[Avodah] mourning for a parent

[Simi Peters]

One might ask why there has to be a halakhic obligation to mourn for anyone.  After all, most people feel a sense of grief at the loss of those who are dear to them and we might think there is no need to ritualize  that.  Still, halakha requires minimum periods of mourning and specifies rites and obligations of grief, just as it sets requirements for all other aspects of our lives.

This is just a guess, but it seems to me that the year-long mourning period mandated for a parent is a response to the complexity of the child-parent relationship--the tension that often exists between personal feelings and moral obligations.  There are children who do not feel particularly mournful at the death of a parent or whose mourning is mixed with relief (or worse).  There are also children who are waiting to inherit and are more preoccupied with that than they are with grief.  (I hasten to add that I still very much miss my parents many years after their loss, so I am not speaking from personal experience.)  In response to this, the halakha *obligates* the child to mourn, whether or not he wants to, conveying the idea that whatever the nature of the child's relationship with his parents, he owes them the ultimate hakarat hatov for having been given life through them and must therefore enact mourning even if he does not entirely feel it.

In contrast, the loss of a child is almost universally an experience of utter devastation for any parent.  The halakha does not have to enforce mourning, since the parent will likely grieve over the child as long as the parent lives.  In any event, the parent has very few (if any) halakhic obligations to his child.  The 'official' period of mourning is, therefore, relatively short.

By the same token, the loss of a spouse is either felt as a tragedy or not, while in some cases, the spouse may feel ambivalent.  In any event, death dissolves the actual bond of marriage with its attendant obligations. After the death of a spouse, one's conduct and feelings with respect to that relationship are no longer a matter of obligation but of personal emotion.  The halakha therefore requires a mourning period, but, as in the case of a child, makes it relatively short, leaving personal aspects of grieving to the bereaved (or not terribly bereaved) spouse.

If my theory is correct, the year-long mourning for a parent is meant to over-ride or compensate for situations where the child might not grieve sufficiently.

Kol tuv,
Simi Peters
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