Bound Up in the Bundle of Life: The Soul’s Journey

Bound Up in the Bundle of Life: The Soul's Journey
By Brooklyn Michalowicz

When I was 12, I went to my first Jewish funeral. My friend's dad had struggled with cancer for a number of years and passed away the day we got back from our 8th-grade trip to Israel, just enough time for his sons to say goodbye.

At the funeral, I remember seeing something weird: a kind of energy that looked like heatwaves hovering above the casket. The most recent funeral I attended was for the great Rabbi David Ellenson, zichrono livracha.

I had the honor of sitting shmira — watching over him — for the last hour before his funeral. As I recited Psalms and read from books of rabbis he held dear, I saw it again: that same energy, like heatwaves above the coffin.

After the funeral, I spent time reflecting on that profound experience, writing: I felt his soul in the room with us, floating above his casket.

It was focused and full of holiness. It was God's soul now, the true "image of God" — what it means to be made in the Divine image. It is this.

As a child, I had always thought of the soul as a fire that burned within each of us like a ner tamid — the eternal flame that hangs over every Torah ark. Now, I was seeing it firsthand. This fiery energy was their souls.

I had seen this energy twice now. And I found myself wanting to understand it — so I turned, as Jews do, to the text. In Genesis, we read that God breathed nishmat chayim — a breath of life — into Adam.

That breath is the energy that animates us, that makes us who we are — we often call it the soul.

Rabbi Levi Kelman taught me that the human being's first inhale was God's first exhale. Perhaps the moment of death, then, is the divine inhale — the neshima — when God draws the soul — the neshama — back to its place of origin.

Later, from the Book of Samuel, we inherit a phrase so central to our mourning tradition that it is inscribed on Jewish headstones across the world: "May their soul be bound up bi’tzror hachayim in the bundle of life."

We’ll come back to those words, but I first want to explore what our tradition suggests about the journey of the soul.

The rabbis of the Talmud teach that at the moment of death, the mind of the recently departed opens fully, and every memory returns.

Every interaction, from the most insignificant encounters to the moments that defined us, comes flooding back in. Once we have taken account of the lives we lived, our souls venture to Gehenna, the Jewish purgatory.

Dr. Simcha Raphael, author of Jewish Views on the Afterlife, explains this phase as giving the soul time to deal with unresolved emotional issues. We can thus understand Gehenna as a kind of post-mortem therapy, in which the soul confronts regrets and hard truths.

And here is where we, the living, enter the story. Our prayers for the dead and the acts of generosity we perform in their honor support the soul in this difficult stage — as if we are holding the soul's metaphorical hand in their grief and pain.

The rabbis teach that the shortest stay in Gehenna is 30 days, while the longest is 12 months. This is one reason we recite the Mourner's Kaddish over our parents for 11 months — because even those who lived complicated lives are understood to have completed the process of purification by then.

The purpose is not punishment, but atonement, and every soul ultimately emerges. From there, the soul goes to dwell in the Garden of Eden. Some experience the lower Garden,  where the soul enjoys pure bliss in an ethereal version of what its physical body was like on earth.

Others, who spent their lives deeply invested in the pursuit of spiritual contemplation, may reach the upper Garden where souls dwell in their truest form. Yet in the end, all souls return to the same place — Tzror HaChayim, the "bundle of life."

That phrase from Samuel, written on headstones, arrives now in our mouths as prayer.

When we recite Yizkor, we ask that the souls of our loved ones be bound up in that bundle — bi’tzror hachayim, a divine holding place where souls are gathered, at peace, and somehow still connected to our world. Rabbi Spitzer describes this place as a kind of cosmic soul soup, from which new souls emerge, and one day, re-enter this world. And though we do not mention death explicitly  in the Mourner's Kaddish, some interpret the word L'ayla — meaning "beyond" or "above" — in connection with the Jewish concept of ilu'i neshama, the "elevation of a soul."

This teaching suggests that those of us still in this world can continue to extend a person's goodness by doing acts of kindness in their memory.

In doing so, we help elevate their soul on its journey. Whether we take this teaching literally or metaphorically, our tradition gently insists that it does not end here.

Lately, I keep returning to those moments: sitting near a simple pine casket, with heat hovering in the air, And think, what am I meant to do with these experiences? And our tradition responds: The soul is elevated by the way we remember the departed, by the way we interact with one another, and by the way we choose to bring goodness into the world in their name.

The choices we make matter not only for us or for the generations to come, but also for those who came before us. Our actions extend their goodness in this world, and we become part of their ongoing story.

Maybe that is what it means for a soul to be bound up in the bundle of life — not only to be held by God, but to be woven into the lives of others, across generations. I pray that the One who breathed life into us at the beginning of our days receives back the souls of those we have loved with tenderness.

May they be elevated by our remembering them, and may the breath within us guide us to live with purpose, kindness, and courage,so that their legacies continue through us. We say, "Amen."