Parashat Shmini פָּרָשַׁת שְּׁמִינִי

The profession of psychiatry is a very powerful profession.  They label what’s normal and what’s not normal. They can offer comfort to clients who seek out their help and support.  

They also have their own Torah - it’s called the DSM:  the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  

That "Manual" is now in its fifth edition, and each addition typically makes really significant changes in what counts as a “mental disorder.”  In some cases, an assignment of a mental disorder is dropped.

In 1973, the DSM-3, after much contentious debate, dropped ‘homosexuality’ as a mental disorder.  More recently, the DSM-5 has added a mental disorder.  This decision was also very controversial, with some hailing it as an important step in recognizing a genuine human condition, while others have argued that the addition will now make something normal into something pathological.

I hope that, by now, I have your interest. What is this new mental disorder added to the DSM?  

It's called PGD:  Prolonged Grief Disorder.  

In the case of prolonged grief disorder, a person is unable psychologically to move beyond the death of a loved one - this is typically a spouse or, even more often, a child.  Dr. Kenneth Kendler has called this decision “the bar mitzvah of diagnosis,” meaning that the diagnosis now officially blesses this disorder, a kind of welcoming into the tribe.  Apparently, about 10% of people dealing with grief suffer from the inability to get past it.

You might be asking “at what point in time does grief become prolonged?”   The answer, according to the DSM, is one year.  

Maybe you agree, or perhaps you think it’s not enough time to grieve. Or you may think that it’s situational - that it depends on your closeness to the person, the age at which they died, and perhaps even how they died. I read one story about a woman whose five-year-old daughter died from strep, and this mother couldn’t even enter her child’s bedroom until a year after she died.  After three years, she was able not only to enter the room but also to go through her daughter’s toys and clothing and sort them in order to give them away.  That mother would qualify as having prolonged grief disorder.

A line from our Lecha Dodi, Friday night’s consummate prayer, reads, “Too long have you dwelled in the valley of tears.”

You might also be asking “why does it matter?”  OR: “who cares whether what’s wrong with me is listed in some psychiatric bible?”  Well, the answer is that, if the DSM lists your disorder - if it makes it ‘official’ - then medical insurance will pay for your treatment. So, there could potentially be a lot at stake.

Unfortunately, almost all of us have had reason to grieve in our lives. How long did you grieve? How long did it take you to ‘move on’? I won’t say ‘get over it,’ because that’s insulting. And I’m not sure anyone truly gets over a deep loss.  Perhaps you had friends and other family members who urged you to move on with your life, and perhaps you found that advice helpful, perhaps you resented it as lacking in compassion and understanding.  But, when I heard about this new diagnosis, I couldn’t help but think about this week’s parsha, Parshat Shemini.  And I couldn’t help but wonder whether there’s such a thing as an “inadequate grief response.”  

Is it possible for someone to mourn too little? Of course, I’m thinking here about Aaron and the deaths of his two sons. There are all sorts of interpretations and suggestions as to the reason of their of their fatal punishment from God. Aaron is silent in the face of what must have been a catastrophic loss. Those issues are not what I want to focus on here.  Instead, I want to ask the question whether expressing grief is a sign of mental health, and whether the DSM should add yet another mental condition, maybe something called failure to grieve.

Maybe Aaron’s problem is gender-related. I know that, for many men, expressing grief might look like a sign of weakness. Or men like Aaron might believe that they have to carry on so as to be a role model to others.  Failure to grieve might also be connected to deep trauma - perhaps the experience has been so devastating that we shut down, afraid that if we let in the sadness, we will never be able to recover from it.  

There’s also the possibility that grief gets masked as anger; how could God have done this to me? How could God have let this happen?

Rabbi Yissocher Frand tells the story of a Rabbi Hollander, who spoke with hundreds of Jews after they had survived the Holocaust.  These survivors felt there was no reason to go on. They felt there was no point in living any longer and there was certainly no point to being a Jew.  They had lost any sense of purpose, any reason to live. Rabbi Hollander uses this week’s parsha, Shemini, to give them hope. He quotes the words of Moshe: “This is what God spoke when saying ‘through those who are near to Me I will be sanctified’ (B’Krovai E’Kadesh).”  Moshe is urging Aaron to recognize that, no matter what one is facing or has faced, being near to God can always give on meaning.  Even in the midst of grief, we can be - we need to be - close to God.

We have seen that grief can also occur as the result of other kinds of losses - we might grieve, for example, the loss of a job.  Or we might grieve a divorce, or a life-changing mistake we’ve made.  There is no one who has not experienced tragedy in their lives. There is no one who is exempt from grief.  Judaism teaches us that it is kiddush hashem to continue to worship God, even in the face of losses that we have experienced. Or, perhaps, especially in the face of losses that we have experienced.  

Judaism also teaches us that balance is so vital to a life well lived. Too much grief holds us back, and keeps us from God; too little grief stunts us and denies us the ability to grow from our experiences.  I could never tell you what that balance is - it’s not anything we can know in advance, and it probably varies from person to person.  But I do know that we can find it, with God’s help. I pray that we do.