term for grab) during the night in a
last ditch effort to hold onto their son.
These kids were beaten and lashed, often with
whips fashioned from their own confiscated
tefillin (phylacteries.) In their malnourished
states, the open wounds on their chests and
backs would turn septic and many boys, who
had heroically resisted renouncing their
Judaism for months, would either perish or
cave in and consent to the show of baptism. As
kosher food was unavailable, they were faced
with the choice of either abandoning Jewish
dietary laws or starvation. To avoid this horrific
fate, some parents actually had their sons’
limbs amputated in the forests at the hands of
local blacksmiths, and their sons—no longer
able bodied—would avoid conscription. Other
children committed suicide rather than convert.
All cantonists were institutionally underfed,
and encouraged to steal food from the local
population, in emulation of the Spartan
character building. (On one occasion in 1856 a
Jewish cantonist Khodulevich managed to
steal the Tsar’s watch during military games at
Uman. Not only was he not punished, but he
was given a reward of 25 rubles for his display
of prowess.)
This boy in our story was one of those
cantonists.
Let Them Live
At Yizkor, our mama and tata, our zeide and
babe, our great grandparents for many
generations, whisper to us how deeply they
love us and believe in us. No matter how many
years have passed, the bond is eternal and
timeless.
And when we embrace and continue their
story, we ensure that every single Jew who
ever walked the face of this earth is still, in
some very real way, alive.