Shalom Brothers: Dancing Through the Darkness (Acharei-Mot/Kedoshim)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed — Executive Director, FJMC International

Grief is one of the places where masculinity most often betrays men.

Not because men do not feel deeply. They do. But many men are trained to metabolize loss through motion rather than mourning. Keep working. Keep producing. Keep carrying. Keep the face composed and the calendar full. Do not linger. Do not unravel. Do not make everyone else uncomfortable with the size of your sorrow. A great many men are not taught how to grieve; they are taught how to outpace grief. And then they wonder why it keeps finding them anyway.

The first great loss I was old enough to feel in full was the death of my friend Joel Shickman to cancer. I was twenty-eight—old enough to know death was real, but not yet seasoned enough to understand what grief actually asks of a person. I did not know what to do with the anger, confusion, and sadness that rose up in me. So for a long time, I did the only honest thing I knew how to do: I wept. Sometimes in public; and many times in private.

That is what makes Acharei Mot so piercing. The parsha opens, “after the death of the two sons of Aaron,” and the text moves with startling speed toward procedure. Aaron’s loss is the backdrop; instruction quickly takes center stage. Back in Leviticus 10, when Aaron first learns of his sons’ deaths, “Aaron was silent.” That silence has often been read as noble restraint. Perhaps it is. But it can also feel like shock, like the stunned quiet of a father whose pain is too large for language. Many men know that silence. They know what it is to be surrounded by expectation when what they really need is accompaniment.

Psalm 23 offers a wiser model than masculine stoicism: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.” The line does not deny the valley. It does not ask us to sprint through it or pretend it is not dark. It insists on something harder and holier: grief is a place we walk through, and the promise is not that sorrow vanishes, but that we do not have to walk it alone. That is a desperately important correction for men, who are so often tempted to confuse solitude with strength.

The problem is that many men mistake composure for health. They imagine that because they are still answering emails, making jokes, driving carpool, going to work, and paying bills, they must be doing fine. But grief does not disappear just because it has been organized. The American Psychological Association notes that grief can affect body and mind alike, bringing emotional distress while also disrupting sleep, appetite, concentration, and a person’s ability to function. In other words, grief is not a private sadness tucked neatly into the soul. It gets into the nervous system. It gets into the marriage. It gets into fathering. It gets into the tone of a man’s ordinary days.

That is why rushing past pain is not maturity. It is often just avoidance with better branding. Men are particularly prone to turning grief into productivity, theology, sarcasm, anger, or silence. We would rather interpret loss than inhabit it. But the work of grief is not to solve pain. It is to accompany it honestly enough that it does not harden into something else. Or, as Dr. Jack Abbott says in The Pitt, sometimes you need somebody to “help you dance through the darkness.” It is a surprisingly profound line. The goal is not domination over sorrow. The goal is learning how to move with it, accompanied, without letting it swallow you whole.

That is also why the APA’s guidance is so wise precisely because it is not dramatic. Lean on social support. Keep healthy habits. Sleep. Exercise. Eat decently. Take care of yourself and your family. And if grief is making daily life too hard to manage, talk with a psychologist or another licensed mental health professional. None of that sounds cinematic. But grief rarely yields to grand gestures. It is more often carried, little by little, by rhythm, companionship, honesty, and care. As Mental Health Awareness Month approaches, men need permission to hear that seeking support is not a failure of toughness. It is part of how human beings survive loss.

A wiser masculinity would stop treating grief as something to conquer and start treating it as something to walk through. It would make room for ritual, therapy, prayer, friendship, tears, memory, and time. It would stop praising men for being untouched by loss and start honoring them for telling the truth about what loss has touched. Aaron’s silence may remain in the Torah, but it does not have to be the final word for us. The task is not to prove how little your grief has changed you. The task is to keep walking through the valley, and to find someone who can help you dance through the darkness.