Being Jewish with Jonah Platt

God, Grief & Google_ Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on the Beauty of the Jewish Mourning Process
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Jonah Platt: [00:00:00] 2015, you write a second book, Option B, After Your Husband's Tragic Death, you use your grief journey as a teachable moment for, for the rest of us, which is pretty exceptional. In the book, you talk a lot about the Jewish grief process that you went through, which another thing, weekly shout out to Courtney.

She and I talk a lot about how Judaism has like totally nailed. How to support people in, in grief. Were you already familiar with that process? Did you have to be guided through it? How, how did that unfold for you?

Sheryl Sandberg: I think there were two inflection points in my life on religion. And one was October 7th, but before that was the loss of my husband.

If you'd asked me if I believed in God before I lost Dave, I would have said, I don't know. Now I would say, yes. I'm not exactly sure what God is. If he's got a gender, I think he's a woman. He's certainly not sitting on a cloud with a big, a big gray beard or she.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: As I [00:01:00] should say, but like a lot of people when I went through something truly hard, I learned a lot.

I had never known what Shel Oshim was. I had, I had not experienced grief, but the way our religion has people coming together, our process of sitting Shiva, I think is great. Quite powerful and quite beautiful. I also learned a lot about supporting people. I did write a book, you mentioned, Option B, about this process of losing my husband.

And what Adam Grant, my brilliant co author,

Jonah Platt: who's a great friend to this podcast, by the way, so shout out to Adam.

Sheryl Sandberg: He said is that there's so many self help books out there, but he wanted our book to be on the not help yourself, but help others section. And there's no help others section. Of a bookstore and there should be, but what we tried to explore coming from religion, but also coming from research and then coming from some of the experiences I had and he had is what are those moments and how do we show up for other people?

And I do think Judaism has a pretty unique approach to that [00:02:00] through the grief process.

Jonah Platt: I want to go back to what you said about God. How did you discover God in this, in this crisis time?

Sheryl Sandberg: I've never told this story. When we went to the grave, my children, who were very young, they were 7 and 10, kind of fell down crying, and uh, this is hard to talk about, sorry, and uh, I started singing, I'm not, I'm not you, I'm not a particularly good singer, but I'm a, I can carry a tiny little tune.

I started singing Oseh Shalom. That was just what came out of my mouth. I don't think I'd ever sang that song before on my own. And then I realized, like, later, that those are lines from the Kaddish, which is the Jewish prayer for mourning. And I don't think I knew that. I don't think I ever knew that. And I felt like that moment, that was God.

That had to have been a higher deity connecting me to something that could lift up my kids.

Jonah Platt: Some spark of the divine.

Sheryl Sandberg: It had to be. Because I didn't know that.

Jonah Platt: Thank you for sharing that.

Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah. [00:03:00]

Jonah Platt: Have you ever gotten feedback from non Jewish readers of the book about the Jewish grief process and how it affected them?

Sheryl Sandberg: I've gotten a lot of feedback from anyone who's shown up for shiva, right? Such an unusual process of seven days of, you know, day after day after day of people showing up to have a moment in prayer together, eating. Um, being there, marking the end of shallow shame with family and friends, which is the end of that 30 day, first, first month of, of grief, which is actually the end of grieving, of grieving for a spouse.

It's very, very interesting. Isn't that interesting? Something I learned. Wait,

Jonah Platt: you don't continue like for a year to say Kaddish or anything?

Sheryl Sandberg: I'm not an expert. I'm sure you've had. Neither am I. Rabbis and people who have more Jewish understanding than I am on this podcast, but I believe that in our religion.

Mourning for a spouse is 30 days. Mourning for a parent, sibling, or child is a year. Interesting. I didn't know

Jonah Platt: that. And that, but that also speaks to like a beautiful value of [00:04:00] Judaism because it probably, they want you to continue on.

Sheryl Sandberg: They want you to continue on. The rabbis want you to remarry and date and have more babies.

Jonah Platt: I love that. A lot of Jewish wisdom. A

Sheryl Sandberg: lot of Jewish wisdom. And permission. One of the things that's hardest when you lose a spouse is is permission to date. I've had this conversation over and over again with people who've lost spouses. I will often be the first person to say early, not, not day one, but soon, you should find love again.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: And they're like, my kids will be upset. I'll be upset. I don't want to not honor my, my husband or wife's memory. And, you know, our religion encourages people to move on and find joy and find love. And I know for me, you know, it's almost 10 years since I lost Dave. I've been married. For two and a half years now.

I feel so lucky I found love again. I think that is part of our religion.

Jonah Platt: Yeah.

Sheryl Sandberg: And I think we do need to encourage people to do that. No judgments. [00:05:00]

Jonah Platt: Right. It's

Sheryl Sandberg: hard enough to lose a spouse.

Jonah Platt: Can you articulate what it is in you that goes, I need to make a book about this terribly difficult personal process to help other people?

I

Sheryl Sandberg: wrote a Facebook post. At the end of Shallow Shame, the end of 30 Days, that went, I didn't even mean it to go viral, I just posted publicly because I was trying to, I was trying to speak to the people who weren't speaking to me. I mean, before Dave died, I could walk in and drop our kids off at school and everyone would say hello.

