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Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, executive vice president at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for Jewish learning and community building based in New York City. You can check us out and learn more at hadar.org.
The question that we are going to look at today is about a ritual, a Jewish ritual, it's a particular subset of sitting shiva. And I would guess in my completely non-sociological study, but just my guessing from my head, that this is maybe a Jewish practice that more people know about and are perhaps familiar with, and I think for many Jews, the practices that we have around mourning can sometimes be people's maybe not their favorite part of Judaism, but it's one of the places where people feel that it's the most obvious that they are really getting something from their Judaism and getting something that they wouldn't have otherwise. The questioner writes: I know we are supposed to cover mirrors during shiva so as not to care about our personal appearance. And here's the modern part: if one has a Zoom shiva call, which many people nowadays do, is keeping yourself on camera where you can see yourself considered using a mirror? Should you block the camera? Should you just ignore your own face if possible? So we have sort of two parts here. The first part is the person is saying you're supposed to cover the mirrors during shiva.
I would love to hear a little bit about what that practice is. The questioner is giving us one explanation: so that you don't care about your personal appearance. I'm curious what the reason is. And then we have this secondary modern part of the question, which is: what do we do about Zoom shiva calls?

Rav Eitan: Well, let's start where you pointed us, which is what is going on with this practice of covering mirrors?

Rav Avi: And maybe even just start with telling us what the practice is.

Rav Eitan: The practice is generally, at least as understood today, as practiced today, pretty much you go around the house and you cover up all the mirrors with a sheet or sometimes if that's not feasible, taping something over it, but essentially to block the surface of the mirror that you would otherwise look in and see your reflection or the reflection of other people. This, I agree with you, is very widely known. It's one of the things often people who may not otherwise know all the details of traditional shiva observance, there's some sense of: I gotta light a candle and I gotta block up all those mirrors. And so it's actually surprising that if you search for the origins of this practice, you will not find it before the eighteenth century.

Now I know, you know, to most people it's like, oh, eighteenth century, that's very old.

Rav Avi: It's downright modern times!

Rav Eitan: We're old hands on this show of knowing that's like yesterday. The first time we ever hear of it is Rav Yehuda Ayash, who's a rabbi in Algiers, talks about a version of this practice. Interesting, it's a little different. He says the practice was when the male head of household had died, then the mirrors would be covered throughout shiva, but for instance, if it was the matriarch or it was a child or someone else who wasn't the head of the household, they didn't follow this at all. So he knows of the practice, but it's much more specific than we know about today.

Rav Avi: That's really interesting because that means that the practice has to do not with the mourner, but with the dead.

Rav Eitan: The deceased. Correct, correct.

So already you see from that description, well, that's not being explained by not caring about your personal appearance, because as you point out, it depends who died.

Rav Avi: Well, or or if that distinction is maybe that it's more devastating, like if it's a truly devastating loss perhaps you would cover the mirrors?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so that's just a sort of cryptic first data point. That's in North Africa. But there's, you know, evidence of this very shortly afterwards all over Europe, on the continent, and you've got the Chatam Sofer who was a rabbi in Pressburg in the nineteenth century talking about it and pretty soon lots of people are talking about it and they're trying to explain, right, what's going on here.

So maybe we can run down a few of these and we'll circle back to the first one that I'll share. start with that in a minute. But the Chasam Sofer Rav Moshe Sofer is one of the first rabbis to give this a sort of robust explanation. And for him, it's already covering the mirrors broadly in the home.

It's not limited to male head of household. And he essentially tries to construct what this practice has its origins in, and he says it has its origins in an earlier core mourning practice that most of our listeners probably have never heard of because it disappeared, which is Kefiyat Hamitah, overturning the bed.

Rav Avi: Yeah, what does that mean?

Rav Eitan: So one of the practices you will see not only mentioned all the time but taken as sort of the main paradigm for mourning in classical rabbinic sources is this practice of overturning the bed. The idea is you basically went around your house and you turned all of the beds upside down or on their side.

Rav Avi: And give us some sort of picture of what a bed means. It's like a mattress or something hard involved? What's a bed?

Rav Eitan: Okay, so this is super relevant, it turns out. But if we look back at you can find some of these fun books that give you the realia, the material culture of the Talmudic period, you'll see a standard Roman bed was basically imagine a mattress or a support for you to sleep on and then four legs coming down from that. Okay, no larger structure, kind of a plank on legs.

So turning it upside down would be this very visual symbol of the bed is upside down like the top is on the bottom, the bottom's on the top.

