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To Comfort the Bereaved: A Guide for Mourners and Those Who Visit Them

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This book contains the traditions, customs, and prayers pertaining to nichum aveilim, comforting mourners. It demonstrates how Jewish customs address themselves to the various stages of the mourning process. This highly practical guide covers all aspects of appropriate behavior by a visitor to the house of mourning. It explains what should or shouldn't be said to mourners, and records experiences of mourners to visitors, to offer suggestions on what one can say or write at such a time. Rabbi Levine has distilled a wealth of stories, parables, and experiences of great sages, garnered from the wisdom of the Talmud, Midrash, and other Jewish literature. Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski has written about this book: "How do we deal with troubled people or broken hearts? Either by delegating the job to an understaffed and underfunded agency, or by prescribing a pill to make one oblivious to one's emotional pain. Rabbi Levine gives us the Torah approach. Not an agency person, not a pill. You can assuage another person's pain by giving of yourself. But you may ask, 'How can I, a person without special psychological skills, possibly help another person?' This is why you should read _To Comfort the Bereaved_."