A Remarkable Kindness by Bletter Diana

Author:Bletter, Diana [Bletter, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-06-11T23:00:00+00:00

17

In the Burial Circle

Leah

After every tahara, the burial circle members left the cemetery to return to the land of the living. But one of them would always volunteer to stay behind. You never left the dead alone until the funeral, the levayah. The word itself meant to accompany, to guide. According to the Talmud, attending the dead to burial is a deed that yields a reward both in this world and in the world to come.

Leah Zado chose to stay with Sophie until the burial service. Leah wedged a rubber stopper under the door to keep it open and sat by the coffin, reading psalms. She tried to get the other members of the burial circle to read tehillim, too, as was the traditional custom, but they all preferred to simply sit, looking out. The sun shone or it did not. Sometimes the rain fell. The sky was a whoosh of wind or it lay still as a blue lake. Now, the winds traveled in long sweeps, up from the desert and on to the sea. The air was dusty and hot. Leah had a powerful awareness that she could feel the warmth all around her while Sophie, lying in her coffin, could not.

Leah did not like to think about her own death. It was hard to imagine that she, too, would one day lie in a coffin in the burial house. Yet for some reason, she always assumed she’d die before Moshe. She pictured him as a widower. She had once asked him if he would remarry after she was gone, and he said, “You think I need more trouble?” But Leah sensed he would quickly take the first woman willing to be his wife.

Leah’s breaths came out in heated puffs. She unbuttoned the top button of her white blouse and loosened the belt of her black skirt so that it wouldn’t dig into her waist. She felt hot and angry and decided that she’d buy herself the nice royal-blue dress she’d admired in the window of a store in Nahariya the other day. Why let his second wife get it all?

She hunkered over her prayer book.

“Even when I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” Leah read out loud. “. . . And I shall dwell in the house of God forever . . .”

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