Rav Avi: And you do that for the full week?

Rav Eitan: You do that for the full week.

Rav Avi: And do you sleep on it upside down?

Rav Eitan: It seems to be you sleep on it upside down.

Rav Avi: Okay, it's not saying turn it over so you won't sleep on it.

Rav Eitan: No, or maybe you would sleep on the floor, but there's some notion there of you are not sleeping on your bed regularly, you're turning it upside down and sort of putting it out of normal commission.

Rav Avi: The thing that I love about that from the sort of poetic standpoint is like the acknowledgment of my world's been turned upside down, and there's something really sort of visceral in that metaphor of turning your bed upside down.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and I think that may explain why it's so central. Like for instance, when early texts want to pin down when does mourning start.
Okay, in other words, when in the burial process does the mourning start? Is it when the body is taken to the funeral? Is it when it's put in the ground? Is it once you've closed up the grave? The way they ask that question is, when do you start overturning the beds? In other words, the way we might talk about when do you remove your shoes or any number of other things, that for them is the core symbol that mourning is happening. Makes it all the more shocking that no one practices this anymore.

Rav Avi: Yeah, why don't we do it anymore? Beds got too heavy?

Rav Eitan: So there's some various elements here of the history. You can see the practice starting to fall away in the Middle Ages. First in Germany, there's sources that will say, yeah, we don't really do this anymore. In France they say that, later in Spain it starts to fall out. And different rabbis give official reasons for this. They'll say, well, there's a text in the Talmud Yerushalmi that says you don't have to overturn the bed if you are a guest in an inn that week because the innkeeper may suspect you of sorcery.
And you're like, why is this guy overturning the bed?

Rav Avi: That's their way of saying it would be super weird.

Rav Eitan: That's right. And maybe you'll get kicked out even. And these sources will say, and today when we live among the Gentiles of Germany, France, they'll think we're totally crazy, as if otherwise they thought the Jews were totally normal, but well they'll think we're totally crazy so we don't have to overturn the beds. That smacks of a retroactive justification. And one of the other medieval authorities, this one in Spain and North Africa, says actually our beds are built differently today. Think like a four-poster where there's poles going up, and the claim is if you turned it upside down, it wouldn't look so different than being right side up. It would just be sort of not as functional.

Rav Avi: That would be like saying, I can't flip my mattress to symbolize that, I flip my mattress anyway. It's a flippable mattress. But what's interesting to me about the inn example actually is it brings forward actually the lived experience of shiva as like a trip, which maybe is more common the later you get into history like If you all lived in a tiny village then you sat shiva in your own home and you were flipping your own bed whereas many people now like many of us when we are mourning our parents we don't live in the same place as them anymore and we have to travel to go to the place where we're sitting shiva and you very well might be sitting shiva in an inn sleeping in an inn or sleeping in someone else's home that is not your home in which case maybe you know that you're sleeping in the wrong place like you don't need to then do the extra activity.

Rav Eitan: That's interesting. You're giving us sort of the next waystation on this journey of a practice has disappeared how might I make sense of why it is that way and that could be an even more modern take on why it wouldn't make sense for us or at least for some people in some circumstances to adopt it. Okay but how do we get to mirrors? So the Hatam Sofer latches onto this practice first of all because I think he's got a relatively new practice that he's kind of puzzled by or searching for a basis for. Which is the mirrors. And then he's got an old practice which seems very normative that has disappeared.

So he's sort of attracted to the idea of maybe this discontinuity on both ends is actually a continuity in some way but there's another thing that he's intrigued by which is Bar Kappara in the Talmud when describing and talking about overturning the beds says death represents the disappearance of the deceased's image from the world and the overturning of the bed represents overturning the divine image. It's kind of what you said before about the world turned upside down. The idea is something unthinkable has happened which is kind of a microcosmic element of God has died that is to say a person. And if the bed is sort of the resting place of people then turning the bed upside down feels like it is a fit way at least according to Bar Kappara to mark the magnitude and the tragedy of the moment.

Rav Avi: Right so it's unrest. It symbolizes unrest whereas a bed would have symbolized rest.

Rav Eitan: If you pay attention to the language that Bar Kappara uses and if you think about how in general rabbinic texts talk about human beings being kind of like God it's the notion of the image of God right the picture the visage of the human being actually on some level is sort of how you capture God and the Hatam Sofer says that actually one element that this new version of overturning the bed is recapturing is the idea of I don't want to look or I have to confront the fact that an image of God was lost so I'm avoiding looking at reflections of my own image in that time.

