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Resource Category: Jewish Holidays

Don’t let your flame go out. Mourning and despair signify your care for something beyond yourself; maybe it is forever lost or temporarily unobtainable, but your yearning is the first step to rebuilding. If the fire remains burning, not all hope is extinguished. There is a nostalgia or vision for better times. The process and hard work come in chasing that renewal, and it all starts with a hope to drive us.
Have you ever considered taking some of the intentionality you use in planning your career or business and applying them to your relationship with your significant other? Try connecting with your partner with these carefully curated questions from business and personal couch, Darrah Brustein.
It can be hard to know the best thing to say to someone who is grieving. While there is no perfect response, it can help to be prepared with different questions and phrases to engage with people who are suffering in the most effective and sensitive way possible.
On Tisha B’av, every member of the community should recognize the challenges and experience the pain of someone living with depression on a daily basis. And just like on Tisha B’av — where we come together in community to show our support for one another — we should remember to be there for anyone living with depression all year round.
Shabbat, the most steadily recurring Jewish observance, acts as a buffer to the pressures of everyday life. It could be the stressors of one’s profession for some people; for others, it’s the constant pull toward technology. For many, disconnecting from everything can be a challenge and a stressor of its own, but the benefits of doing so offer the perfect remedy to the continual “grind” and need for constant production indicative of a larger, more extensive neglect of rest in the contemporary world.
By Rabbi Sandra Cohen: I still have no desire to resume sacrifices in a rebuilt third Temple. And yet, on Tisha B’Av and the minor fasts, I fast. I mourn. It was genius of the rabbis to create liturgical space in which to be sad. A time to pause and note that the world is imperfect, and I, as an individual, am also lacking. There is no one who does not have loss.