by Lucy Marshall (Minneapolis MN)
I gave birth two months before Rosh Hashanah. I knew I wanted to find a meaningful way to welcome the new year and mark the major transformation that comes with adding a child to our family. My Google search for feminist Jewish rituals led me to Annabel Gottfried Cohen’s website “Pulling at Threads,” which details the rich history of keyver-mestn, grave measuring, and neshome likht, Soul Candles.
I learned that, in times of crisis and in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, women used a string to measure the perimeter of a cemetery or loved one’s grave. This string was then utilized as a measurement for the wick of a new candle. The candles were donated to the synagogue and/or burned as part of a community gathering.
Women recited tkhines, or spontaneous prayers, while measuring, creating, and burning the Soul Candles. They asked their deceased relatives to intervene with God on their behalf for protection and blessings. This ritual has been practiced since the 1100’s or earlier, and it lives on today in contemporary Judaism with the practice of lighting memorial candles on Yom Kippur.
Reading this history, I felt my heart expand – this was it. I couldn’t stop looking at a photo of women in South Russia in 1906, walking at the border of a graveyard with a ball of string in their hands. They looked so familiar. I allowed myself to imagine, what if these women were my relatives, my ancestors?
My Bubbe was born in the same region about twenty years later, before fleeing to North America as a baby. My daughter is named after her. As I’ve stared into the face of my newborn the past two months, I’ve wondered how my Bubbe’s mother felt when making the choice to flee with a baby in tow. Certainly, she would have uttered her own spontaneous prayers for protection and blessing. How could she not?
I called my mom. My parents are good at a lot of things, and one thing they’re especially good at is measuring. They are both architects, and I have many memories of them measuring my college dorm room in New York, my dilapidating apartment in Wisconsin, and my first house in Minnesota to help me furnish the space. I asked if she and my dad would measure my grandparents’ gravesite near Chicago.
A week later, she texted me a video. My mom and dad walked the perimeter of my grandparents’ gravesite with a ball of string in their hands. It was an almost-perfect echo of the photo from over a hundred years ago. I listened to them recite the keyver-mestn thkine, and I could feel their words crossing over the boundary they’d just drawn between the living and the dead.
My dad’s father doesn’t have a gravestone, so instead, he measured the perimeter of my grandfather’s desk, which has become a living memorial at the family architecture office. I wondered, what spaces in my life will become my legacy? What physical items and places will help my descendants feel close to me when I am no longer here?
My husband and I gathered our kiddos for the road trip to Illinois, and my brothers met us at my parents’ house. It felt right to be in a place filled with so many memories of my grandparents — cuddling on the pull-out couch, reading Isaac Bashevis Singer stories before bed, lighting the Shabbas candles together…
Using the toyter fodem, or “dead thread,” we measured the long wick for our Soul Candle. We took turns delicately wrapping colorful sheets of wax around the thick, folded lines. My son cut out shapes and added them as candle decor.
Next, we measured the living, drawing a line from our toes to our heads for another long wick. Even my newborn’s length, however small in comparison, was added into the measurement. This candle would be a lebedike likht, Living Candle, a plea to God to protect and bless those of us who are still alive into the new year.
We read our original thkines while the two torch-like candles burned bright in the backyard. Each of us named the qualities — resilience, creativity, warmth — of our deceased loved ones that we wished to bless us in the new year. Then, we blessed each other, praying for one another’s growth, safety, and nourishment in 5786.
Our closing prayer, cited directly from an 18th century Soul Candles tkhines collection, implored our loved ones to “arise from their graves and pray for us that this year be a good year.” It may sound like something out of Spooky Season, but in practice, it felt like an honest plea for connection — connection to the relatives we miss so dearly, to each other as a growing family, to a future that is uncertain, and to God.
Now, in the days following the ritual, I find myself surfacing new memories of my grandparents. I notice the ways my children cuddle on the couch with my mom and dad, their Bubbe and Zayde, to read stories before bed. As we gathered around the Shabbas table to light another pair of holy candles together, I was struck by the realization, again, of the almost-perfect echoes across generations.
And what a blessing these echoes are, blurring the lines of time to provide us with ancestral love and protection, as we enter the new year in the sweetest, brightest way yet.
Lucy Marshall is a queer Ashkenazi Jewish educator, facilitator, ritualist, and network weaver. Passionate about cultivating Jewish belonging, she is the Director of Community Services at Jewish Family & Children’s Service of Minneapolis. Lucy recently launched Neshama Mama, a new library of Jewish rituals for pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. Previously, Lucy directed the Rising Tide Open Waters Mikveh Network at Mayyim Hayyim, taught at Shir Tikvah Congregation, and served as the Twersky Education Fellow at the Jewish Women’s Archive. She has her MSW from the University of Minnesota and MA in Jewish Education from the Jewish Theological Seminary. Lucy is a proud ema (mother) to her babies Lazer and Raizel on Dakota Land in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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