When I added that Judaism specializes in the division of time, in setting times, in sanctifying time, I was only saying something everybody already knows. But I wanted to emphasize the arbitrary aspect of it all, the fact that people are the ones who counted days and gave significance to the passage of time. The meaning comes from us. We projected it on the natural order.
People once believed there was some compelling reality in the division of time into hours, days, weeks, seasons, and years – that God set the whole thing up – but now we know that, if anything, the process went the other way. The laws of astrophysics determine the way the earth spins and circles the sun, and the way the moon circles the earth, and the laws of evolution set biological and physiological clocks in the world in response to those arbitrary motions. If God set it up, why didn't He do it more neatly, so that the lunar months fit perfectly into the solar year, which would be neatly divided by solar days?
Judaism decided that the period of thirty days after a funeral is a particularly intense time of mourning, setting an arbitrary number to a psychological process that must be gradual. Maybe for some people the intense period is two months, or two years, and maybe for others it's only three weeks. But this isn't the kind of thing that should be left to individual choice, because we need guidelines when we're in the uncharted territory of grief.
Nobody's death follows a neat pattern. Some people die suddenly in an accident or of a heart attack, others take years and years to die of lingering illness, and every instance of death poses a terrible challenge to the bereaved. If a person dies suddenly and unexpectedly, you feel cheated of the chance to part with them. If a person dies a long and painful death, you feel your helplessness, the limits of the comfort you could offer.
Asher's death was sudden, but we didn't know about it for nearly two months, two months that aren't defined in the normal rules that Judaism lays down for mourning. We went through a series of periods between mid-October, when he left New York for Peru, and early January, when we buried him. For nearly three weeks we got regular emails from him, excited reports about what he was doing, seeing, and eating. Then he went hiking in the Colca Canyon, and we knew that we couldn't expect to hear from him for a week or more. Two weeks went by, and his mother became actively worried – two weeks when he was already dead, and no one knew it.
Soon we were all worried.
The following six weeks, until a villager happened to discover his body, were weeks of fear, tension, hope, and despair, weeks of intense activity in the effort to find Asher, weeks when those of us who were here in Israel, not looking for him in Peru, also tried to continue doing the things we always did, to fulfill our obligations, to function as if he would somehow be found alive and well. Perhaps there was an element of superstition in our behavior, the belief that if we gave up hope and acknowledged that he was probably dead, we would be depriving him of the chance to be alive.
Nearly another week passed between the discovery of his body and its burial, another week of activity: our son and son-in-law returned to Peru to arrange to have the body recovered and shipped to Israel, to give a reward to the man who discovered the body, to thank the High Mountain Rescue Unit, and we had to arrange the funeral here, to deal with the Burial Society. That was a week of numbness and tension, of urgent and expensive travel arrangements, of getting used to a new and tragic certainty: there was no more hope.
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