Some Jewish rituals look… well, a little creepy at first.
Covered mirrors. Candlelit searches. Washing the dead.
If you only caught a glimpse of them out of context, you might think Judaism leans dark or even morbid—but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Each of these practices is a lesson in compassion, dignity, and love. They remind us that holiness doesn’t hide from the hard parts of life; it shows up because of them.
In this video, I’m unpacking the Jewish rituals that often make people raise an eyebrow—and revealing the tenderness, care, and deep spiritual meaning behind them. From tahara and shiva to swinging chickens around our heads, we’ll explore how Judaism transforms even life’s strangest moments into acts of grace.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
Let’s talk about Jewish rituals that seem creepy until you know what they mean.
Covered mirrors, candlelit searches, even washing the dead.
They can look strange from the outside.
But every one of them is really about love, dignity, and remembering that holiness shows up in weird places sometimes.
Because the truth of it is, Judaism doesn’t shy away from the hard realities of life and death.
It just teaches us how to hold them with care.
So let’s start with the dead bodies.
Hi, I’m Kochava. I’m a Jewish convert and I’ve been helping people convert to Judaism since 2010 through my blog, Building a Jewish Life.com.
So when someone Jewish dies, a group called the Chevra Kadisha steps in.
It literally means the “holy society.”
They do one of the most sacred jobs in Judaism: preparing a body for burial.
If you’ve never heard of it, it sounds well, a little unsettling. Isn’t this better left to the professionals?
Late night prep rooms. Silence. Shrouds.
Mumbled prayers.
It can sound like something out of a ghost story, but what actually happens is the opposite of scary. First, the body is washed gently by hand with prayers and care.
There’s no rushing, no fear.
Just members of the community quietly honoring a life that has ended.
The person is dressed in simple white garments, a shroud called Tachrichim. If you’re new here, welcome to my terrible Hebrew. The outfit is the same for everyone, whether they were a billionaire or barely scraping by.
No makeup, no fancy suit, no jewelry. Because in death we’re all equal.
And after the body is prepared, someone stays with them at all times.
It’s called Shemira, which means guarding.
A person sits nearby, usually reciting Tehillim, the Psalms.
Simply keeping company so that no one is left alone between one world and the next.
And that’s the heart of this ritual. It’s not creepy. It’s radical compassion.
It’s love expressed through presence and respect.
And it’s the quiet kind that asks for nothing in return.
Tahara, the washing, and Shemira, the guarding, are what’s called the final acts of Chesed Shel Emet. True loving-kindness, and it’s considered one of the most important Mitzvot because you can’t get anything in return for it. No one can ever pay you back. It is the sort of thing you only do out of the goodness of your heart because you care about people deeply.
The person you’re caring for can’t say thank you. They can’t promise to return the favor, and you do it anyway simply because every person deserves to be treated with dignity all the way to the end.
That is what Judaism calls holy.
Not the avoidance of death, but the gentleness with which we meet it.
Now after burial comes the Shiva. You’ve probably heard of Shiva on TV somewhere.
It’s a seven day mourning period that helps comfort the living while they learn to live with the absence of the people that they loved.
From the outside, though, it can look a little eerie and weird.
The mirrors are covered, clothes are torn. Candles burning low.
It’s the kind of scene a horror movie might borrow. But in Judaism, it’s not about fear, it’s about honesty.
Shiva is observed by the immediate mourners, the people closest to the dead parents, children, siblings, and spouses.
And friends and the community and other people who mourn this person come together to all support each other, and especially to take care of the people left behind who are the closest.
We tear our clothing, called Kriah, as a way of naming that we ourselves are torn already.
So that our hearts don’t have to pretend.
We cover the mirrors to shift our focus away from appearances.
Because grief isn’t something you have to clean up or hide. When you’re mourning, you look like you’re mourning, and we don’t want you to feel bad about that.
And we sit, literally sit low to the ground, surrounded by the community because mourning doesn’t have to be productive.
It just needs to be witnessed, and the community should hold you through that.
And I understand that is a little bit of the ideal world and not every mourner is given that kind of support. I was given very little of that support when my own mother died, but that is a story for another day.
The visitors come not to fix things, but to listen. And that is most of the job of Shiva. We sit around and we talk about the person who passed… or whatever the person who is mourning wants to talk about. We follow their lead. Again that is a deep sense of dignity and respect for the people who are hurting.
You don’t have to pretend.
Meals are brought, prayers are said.
And quite frankly, there’s a lot of awkward silences, but it’s a shared awkward silence.
The home itself becomes a sacred space, which arguably in Judaism in the home is always a sacred space, but this is a different type of sacred space.
