There’s a little-known ancient custom to visit cemeteries, especially the kevarim of the Avos and tzaddikim, on Tishah B’Av afternoon. Join the sisters
I’m rarely at a loss for words but I’d said all I had planned to say and didn’t know what to add. So there I stood sefer Tehillim in hand in front of the grave of my father Nachum Stark z”l wondering what to say after I’d said my last words.
There’s a special power to prayers said at a parent’s kever. Perhaps the memory of our earthly father who helped give us life and fulfilled many of our needs reminds us of the Heavenly Father Who truly gives us life and fulfills all our needs. Maybe it’s our feeling that our parent’s neshamah can intercede for us from its lofty place in Shamayim. Or it might simply be the memory of the times we came crying to our father to Daddy with a skinned knee or a failed test and he somehow made it better.
I was already living in Israel and every trip to America included the three-hour drive to my father’s grave on Long Island. I said the pirkei Tehillim one reads at a cemetery and the chapters for that day of the month and also read the beautiful words of the pirkei Shir Hamaalos. I poured my heart out to Daddy updated him so to speak on family news. As always I ended with a silent prayer to Hashem that I would return to my father’s kever with news of simchahs and then I walked away.
Moments later I walked back.
My father had died 15 years before. My oldest child Nachum born three months after my father’s petirah was named for him. Nachum has my father’s tall and thin physique his bright blue eyes his easygoing personality.
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