After Dave died, no one spoke to me. They didn't mean to.

Jonah Platt: They just, they didn't know what to say, they didn't want to say the wrong thing. Yeah,

Sheryl Sandberg: didn't know what to say, didn't want to say the wrong thing, they would freeze. I said to Mark Zuckerberg at Ben Facebook, now Meta, I can silence any room by just walking

Jonah Platt: in.

Sheryl Sandberg: People don't know what to say to me. He said, they just don't want to say the wrong thing. And so, I wrote publicly and that went, that went very viral. And I think when you face tragedy, you try to find meaning. And so, I started reading a lot of the books on grief and they were terrible. I had friends who lost spouses who had said, you'll never feel okay again.

And I, Adam really [00:06:00] helped me, Adam Grant, say, That no, you're going to recover and you're going to find joy and you're going to find love. And I think in order to honor Dave's death and find some good from it, I wanted to help other people move on.

Jonah Platt: And I'm sure you've helped many, many people. So 2022, we're going, you know, year at a time here.

Big year for you. You marry your current husband. Tom, which I heard was a beautiful wedding. Blackberry Farms want to go there one day. How Jew y did we go at the wedding?

Sheryl Sandberg: I mean, we had a traditional ceremony. We broke glass. We said the blessings. Um, we were married by a rabbi. That was really important to me.

As well as Kind of co married by a rabbi, but also co officiated by my brother in law, Dave's late, Dave, my late husband, Dave's brother.

Jonah Platt: That's special.

Sheryl Sandberg: Rob. Yeah, he had fixed us up. So having him be part of blessing us under the chuppah was very, very meaningful for us.

Jonah Platt: I love that. How important was it to you to marry Jewish?

Was that a [00:07:00] consideration? And what role did Judaism play in your married life?

Sheryl Sandberg: I wanted Jewish children. I wanted boys. To have breasts, I wanted girls and boys to have bar and bat mitzvahs. I fell in love with Dave and I feel lucky my, my current husband is also Jewish. So I think that is obviously by revealed preference as economists would say.

But I think what really mattered to me was having Jewish, Jewish children and passing on, passing on my faith. In our religion, as you know, as a mother, my children would be Jewish.

Jonah Platt: Right.

Sheryl Sandberg: No matter what. But I think having a partner who shared my values was very, very important to me.

Jonah Platt: Would you attribute that more to the idea of continuing the Jewish story?

Or, as you say, like having someone with common values? Or is it both?

Sheryl Sandberg: I think both. I mean, the famous story is of my grandmother. My grandmother saying to my father that if he didn't marry, someone Jewish, she would put her head in the oven. She was very clear that there was no other [00:08:00] path forward. But I was raised with the fact, we're not a proselytizing religion, and we're a small group and we're not getting.

And so I was definitely raised with one of the responsibilities I have as a Jew is to continue our faith. And one of the ways to do that is to have children who are being raised in that faith. And that's important to me. I have five children. I want them. They're very young. They range from age. Uh, 12 to, you know, age 20.

So, no one's, no one's getting married. Well, no one's getting married right about, right about now. Certainly not our 12 year old, even though we are preparing for his, his bar mitzvah. Oh, that's exciting. I want them to marry for love. I do hope they raise their children in our, in our religion, in our faith.

Jonah Platt: That's a tough, you know, thing to, as a parent, to navigate, because you want them to marry who they love and makes them happy. And you also want them to care about what you care about and to continue that line. How do you, how do you balance that? I mean, like you said, you're not, it's not knocking on the door yet, but is that something you think about?

Sheryl Sandberg: I mean, we certainly joke about [00:09:00] it in the family. I think they know how important religion is. And I actually think it's interesting because I think it's changed a lot since October 7th.

Jonah Platt: What has?

Sheryl Sandberg: Even my children's affiliation with their religion. And I think it's gone many different ways for many different I have friends whose kids were kind of marching and what they would consider, you know, against the interests of Israel.

And I think that's been one form of a challenge. In my family, our family, it's been pretty beautiful. My eldest daughter for her, I asked her what she wanted for her birthday a year ago, and she said she wanted a Jewish star, but she had never worn before. And I got her one. And then I got the other two daughters, three daughters, one, and then a matching one for myself.

And all four of us were matching Jewish stars. Every day. It's amazing. Something we hadn't before. My two sons are wearing Jewish stars.

Jonah Platt: I wasn't wearing one before October 7th.

Sheryl Sandberg: And they are wearing them, and they weren't wearing them. One was, one wasn't. It's become [00:10:00] more a part of our family. My kids have definitely swung more towards affiliation, pride, helping people understand what they think is really going on, and, you know, I put this on every morning.

I'm not someone who sleeps in jewelry, so I take it off, I put it back on. And it's a moment of connecting to, uh, who I am and who I want to be every single day.

Jonah Platt: It's awesome. Which I

Sheryl Sandberg: think is a pretty beautiful thing. And I think my daughters and my sons are doing it, doing that as well.