A kind of temporary sanctuary . You might even have actual prayer services said within the home, allowing you to say the prayer for the dead, Kaddish, with the community.
From the outside, Shiva can sound strange. That’s why people love putting it on television shows.
But from within, it is one of the most profoundly human aspects of Judaism, in my opinion.
It gives us permission to fall apart, safely and in a supported way until you’re ready to stand again.
But it also provides a container that can help stop you from spiraling. Shiva lasts seven days.
And after that period, you know you have to move on and you’re given the support to help you move on.
And those practices support you by making your activities a little bigger and then a little bigger, and then a little bigger in the outside world over time.
It helped having a roadmap and no, the roadmap doesn’t work perfectly for everyone. But it works pretty good for most people we know that societies throughout time have had very structured death practices, and I think that’s something that growing up in a regular American society, there really wasn’t so much structure, and I found that when my mother died, I had basically no support from outside the Jewish community because there were no practices in place. People didn’t know what to do; they didn’t have a role. That is one of the things that is so hard when someone dies is we don’t know how to help, but the practices of Shiva give us jobs. Having been on all sides of this, I think that it’s a really useful practice.
But I probably think about death far more than the average person. It does not help that when I was a kid, my mother sold funeral plots for a while. So I have been steeped in the death industry in a lot of ways throughout my life and, you know, who didn’t love Six Feet Under when it was around?
So a fun fact about me is that seeing this more human focused approach to death was actually one of the earliest things that really sold me on Judaism.
So I’ll stop rambling at this point and move on because I can talk about this for a very long time.
Now, let’s move to the cemetery.
It’s a video about creepy stuff. It wasn’t going to be light.
So if you’ve ever seen Jews visiting cemeteries, usually before the High Holidays, it could look a little unsettling and a little unusual.
I mean, there’s the normal part, people walking quietly among the gravestones. You might see people’s mouths moving as they speak quietly to themselves.
But we also leave little stones on the tombstones, and you may hear louder prayers as groups of people pray together.
And I have heard the accusation that we are praying to the dead, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s a bit more mystical than I tend to personally go, but in a sense, we’re praying with the dead.
There is a prayer, El Malei Rachamim It’s the memorial prayer, and the name literally means “God full of compassion or mercy.”
It asks that Hashem grant rest to the souls who went before us.
Not because we need to feed them power or attention, but because we still feel connected to them.
When we visit a grave, we’re reminding ourselves that life continues in ripples, through values, stories, memories, and the way we carry their names forward.
So yeah, it can look a little eerie, a crowd of people at twilight murmuring among the tombstones.
But really it’s an act of loyalty and respect, showing up to say, “you are still part of us.”
We don’t pray to the dead.
But we do carry them with us: in memory, in prayer, in how we live.
We’re really praying to the G-d that connects us.
Now I want you to imagine a burial, but instead of a coffin, there’s a box of books.
Torn pages, faded ink.
Corners smudged from years of hands turning the pages.
That’s a Genizah.
It’s a resting place for words too sacred to just throw in the trash.
Pages with G-d’s name written on them. Torah study notes, Torah scrolls, and worn prayer books that have served their time.
When the storage is filled up, it’s buried, often in a Jewish cemetery and with the same respect and dignity we would give a person.
Not out of fear, but out of love and respect for holiness.
Because in Judaism, holiness isn’t disposable.
Words that carried holiness don’t just lose it when they wear out.
Now, this time I promise we’re moving away from the cemetery and the dead.
Of all Jewish rituals, few are as misunderstood as kapparot or kapparos, however you wanna pronounce it.
Inevitably before Yom Kippur, and inevitably in a lot of my comments sections, you will hear people whispering, ” wait, I heard Jews swing chickens around their heads.”
It sounds brutal.
And quite frankly, in some communities it was, and it can be. Come on, I’m a hippie dippy vegetarian. It’s not my favorite practice. But that is not what most Jews do today. And it was never the point of the ritual.
Kapparot means “atonements.”
It’s a symbolic moment to acknowledge the weight of our mistakes and release them before the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.
The original version used a chicken as a living metaphor: a life for a life, and afterwards it was donated as food to the poor.
But for generations now, the vast majority of Jews have replaced the chickens with money.
They circle coins or bills over their head while reciting a short prayer, and then they give the money to Tzedakah, which is usually translated as “charity,” but actually means like justice, which should tell you a little bit about how we feel about charity.
It’s not about transferring your guilt to an animal, though, of course we can talk about the scapegoat in the Bible.
But fundamentally it’s about turning our awareness of our harms into actions that help others.
The act says, “my harm ends here. Let it ripple outwards as help instead.”
It’s about mercy, humility, and change.
