"It's harder now than it was before."
I wasn't expecting those words.
The woman sitting across from me was Revital Djaoui Ben Yaakov. On October 7, 2023, her husband, Master Sergeant Lior Ben Yaakov, left their home to defend their small moshav on Israel's Gaza border. He never came back.
Lior and his fellow soldiers were killed in the battle, but not before wounding several senior Hamas terrorists. The attackers retreated, abandoning their assault. The moshav survived because they did not.
Today, Revital still lives there with their three children. In the same home she and Lior had dreamed of building together. Among the same neighbors whose lives he helped save.
Nearly three years have passed.
Judaism asks us to sit shiva for seven days. Friends fill the house. Meals appear at the door. We are commanded not to grieve alone.
But no tradition tells us what happens after the thousandth day.
Perhaps that is because, after the seventh day, the obligation no longer belongs only to the mourner. It belongs to the rest of us.
Grief does not just end because 1,000 days have passed
Hagar Daniels Ozeri understands.
Her partner, Major Yaakov Ozeri, was killed in battle in Gaza while she was pregnant with their daughter, Ella. The last time they were together was the first and only moment he ever felt his daughter move. Hagar says he smiled and told her it was the happiest moment of his life.
When I called Hagar to ask whether Revital's words resonated with her, she didn't hesitate.
"People think the first or second year is the hardest," she told me. "They think you eventually get used to it. But the first year is about surviving. The second year is about rebuilding. The third year is when you realize that you are missing a part of yourself forever."
There is no finish line for grief.
There is only the quiet work of learning to live beside it.
Perhaps that is why the Torah returns to the widow and the orphan again and again. More than forty times throughout Tanach, and eleven times in the Book of Devarim alone, Moses reminds the Jewish people of this sacred obligation as they prepare to enter the Promised Land.
That repetition is no accident.
Jewish people are obligated to care for mourners
Before the Jewish people were given a land, they were reminded what kind of people they were meant to become.
Caring for widows and orphans is not an act of charity. It is a covenant. A promise that when the visitors stop coming, when the meals stop arriving, when the phone rings less often and the world moves on, the Jewish people will not.
I have the privilege of witnessing that covenant every day through the IDF Widows & Orphans Organization. It is a community where those who have endured unimaginable loss refuse to let others endure it alone. Widows who once needed someone to walk beside them become the ones extending a hand to newly bereaved families. Orphans grow into mentors. Pain is transformed into responsibility.
We rightly honor those who gave their lives defending Israel.
And we should.
But heroism did not end on the battlefield.
It rises every morning in homes where a mother gets her children ready for school alone. It lives in every child who learns to laugh again without forgetting. It endures in families who choose, day after day, to build a future they never imagined having to build.
Tisha B'Av teaches important lessons about mourning and tragedy
The Torah never asks us merely to admire widows and orphans or to pity them. It commands us to stand beside them.
As we observe Tisha B'Av this week, we remember the tragedies that shaped the Jewish people. We should also remember those for whom mourning is not history, but daily life.
Because grief does not end when shiva ends.
Or after the first year.
Or the second.
The Torah knew that thousands of years ago.
Revital and Hagar reminded me that it is still true today.