Rav Avi: So I've lost the God that was reflected in the person who died and therefore the reason I don't want to look in the mirror in this explanation is because I don't want to see God in myself and remember that God is not anymore in my loved one.

Rav Eitan: Something like that I think you're actually beautifully taking the Hatam Sofer even one step further in terms of playing it out but that's I think what he's aiming for. You're of course seeing other people in the shiva house you're looking at human faces all day but there is something where for people to look at their own face is maybe you could even say it's sort of a reassurance of the ongoing divine image that's in me and this is not a time to be reassured.

Rav Avi: It's also just such a good explanation of why do we do rituals in general right is that grieving or mourning is something that you can't see and both the overturning the bed and covering the mirrors are ways of making what would be totally invisible visible.

Rav Eitan: So the Hatam Sofer plays on that one thing of the mirror is looking at an image of God at a time where you're confronting the loss of an image of God and then he ties it in another way to the overturning of the bed and he really quite surprisingly I think amazingly brings it to a totally different midrashic locus I have a feeling you'll like this one which is he says mirrors, mirrors, where else are mirrors? and he thinks back to the tradition about the women who bring mirrors as a gift to the Mishkan, to the portable sanctuary in the desert. And they were just told they brought them and that was the basis for the kiyor, for the sink, the laver in the tabernacle. And the midrash comments, what were these mirrors? And it says these mirrors, which are described as the mirrors of the tzovot, those who—it’s almost like the language of being a general in an army, but in the feminine form. These were the mirrors of women who, when they were in Egypt, when the people were in Egypt, essentially the men had completely despaired of there being any future in slavery and essentially had refused to participate in any intimate activity that would lead to procreation.
And the women in this midrash essentially made themselves beautiful, attractive, would bring these mirrors and kind of come near their husbands and say, look at me, don’t I look so amazing? take a look at me in this mirror, I’m looking at myself. And essentially seduced their partners into being intimate with them. And as a result, you had armies, legions of children that emerged even while they were in the depths of slavery. And this was sort of the sign of the vitality and endurance of the Jewish people in their lowest moment.
And even though the midrash says Moshe was initially skeptical about why are we having these mirrors? Mirrors are a thing of vanity. I don’t want them in the building of this holy space. God jumps in and says, this is the best gift that anyone brought!

Rav Avi: Yeah, so to me, this midrash, I would think, would lead us to the opposite conclusion. Like if you were to say, and that’s why we bring extra mirrors into the house at shiva, because it reminds us of those who are still alive, because it’s a weapon against despair. I would expect this midrash to point us directly in the opposite.

Rav Eitan: Good, so here’s the brilliant last move of the Chatam Sofer. He says, yeah, but covering the mirror is like overturning the bed. Overturning the bed during shiva is a sign that the seat of intimacy is inoperative this week. That’s both a technical thing, which is sexual intimacy is forbidden to the mourner during shiva, but also a symbolic piece of we’ll get back to the rebuilding of life in a bit, but actually during this week, we’re sitting with the destruction and the loss. And so the best proxy that we have for overturning the bed is covering the item that symbolizes in our tradition, in this midrashic tradition, encouraging people towards procreative intimacy.

Rav Avi: Yeah, it’s interesting. The question in our heads said, so as not to care about our personal appearance. But this explanation is actually going a little bit further. It’s almost like you should ugly up, you’re not going to let yourself do that if you have a mirror there. But really actually, you should, like you should actually be going in the opposite direction from putting on your makeup.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that’s at least how the Chatam Sofer takes us through this. And so again, he says this is really just the modern-day overturning of the bed. It’s got these two resonances and it sort of solves two problems at once. One is, where did this crazy mirror practice come from? And where did that core practice of overturning the beds go? And the idea is essentially the latter transmuted into the former.

You simply had an ancient practice which we were no longer able to do or wanted to do for various reasons, but we found a replacement and it does the same job.

Rav Avi: It’s a cool connection and a brilliant read. It doesn’t feel to me like it totally represents the way we practice today in that we make no distinction between are you married? Right. Are you young? Are you old? Why was it your—again, as you said, if it’s your spouse that died, you certainly would not need to cover the mirror in order to avoid having sexual relations with your spouse. So it’s a really interesting read and it feels a little bit far afield to me from how I experience this practice.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so unsurprisingly, this is not the only explanation offered.
You get other Hungarian rabbis who see mirrors as providing some element of joy. And this is supposed to be a time of worry or concern. That’s one. Rav Moshe Sternbuch, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, more contemporary rabbis— rabbis 20th century have sort of a cousin of this which is mirrors are about vanity and this is not a time for vanity and that gets closer to what the questioner had heard right hey don't think about your personal appearance right now that doesn't matter right don't do that.

