May 1.
All day I’ve had a song running through my head. Julie Andrews playing young Queen Guinevere opposite Richard Burton’s King Arthur in Camelot – “Tra-la! It’s May! The lusty month of May! That lovely month when ev’ryone goes blissfully astray!” (Side bar – what sane woman would have chosen Robert Goulet over Burton?!) I’m told you can sign up for free films of shows on BroadwayHD but truthfully, I’m a simple girl and enjoy singing for myself. The more actively engaged, the better. It would take me many moons to exhaust my inner trove of Broadway show tunes.
Actually, speaking of singing reminds me of my second week signed up to sit Shmira (see my post here from April 20 for how and where to sign up). At first I tried my hand at reading psalms, but it didn’t work for me, too cerebral somehow, I wanted something that would allow me free reign to express what I was feeling, to respond to what it seemed to me the need was of souls released from their bodies but not yet laid to rest. So I sat quietly ruminating until I came up with what proved to be satisfying for me.
In 1976 when my mother died, I was still in my 20s, unprepared for such a monumental loss – I guess somehow I imagined then that one could be “prepared” – of course not, never. After the medical staff had pronounced her dead – she’d been in a coma and the family surrounded her in the hospital room – I started singing spontaneously, a psalm after all, “Pitchuli shaarey tzedek, avovam odeya.” I think it was a tune I had learned as an undergraduate in Hillel a few years before. I rendered it in English as, “Open the Heavenly gates, so the righteous may enter.”
For shmira, I sang that sitting on my porch in the sunthis week, sometimes with my eyes closed and sometimes open. When open, I watched a robin flying back and forth to the nest which was safely hidden on my porch roof, after each reconnaissance offering worms to her babies. I fleetingly recognized it as a great photo for a blog post, but no sooner would I have tried to capture it in a photograph as to take a picture of someone davening. It was such a holy intimate moment - I could see their little necks craning, stretching up above the rim of the nest, and their beaks open in yearning and need. Imagine it in your mind’s eye.
Toward the end of the allotted time I had volunteered to sit (you sign up in ½ hour segments for shmira) I began to alternate the Hebrew words and melody with the spiritual, “Rock-a my soul in the bosom of Abraham,” envisioning myself rocking souls to comfort them and to be present for them. And in fact, I see my kavanah/my intention, as bearing witness and offering the comfort of sitting shmira to all the souls, not only the Jewish ones. So many souls are waiting. Each time I’ve performed this mitzvah now, whether on my porch or in my study, I’ve finished with a sense of peace, a sense of having brought peace, and a sense of that peace having entered me. Each week I sign up for more time slots.
With that sense of peace still lingering, I wish you all a good Shabbos.
How do you envision souls? especially of the departed? How does the tradition envision souls? (If interested, ask your rabbi - of course you could do a Google search, but a conversation is better than just “information.”)
Why do you think it’s a mitzvah to sit with the dead before burial?
Sign up for one 1/2 slot to sit shmira - what was your experience?