New York, 2 Kislev 5748.It is thirty days since Dovidl's mother passed away. According to our holy tradition, when a soul departs from this world there are steps: the way in which the soul says goodbye.The first time the soul says goodbye is when it leaves the body. It's a heavy kind of goodbye. Somehow the soul is still connected to the body, but not connected enough to give life to the body in an ordinary way. Everybody knows (they should live long) that at a funeral the dead person is completely aware of how they are buried. You know, all the Rabbis would say that when you go to a funeral you better mean it for real, because the person looks at you and knows if it's for real or not. They already have heavenly eyes and they look at you. This is one sense of saying goodbye.
The second goodbye is after seven days. The soul and the body are getting a little more distant. The body is resting in the cemetery and the soul goes up, but there's still some connection. The connection is not so much to the body as it is to the people who love this person very much. After thirty days, the soul somehow goes up to heaven. And for eleven months the soul is judged, and this is the time when people who me closest to the person who left the world are saying Kaddish.Each time Kaddish is said it's like you're giving energy to that soul in an unbelievable way. So tonight it's thirty days.
How can anybody say how much we love our mother or how much our mother loves us. You have no idea. While the person is in this world the soul is in garments and even the love is in garments. It's clear to you and me, when our mothers say to us, "Why don't you eat more, why don't you sleep more? "-you know what they are telling us? They just want us to know how much they love us. But sadly enough, in this world, there is no way to say it except in a garmented way. So they say, "eat chicken soup, sleep more, are you making a lot of money?" All these things, they mean so much more, but sadly they don't know how to say it. But when they leave this world, it's so deep that when a person says Kaddish at that moment the person from the other world is actually standing beside them and telling them how much they love them. And this is just so awesome.When we are born our parents carry us. When they die, we carry them, but the truth is they are carrying us forever.
Just as Yakov Avinu asked his children to carry him back to Eretz Yisroel before he died, but he was really telling them, I will carry you back from the four corners of the world.
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