How to mourn in our polarized age

Charlie Kirk, 31, observed the Jewish Sabbath. It was a little detail buried near the bottom of one of the many profiles published since news broke that the conservative leader was killed on Wednesday. Every week from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, Kirk would turn off his phone, spend time with his wife and children, and rest.

I found this surprising — he was an outspoken evangelical Christian. I also found it unexpectedly moving. This famous Christian figure shared in the precious ritual that Jews like me all over the world have practiced for centuries. I found a video of him explaining why he was drawn to Sabbath; he was even writing a book, set to come out this December, on why he felt observing it was so transformative.

As we all refreshed and scrolled on our phones waiting impatiently for updates — as I write this, the shooter remains at large — I encountered a torrent of Kirk’s most inflammatory statements. I also saw stirring defenses of him from his political allies, friends, and followers.

But when I thought about his wife losing her husband, and his two children losing their father, those contradictions felt considerably less important. I just felt sad.

The Sabbath is not just time off. It’s a radical act of stepping outside the relentless pace of modern life, of prioritizing family and spiritual reflection over productivity and the public sphere. It’s a weekly reminder that there are things more important than the political battles that consume our daily attention. For 24 hours each week, Kirk chose to disconnect from the very platforms and conflicts that made him a star.

This practice of stepping away, of creating sacred time for reflection, reminded me of something else: the Jewish ritual of shiva. Shiva is the seven-day period of mourning that begins immediately after a Jewish person’s death. During this time, mourners sit in their homes while friends and community members visit to offer comfort, share memories, and provide practical support. Food is brought, prayers are said, and stories are told — not just about the deceased person’s accomplishments, but about their full humanity. It provides a warm yet firm structure to people during some of their hardest and most disorienting moments, and it is one of the aspects of Judaism I have always been most grateful for.

Shiva creates space for the complexity of grief. It acknowledges that mourning isn’t simple, that even people we disagreed with or who disappointed us leave genuine holes in the world when they’re gone. It provides structure for processing loss without requiring us to sanitize or simplify the person who died.

Right now, I find myself thinking about what shiva might offer us in the wake of Kirk’s death. Not because I’ve resolved my feelings about his politics — I haven’t. Even when it comes to Judaism, he said some blatantly antisemitic things. But he also pushed back in other instances against young conservatives embracing online conspiracies about Jews and Israel.

Shiva creates a ritual space for sitting with all that, and not demanding we resolve everything first to do so.

There’s a lot we don’t yet know about the shooter. But we do know that they chose to resolve some sort of grievance with a bullet rather than argument, debate, or democratic participation. That choice should terrify anyone who believes in the possibility of peaceful coexistence in a diverse society. It terrifies me.

The Sabbath practice that Kirk observed offers one model for stepping back from the intensity of political combat. The ritual of shiva offers another — a way to hold complexity, to mourn genuinely while maintaining our principles, to find our humanity even in the face of profound disagreement.

On the seventh and final day of shiva, mourners take a symbolic walk, often around the block, marking their transition back into daily life. In Jewish law, the formal obligations of mourning are tied to specific family relationships, regardless of their quality. A child is required to mourn a parent even if their relationship was strained or abusive. A sibling is mourned regardless of personal feelings or profound past conflicts. The underlying idea is that mourning serves not only the individual relationship, but also the broader obligation to honor family ties and acknowledge loss to the community.

Even when rabbis acknowledge that a relationship was difficult or damaging, the focus remains on what mourning is for: honoring the dead while caring for the living. It creates space for working through mixed feelings, provides community support during trauma, and gives structure for moving forward. The obligation encompasses both — honoring someone who died and helping those who remain.

This framework can extend beyond family. Kirk might not be part of my or your political tribe, but we can understand mourning his killing as an obligation to our broader community — in this case, our country. Someone walked up to a person giving a speech and shot them. That should disturb anyone, and makes us all less safe.

I keep thinking about Kirk’s two young children, who will now grow up with only stories of their father. They’ll inherit not just his absence, but the strange burden of his public legacy.

Maybe that’s where the practice of shiva becomes most relevant — not as a neat metaphor for political healing, but as acknowledgment that grief is always messier than we want it to be. The ritual doesn’t ask mourners to resolve their complicated feelings about the deceased. It simply creates space to sit with them. It says that you can even hate what someone stood for and still be shaken by the fact that they’re gone. You can oppose their ideas and still feel the wrongness of their violent end.

Sabbath and shiva both remind us that life is more than politics, and death is always more than an argument ended.