Yesterday I wrote about going to an Irish wake. Jack Ross offered his own experience:
"Four years ago when my grandmother died I had a friend visiting from San Francisco.
When I tried to explain shiva to him (notably without using the word)
he asked if we were having a wake. I took great umbrage to the
suggestion at first, but quickly realized that a wake is exactly
what shiva has become to the non-Orthodox.
"It's the damnedest thing – we've become more German than the Germans, if only the Brooklyn Jews of the middle of the last century who so detested the assimilationists in Manhattan could see what's become of their children and grandchildren in Park Slope. 62%? Intermarriage
was as frowned upon by Classical Reform in its heyday as anyone. And
don't even get started on lifestyles. My mother, whose family was
mostly Pittsburgh
assimilationist, tells the story of when her parents married, her
mother's father asked her father 'Now wouldn't you have more respect
for her if you had waited until you were married to kiss her?'"
Weiss: I'd add that in my experience, Jews reinterpret the laws of shiva to meet the necessities of modern life, just two days of shiva, say, instead of seven. Though I bet not in Israel.
