There are books that explain the halachot of mourning. There are books that explain the psychology of grief. Until now, these have been two separate shelves.
Dr. Batya Ludman and Gina Junger noticed that gap years ago and set out to bridge it. Their new book, The Jewish Journey Through Loss, published by Maggid Books under Koren Publishers Jerusalem, brings together what has too long been kept apart: the wisdom of Torah and the insights of psychology, working side by side to help mourners heal.
Ludman is a clinical psychologist who has practiced in Israel for decades. She grew up watching her parents serve on the chevra kadisha, and later joined it herself. Junger is a Jewish educator whose students, young and old, continue to shape her teaching. The two became chavrutot on the subject of death and grief, and their husbands marveled at how they could talk about it for hours. “With my psychological background and her perfect blend of Jewish understanding,” Ludman writes in the acknowledgments, “we seemed to complete each other’s ideas as well as sentences and make the sum of one and one so much greater than two.”
That partnership shows on every page. The book walks through the stages of mourning from illness through death, shiva, shloshim, the first year, and beyond. But it does not read like a Halacha guide or a psychology textbook. It reads like a long conversation between two people who have thought deeply about loss and want to share what they have learned.
Judaism's therapeutic approach to mourning
The central insight of the book is that the structure of Jewish mourning is itself therapeutic. “One of the most beautiful aspects of Judaism’s approach to death is its focus on ritual,” the authors write. “This prescribed structure, filled with incredible wisdom, lovingly embraces the mourner, moving you forward, step by step, through your pain.” Shiva keeps the mourner home and surrounded by community during the first shock of loss. Shloshim begins to ease them back into the world. The year of aveilus allows grief to settle gradually. This is not news to anyone who has sat shiva, but the authors make the connection explicit: The Halacha moves at the pace a person can absorb. It is not arbitrary. It is wise.
What sets this book apart is its attention to what mourners actually feel. The authors describe the guilt that surfaces unexpectedly, the exhaustion of telling the same story to every visitor, the moment months later when a smell or a song brings grief rushing back. They write about the disorientation of the first days, when everything you know has been turned upside down, and the Halacha gives you something to hold onto. They write about the strange relief some mourners feel, and the guilt that follows the relief. They write about anger at Hashem, and about the silence that sometimes says more than words.
The book is filled with vignettes drawn from the authors’ own lives and from the families they have worked with. A teenager who walks out of the room rather than hear the news about his mother. A young woman who never knows how to answer when someone asks how many siblings she has, because she lost a brother. A mourner who describes grief as a closet you learn to open and close, and over time, it becomes a little easier. These are not case studies. They are moments of recognition. Reading them, you think: ”Yes, that is what it is like.”
There are chapters on different kinds of loss. Losing a parent. Losing a spouse. Losing a child. Losing a sibling. Each one carries its own weight. The authors quote a teaching that with the death of a spouse, you lose your present; with the death of a parent; you lose your past; and with the death of a child, you lose your future. They do not rush past these distinctions. They sit with them.
There are also chapters on harder topics. Suicide. What to tell children. The isolation of mourning during COVID, when shiva happened on Zoom and the community could not walk through the door. And there is a chapter on grief after terrorism, written before Oct. 7 and then revised after the war began. One of the dedication pages memorializes David Schwartz, killed in battle on 27 Tevet 5784 defending Am Yisrael. The authors live in Israel and have watched their community absorb loss after loss. “Then along came COVID-19,” Ludman writes, “followed by the multiple losses experienced during and after a horrific war, and we suddenly had infinitely more we needed to say.”
That sentence captures something important about the book. It was not written from a distance. It was written from inside the experience, by two women who have accompanied mourners through the hardest days of their lives and who have faced loss themselves. Ludman thanks her patients “who allowed me to accompany them on their journey in both life and death, through loss and through healing.” Junger prays that the book will be “a tool for people to find comfort in their grief.” You can feel that intention throughout.
The tone of the book is warm and honest. The authors do not pretend to have all the answers. “We ask for your forgiveness,” they write, “if we don’t always anticipate correctly just how you may be feeling.” They know that grief is not predictable, that what helps one person may not help another, that feelings change quickly and without warning. They are not trying to fix anyone. They are trying to walk alongside.
For those who make shiva calls, the book offers practical wisdom. It explains why the Halacha tells us to wait for the mourner to speak first, and why presence often matters more than words. It describes what mourners wish visitors understood, and what well-meaning people sometimes get wrong. Reading those sections, I thought of visits I have made and wondered if I had helped or just added to the exhaustion.
For those who are grieving, the book offers something harder to name. Companionship, maybe. The sense that someone understands what you are going through, even the parts you have not said out loud. “While we are unable to take away your pain,” the authors write, “we sincerely hope that through this book we will ‘walk’ alongside you as you take your journey forward into the land of healing.”
The book also speaks to those who have not yet experienced major loss but want to be prepared. Ludman and Junger compare it to expecting a baby. You read books, you talk to friends, you think you know what to expect, but when it happens you discover how much you did not anticipate. Grief is similar. No one is fully ready. But some preparation helps.
One line near the end of the book stayed with me. “We don’t have a choice over the package that we each are given in life,” the authors write, “but we do have a choice as to what we do with that package.” That is the question the book keeps circling back to. Loss is not optional. But how we carry it, how we make meaning from it, how we let it shape us or not, those are choices. The Halacha provides a framework. The rest is up to us.
I finished the book thinking about the two women who wrote it. A psychologist and an educator. A chavruta that became a partnership. Two voices woven together so closely that you cannot always tell where one ends and the other begins. They set out to bridge the gap between the psychological and the halachic, and they succeeded. The result is a book that feels both deeply Jewish and deeply human.
It is not a book you want to need. But when you need it, you will be grateful it exists.