Rav Avi: This is a good time to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Responsa Radio but before that I wanted to let you know about an upcoming program at Hadar that you might love especially if you listen to podcasts on halakha. Of course I'm talking about Hadar's halakha intensive on May 17th through 20th 2026 at Yeshivat Hadar in New York City. The halakha intensive is a week of incredible high-level learning of Jewish law designed for learners with experience studying halakhic texts.

This year we're learning about Yom Tov Sheni the second day of festivals celebrated outside the Land of Israel. What is this ancient practice really about and how should we think about it today? If you've ever wondered about these questions or even if you haven't but you just love learning halakha we'd love for you to join us. Visit Hadar.org/halakha for more information. Now let's dive back in.

Rav Eitan: There are others that talk about there being demons in the mirrors. We'll come back to this. That's new. And you need to avoid demons during this period.

That has its roots in the Zohar which actually talks about if you look in the mirror there's sort of a risk of like the forces of arrogance coming for you. Rav Yonatan Eybeschutz a later rabbi talks about there being a ruach ra'ah some kind of evil spirit in all reflections and then you'll also get people just talking about mazikin about demonic forces. We'll return to this explanation in a bit but that's another one you will commonly hear essentially it is often this is said with derogatory tone it's a superstition in scare quotes about evil forces that will come to get you. I first among equals love to dismiss demons and say, oh how silly does that sound but demons are just another word for the stuff we're scared about and anxious about which God knows we have plenty of anxiety in our society it's a different language right for talking about that and that's just I think important to note.

Rav Avi: I'm totally here for that explanation actually and I think it to me of all the things that we've said that that one although it could sound like the silliest is also perhaps the deepest I think to say like don't look in the mirror because you might just freak yourself out like you don't want to become overwhelmed in this moment and looking at yourself in the mirror facing up to the fact that your life is going to be different now like it's just that's that's going to be really hard and you don't have to put yourself through that.

Rav Eitan: Rav Ovadia Yosef and a number of Sephardic rabbis beforehand they just try to explain this as this is part of the laws of tefillah. Actually there are much broader set of comments of you are not supposed to pray while looking at your own reflection. One of the concerns is it looks like a narcissistic act of bowing down to yourself, praying to yourself so there's a general taboo of you shouldn't daven the Amidah you shouldn't be praying things when you're looking in a mirror and guess what happens in a shiva house there's a minyan there. There's davening there here too we could ask your question of do the parameters of the practice match the scope of the purported reason.

Rav Avi: Meaning is it only in the room that you're praying.

Rav Eitan: Yeah or maybe then I should only cover them up when I'm actually praying which is very little of the day.
But there is here a notion that no no no this is just a functional element of running a davening space in a home.

Rav Avi: Yeah I like that. These different explanations really point me in totally different directions right if I'm covering the mirrors to diminish my joy that feels so different to me than I'm covering the mirrors because I'm making my home into a place of prayer. And that might be something that I want to do even more than just during shacharit or during the mincha minyan right I might want to say, I'm not going to leave my house and I might need to pray at any moment so I better cover the mirrors so that I have that ability to pray. It's also a it is the same as I shouldn't like maybe see God's face in the mirror but different right it's like what am I what am I going to see in the mirror is it God or is it a demon is it joy or is it fear but also to be able to say like actually maybe this is about prayer like I would I would love to say that to a mourner. If we cover the mirrors it will allow you to pray more freely.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. I think that's a beautiful way of sort of also yeah, aligning it why you would do this here even though you don't necessarily cover all the mirrors in your house every time you have a minyan there for for one time for a one-off there's a transformation of the home into not quite a synagogue but right a place of prayer. Yeah. And I think that's nice.

Okay. That's the range more or less of what we've got. Tzvi Ron writes an article in Hakirah periodical about halakhah. Really interesting article on this topic where I think he shows pretty convincingly that this practice is definitely from the non-Jewish world and it is based on superstitions, whatever we want to call them, of the deceased being captured in images of mirrors and the like.