We don’t throw away our guilt. We repurpose it with compassion. And yes, I do personally believe that no one should do it with chickens anymore. That’s me. Unfortunately, no one has elected me Rabbi of the Jews yet. Yet. My day will come.
Now, if you’ve ever seen a Jewish family creeping around at night in the dark with a candle, a feather, and a spoon in their hands… don’t worry, they’re not casting a spell on you. It’s just Bedikat Chametz. The search for Chametz, leavened bread products.
It’s the traditional search for leftover bread before the holiday of Passover, called Pesach.
Because we don’t eat or own leavened bread during the holiday of Pesach.
The candlelight is intended to set the mood, not spooky, but intentional.
Every corner gets checked, every crumb swept away, so helpfully with that little feather into your spoon.
So that the home is ready for the clean slate of Pesach.
Honestly, I don’t know where the feather and the spoon came from. I really should have looked that up, but we’re here right now.
Hi, this is Kochava from the future with just that answer. The candle part is ancient, mainly because it’s practical. It’s right there in the Mishna, some of our oldest written sources.
You’re supposed to search for your chametz “by the light of a candle.” But the feather and spoon, those come later. That’s a medieval Ashkenazi custom from Europe. Kind of like ritual accessories.
The feather is used to sweep up the crumbs into the wooden spoon.
And in many homes, all three, the feather, the wooden spoon, and the crumbs are all burned together the next morning.
And then by the 1500s, the Kabbalists, the mystical thinkers, added a whole other layer.
The crumbs aren’t just food- they’re symbols of the ego, pride, and spiritual clutter that we’ve built up over the last year.
The candlelight becomes a way to search the dark corners of the self and clear them out before freedom begins. And now, you know.
It is admittedly a strange little ritual: part treasure hunt, part meditation, and quite frankly, it’s really fun for kids. Kids love it.
But beneath it is a deeper truth: that true freedom, which is the theme of Pesach, begins with noticing and searching ourselves.
You can’t rush into redemption without seeing what you’ve been living with.
The light isn’t just for finding crumbs, it’s about illuminating ourselves.
And it’s also a hands-on reminder that holy work can be physical.
Sometimes you find what needs clearing out underneath the couch cushions and sometimes inside yourself. But side note, you don’t actually have to look under your couch cushions with the candle and spoon and feather thing. You’ve already done a deep clean before the search has come.
It is a symbolic ending point of your preparations for Pesach.
In Judaism, we mark the anniversary of loved ones’ deaths .
We call this a Yartzeit.
I promise it’s not morbid. It’s more rhythmic.
So in my experience, most Americans tend to remember their dead on their birthdays, celebrating the life that began.
And very few of those people could actually tell you when that person died, unless there was some other thing to remind them of, or it was particularly traumatic.
But Jews remember people on the day that they left the world, not entered it.
And it’s not about tragedy, it’s about continuity, about saying you mattered and you still do.
It’s a really simple practice. Usually we light a 24 hour candle.
If it’s a close relative that you would’ve sat Shiva for, you would probably say the Kaddish prayer in a synagogue with the community.
Maybe you visit their grave.
Maybe just pausing to remember them. Tell stories to your children about them.
Connect with another person who loved them like you did.
It’s a moment to honor them and to let the grief breathe for a day.
Another way that I think Judaism approaches death in a very healthy way. We appreciate that grief never truly ends, but we get spaces where we can interact with it in a healthier way.
It’s a little like how some cultures observe holidays like Dia de Los Muertos: an annual moment to reconnect with your loved ones who’ve passed on.
But while those holidays tend to be communal and celebrated for all the dead at the same time, the Jewish one is quiet and personal. It’s individual to you and the people you loved.
Just a candle and a moment of remembering one specific person at a time.
Yartzeit literally means “year time,” a reminder that mourning doesn’t disappear, it just finds a rhythm.
Each year, the day returns, and so does the ache and the love and the memories.
Grief doesn’t vanish in Judaism, nor should it.
It just becomes part of our calendar, part of the ordinary process of living our lives because death is part of life.
So maybe some of Judaism’s so-called “creepy” rituals aren’t so creepy after all.
They’re generally tender, grounded, and profoundly human.
They remind us that Judaism doesn’t hide from the dark. It transforms it in a life affirming way.
Whether it’s washing a body or burying a book or lighting a candle for the dead, these moments all whisper the same theme: life, death, and everything in between are sacred.
So if you love exploring the meaning behind Jewish rituals, especially the weird or misunderstood ones, come join my mailing list at Building a Jewish Life.com.
You’ll get thoughtful resources and real life conversations that make Jewish life feel doable, even on the messy days because we’re all messy.
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