“I can”t live without him.”

That”s what some people think after the death of a loved one. They force themselves to carry on, but a number of them regard their lives as diminished from that point forward. “Something in me died the day that he died,” they say.

The feeling is understandable, of course. But it”s also wrong, according to Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch. Indeed, the prohibition against cutting oneself following the death of a loved one is designed to teach us that it”s wrong.

“However dear and valuable, however important the existence of somebody else may be to us, our own importance and our own worth may never end with the end of his existence, may never be allowed to lessen,” he writes.

The Torah declares, “You shall not make a cut in your flesh for the dead” (Leviticus 19:28). It isn”t the act of cutting so much that”s forbidden, writes Rav Hirsch. It”s placing this symbolic sign – this “seret lanefesh” – on our bodies. Such a sign “would express the thought that with the death of a relation, our own bodily self has suffered a breach – and that is not to be.”

If we”re alive, it means G-d wants us to be alive, and we must “serve Him with all our might and may not diminish our strength of our own free will” following a loved one”s death. Indeed, we must do the very opposite: expend “double energy to try to fill out the gap in the service of G-d”s work on earth that the death has caused.”

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) – head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.

Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch”s commentary on Chumash.