The Seven Days the Soul Wanders Between Home and Grave

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The Night the Soul Would Not Leave

The lamp in the house of mourning burned low, and the family sat on the floor with their sandals off and their collars torn. Outside, in the fresh dark of the grave, a body lay wrapped in linen. Above the house, unwilling to go anywhere, hovered the thing that had left it.

The soul did not understand yet that it was dead. It climbed toward the doorway it had lived behind for a lifetime, toward the table where it had broken bread, toward the room where its children now wept into their knees. Then it turned and rushed back to the grave, to the still face, to the mouth that would not take breath again. Home, then grave. Grave, then home. For seven days it would run that road and find no rest at either end.

The mourners could not see it. They only felt the strange nearness of the one they had buried, as if the dead still lingered at the door.

The Man Who Crossed the Marketplace

Streets away from the house of mourning, a man pushed through a crowded marketplace with a single key closed in his fist. His house stood shuttered and locked, and inside it lay everything he owned, his coins, his oil, his bread, his inheritance. He carried none of it on his body. He carried only the key, and while that key stayed in his hand, every locked thing was already his, as good as held, waiting for the turn of his wrist.

So it was with the restless soul above the grave. It was not lost. It was not loose in the dark. It was held, the way the marketplace man held his whole house inside one closed hand. "In whose hand is the soul of every living thing," runs the verse, and the hand is the hand of the Holy One. Every spirit that ever breathed is shut inside it, and the same hand that grips the souls grips also the keys to the graves and to the hidden treasure-houses where the souls are stored. Nothing that goes in is spilled. Nothing is dropped.

Gathered to the Fathers

As the seventh day came near, the soul's frantic road between house and grave began to close. It was drawn toward a gathering it had not chosen and could not refuse. God had promised this long before to Abraham, when He said, "But thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace." Every soul goes to its own. The righteous are gathered to the righteous who went before them, and the wicked are gathered to the wicked, each one to the company of its own kind and its own people.

For a soul that had lived well, the arrival was not a plunge into cold. The righteous who had gone first came out to meet the newcomer the way a household comes down to the road to greet a traveler spotted from far off. "Come unto peace," they said. And the soul that had run seven days between a doorway and a grave was taken in among those who had already made the crossing.

The Breath Returns to the One Who Blew It

On the seventh day the body in the grave began to change. The linen sank. The flesh loosened and started its slow return to the ground it had been shaped from, for the dust goes back to the earth as it was. And the soul, no longer tied to a face it could not wake, rose past the doorway for the last time.

It was going back to where it began. Long ago, in a garden, Adam had lain on the ground as a finished shape with no life in him, a mouth and lungs and open eyes and no breath behind any of them. Then God bent close and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, the nishmat chayim, and the shape sat up and became a living man. That breath had never been the man's own to keep. It was a spark of the One who blew it. Now, at the end, the spirit returned to God who gave it, back into the closed hand, back into the treasure-house, to wait.

The Dew on the Head of the Holy One

This is what all of them wait for, the righteous folded among the righteous, every stored spirit shut in that hand.

There is a dew that no morning field has ever tasted. It does not rise from the earth. It gathers on the head of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose head is full of the reviving dew, the dew of life itself. On the day appointed, when the graves are commanded to open and the seed of the earth is told to give back what it swallowed, God will shake His head, and the quickening dew will come down like rain out of His hair onto the dust of the dead.

"I was asleep, but my heart waked," says the verse, "for my head is filled with dew, my locks with the drops of the night." The sleeper stirs. The dew falls. And the souls that ran seven days between a house and a grave, and then waited in the closed hand of God through the long night of the world, are called up out of the treasure-house to be clothed again in flesh and stand.