That is to say you are somehow worried that mirrors kind of pick up these images like from the outside world and they trap you or there's a fear, right? I think this is part of the amazing thing of a mirror. You're like 'Am I in the mirror?' right? It sort of feels like you're in the mirror. And well if I'm alive, I can look in the mirror, be in the mirror but then I can sort of get up and leave. If a mirror is around someone who has died, will their reflection get trapped in there and they won't be able to go to their eternal rest or whatever it is? That is to say if you think about not just the shivah period which is after the burial but you think about a practice of people being concerned the person has died in the home. Maybe one of the very first things you do is cover all the mirrors.

Rav Avi: And the reason you're doing that in this case, back to it's not about you, it's about the dead, is it's to let go. It's to tell the dead it's okay, you can move on and you're not going to get stuck here in this mirror.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And maybe also so they won't haunt you later or right there's any number of possibilities. The main thing that Ron shows is that this is a practice in Celtic Ireland, off in the far east you find evidence of it in China. You find it actually across a wide range of cultures such that if you take the evidence seriously.

Rav Avi: With this reason or that different cultures have different reasons?

Rav Eitan: No, just an anthropological, you know, testament to it. For Americans, perhaps the most important testimony to this effect is there are clear testimonies that when Abraham Lincoln died and was, you know, in state and getting ready to be buried, one of the practices was to put drapes over all the mirrors. So then that puts a very different spin on the story. We'll get to the Zoom component in a minute, but I just want to dwell on this.

If if that anthropological historical analysis is right, then we actually have to see the work that the Chatam Sofer was doing in explaining this practice as a continuation of overturning the beds and of following up on Bar Kappara and the human image and the midrash of the women in Egypt as not really just an explanation, here I'm telling you what it is, but a kind of spiritual textual appropriation, reclamation in a certain way of a practice which we might say with a historical lens has a very different origin, but the Chatam Sofer is answering what is often the more important question, which is Jews are doing this. Is there a way I can understand this practice as being continuous with and fundamentally enhancing of our internal Torah tradition?

Rav Avi: Yeah, it's really interesting. So where I started by saying, you know, shivah and mourning practices are one of the clearest places where we see that Judaism is a gift, what you're telling me is this isn't really one of those core things. It's kind of new. It's probably appropriated from somewhere else, or at least shared with other cultures if not, you know, if appropriated is too strong a word, it's ours also now clearly. But that this isn't really, we might say, actually shivah is itself the gift and the concept of the timing and the concept of not going out of your house and but the mirrors thing is maybe not the core practice here.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, narrative of origin is not necessarily the same as narrative of meaning.

Rav Avi: And in terms of Minhag versus Halakha, in terms of practice or custom versus law, let's say I have a really big mirror that's hard to reach or something, or I really I don't have the energy to do this practice, I'm not tall enough or whatever the whatever the barriers, how much should people take this practice as something they must do versus a custom that you can do or not?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, look, it gets taken pretty seriously over time, as the questioner indicates, and it shows up in codes, later 20th century codes that are telling you what to do. They will talk about covering the mirrors; they may then have some range of explanation of what it's about.

I think mourning is probably the most difficult area to draw a bright line between Halakha and Minhag, that which is statutory required whether or not you want to do it as opposed to, well, this is a lovely practice if you'd like it. People tend both emotionally not to feel that way; they're like, if this is what happens I want to get it right. And also the halakhot in this entire area of practice are themselves tied in with all kinds of mythic assumptions, leanings about how are we constructing this space between life and death. So the listeners have the analysis and can do with that what they will in terms of understanding where does it fit in.

Not going to tell you this is something that Rabbi Akiva would have recognized in any way, but that said, I don't think it's our place to belittle or marginalize this practice. But the questioner, maybe we can go there now, gives us a good way of kind of probing, well, what do we think this is about, and in good rabbinic fashion, can you give me a boundary case that will test that?

Rav Avi: Yeah, great, okay. So let's get to that, right? The question here is about Zoom and seeing yourself on Zoom. I'm curious if you want to give us maybe a word on Zoom Shiva in general, and then yeah, what do we think about this camera situation?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I mean look, Zoom Shiva is often just a necessity. It's an extreme in COVID where that was the only way to visit. In principle, we say that, of course, I'm saying this not really even mainly halakhically, mainly intuitively and anthropologically, being in person, face to face, seeing people 3D, their whole body, that's always better, there's always a value there to the extent one's trading off between those two. I think that's obvious, but it's also unequivocal that, yeah, of course you fulfill the mitzvah of visiting the sick over Zoom and of course you fulfill the mitzvah of nichum aveilim of comforting the mourner over Zoom. Like all mitzvot like that, there's gradations.

