Kriah (tearing) is the rending of a garment by close mourners on learning of a death or, most commonly today, at the funeral before burial. Mourners for a parent tear the cloth on the left side, over the heart, and for other close relatives on the right; the tear is made standing, and in many communities is accompanied by the blessing that acknowledges God as the true Judge. The custom is ancient and biblical, the patriarchs and kings of the Hebrew Bible tear their clothes in grief, and the rabbis gave it fixed rules, so that a spontaneous gesture of sorrow became a defined rite marking the mourner's changed status. The torn garment (or, in a common modern accommodation, a torn black ribbon worn in its place) is kept on through the seven days of intense mourning. Its meaning is direct: an outward, bodily expression of a loss that words do not reach, worn visibly for others to see.
Halakhic codes, notably Joseph Karo's sixteenth-century Shulchan Aruch (Yoreh De'ah 340), fix precise technical requirements for a valid kriah: the tear must be made while standing, a rule the Talmud derives from the verse describing Job rising to tear his robe, must run at least a handbreadth (tefach) in length, and, for a parent, may not later be mended even partially, a stricter rule than applies to the tear made for other relatives, which may eventually be sewn closed. The codified detail illustrates how what began, in the biblical narratives, as spontaneous grief became, by the medieval period, a precisely regulated legal act.