You could do it half-heartedly, you could do it more robustly. So that's just become a part of our landscape now. I think overall it's a blessing when it doesn't replace, right? That is to say, people who can be there in person to be there. So to take it to how to think about this, this is where the kind of halakhic analysis we've done here really matches what poskim, what the great authorities will often do.

They'll say, well, what's the practice about? They'll come up with like four to five different reasons, and then they'll say, well, depending on what you think the reason is, it'll make a difference in this or that case. So if I just run through that here, we're asking, do I have to worry about seeing an image of myself on Zoom when I'm in Shiva? So if this is fundamentally about prayer, as that last theory offered, then it's not relevant. Like, you're not praying on a Zoom call. We're not getting into Zoom Minyan; that's another...

Rav Avi: Yeah, I was going to say, now that this makes me think maybe I should, if you join a Zoom Minyan, you should hide your self-view.

Rav Eitan: I think that is, that is probably right. But for the purposes of Shiva, so that that's not really relevant then; you're not, that's not the prayer space. If it's about looking at yourself to make yourself look good, I think even people that have a less jaundiced view of self-view on Zoom than you do, that is not where you go to pretty yourself up.

Rav Avi: I don't know anyone who's turning on Zoom to put makeup on.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I don't know anyone who turns on their computer camera. I mean, you're checking your hair maybe for the call, so maybe, but I don't think that that's really central. That's not what the tool is about in the way that's what a mirror is about.
Demons? Maybe. I think the main one is the seeing yourself and seeing yourself as an image of God, and that's what the questioner, I think... Maybe intuitively is asking. The focus was on vanity based on what they had heard but a little bit of a taboo of like am I supposed to see myself?

And that might have some weight. That is to say even if you don't go with the Khatam Sofer's full historical explanation here, if Bar Kappara in the explanation of the overturning of the beds at the end of the day says to you, we are marking a time of wanting to confront that an image of God has been lost. And you feel powerfully that when you look at your own image, something about that is being elided, evaded, blurred, I could see someone saying I am very careful to turn off self view during Shiva because I'm actually trying to sit in that space of I don't even know what I look like, I don't know what state I'm in, I'm not looking at face features that look like my parent etc. etc.

Rav Avi: So I do think it's worth just pointing out the questioner had said should you block the camera that sort of what we're leaning towards is hide self view, right? But not block the camera actually, because part of Shiva is that other people can see you. And so that's like really not the direction that we're going in to offer that.

Rav Eitan: I think that's right. You would be downgrading their ability to provide you a full sense of comfort if you block your camera. It's just about the self view. And I'll say here, I think this is an area where using your instinct makes some degree of sense because there are both so many explanations and the origin is so unclear.
Here's the guideline I would offer. If there is a strong functional reason to make sure you can see what you're projecting, like you might be holding up a photo album or a news clip, and for that you actually sometimes need to orient yourself on your image. Oh, is this in the picture? etc. I would not worry about this at all. Like I would not treat this as a taboo under any theory that you can't do that. But if you self-diagnose that I am getting some degree of comfort from looking at my own face, then maybe hide self view.

Rav Avi: Sort of like comfort or discomfort maybe. Either way hide self view.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that there's something there, you might want to you might want to hide self view.

Rav Avi: The other thing that I think is different is that if I can see myself on camera or not no one else can really tell. We were saying the prayer it makes it look like a prayer space if you cover the mirrors, but now it makes it look like a Shiva house. When I walk into a house and the mirrors are covered I know it's a Shiva house. It signals that to me, which is not in your sources exactly, but that to me also feels different on the Zoom, right? No one can tell whether you're looking at yourself on the Zoom so in that way it doesn't matter as much.

So like the worst case scenario is you might say like oh that's just virtue signaling that I covered all the mirrors to show that it's a Shiva house. But also it reminds everyone else in the house that they are in a Shiva home. So when they go to put their shoes on they remember oh I should go offer words of comfort before I leave the house. I should you know keep my voice down, whatever decorum they want to behave differently because it tells everyone that it's a Shiva house. I think that's also missing from the Zoom example.

This is I think a really it's a really interesting question. I'm so glad that it was submitted and that we got to do this deep dive into these very different answers. And it I think it gives us a I'll say a mirror into the sort of multiple dimensions of practices of ritual practice.

One of the beautiful things about ritual and Jewish ritual is that we can do one action and it can mean so many different things and this is a great a great glimpse into that. So thank you.

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