Staring into the pages of my Tehillim, it occurred to me that I had just reread the same verse several times. It was four in the morning on Shabbat, and I had a few hours until someone would come to take over my shift. Inside the large tent, police officers mingled and nibbled on the cookies my friend had brought earlier. I looked up from my book, and a state trooper smiled warmly at me. Despite being an outdoor temporary morgue, the atmosphere was one of comfort and camaraderie.
Suddenly, the quiet was shattered by the blast of sirens. We knew what that sound meant. We all stood up from our benches and peeked out the tent entrance. The flashing lights coming up 1st Avenue toward 30th Street could mean only one thing. More bodies of firefighters had been found at Ground Zero. There were no cars on the street, but the sirens blared anyway. The police officers and firefighters took off their hats and held them to their chests, while I recited the opening verse from Psalm 130: From the depths I called you, Hashem, my Lord, hear my voice; May Your ears be attentive to the sound of my pleas. The officers removed the barricade, and the ambulance pulled slowly into the cordonedoff outdoor morgue. If you protected injustices, O God, who could survive? Medical examiners and volunteer medical students opened the ambulance doors and pulled out the stretchers. For with you is forgiveness, that You may be feared. I put confidence in God, my soul has put confidence, and I hoped for His word. But no bodies emerged from the doors. I saw only what appeared to be garbage bags of different colors. “One color for larger body parts, one for small parts,” I heard someone say. I yearn for my Lord, among those longing for the dawn, those longing for the dawn. “Small parts?” I asked. “Well firefighters are mostly intact because of their suits, but the small parts are just as important. Anything to identify someone who’s missing,” he answered. The officers wheeled stretchers filled with bags into the large well-lit tents across the way. It was a cold night, and the doors of the tents closed after them. Let Israel hope for Hashem, for with Hashem is kindness, and with Him is abundant redemption. And He will redeem Israel from all its injustices.
“ I had to believe that God would take care of these souls.”
Questions clouded my head. How, in any way, were my words relevant at this time? Could I truly put confidence in Hashem? God had allowed a great injustice, which took the lives of more than 3,000 people, possibly 400 Jews among them. Where was the redemption? Where was the kindness? Where was the dawn? And then I realized— these words aren’t for me! There are hundreds of souls for whom I am reciting them. They were longing for the dawn, for there would be no peace until there was a proper burial. Families could not properly mourn for their lost loved ones until they were found, identified, and given a funeral. And despite whatever injustices I had seen in the last few months, I had to believe that God would take care of these souls. With that realization, my reciting Tehillim took on a new, more meaningful fervor, and I allowed myself to establish a tangible connection with the souls of those I had never met.
I thought back to the previous Thursday night. Rabbi Allen Schwartz of Congregation Ohab Zedek had been organizing Jews to sit shmira—keeping watch over the body of someone who has died—for the victims of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, in four-hour shifts at the tented morgue. Dr. Charles Hirsch, Chief Medical Examiner, supplied the volunteers with passes and full access. Words are inadequate to express our gratitude to Dr. Hirsch for all his efforts. The only obstacle in this process was the lack of Jews within walking distance of the morgue, which would affect the shmira shifts for Shabbat. A friend of mine on the Upper West Side realized that Stern College for Women was nearby, and he contacted me for assistance. It was just at the time that Stern students would be coming back from late classes or heading out for the evening, and so I planted myself at the entrance to the Schottenstein dormitory, the closest to where the temporary morgue was located. It was not difficult to find a fellow student just after 9/11 willing to volunteer her time to perform this very special mitzva. In fact, the Red Cross had been turning people away because there were too many volunteers, and all the girls who had gone to hospitals to help on the day of the attacks found that there were few survivors who needed medical attention. People had either made it out safely, or they had not made it out at all.
What I did not know when I agreed to help my friend was anything about the nature of the mitzva of shmira or the reason for it. I quickly learned that our tradition teaches that a body is to be treated with the utmost respect and dignity in life and especially in death. The soul remains near the body and is aware of what transpires nearby. Tehillim comfort the soul, and a person’s physical presence protects the body from posthumous harm. However, in this case, we would not be able to see the bodies at all, but rather only glimpse them coming out of an ambulance and being wheeled to the morgue or to large refrigeration trucks. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein says that once the body is seen to be out of physical harm, it is sufficient to sit shmira on the same premises. As to whether or not a woman can sit shmira for a man or a man for a woman, exceptions were made in this case—because the bodies were mostly unidentifiable by gender—and because, since it took months to finish the Ground Zero cleaning process, there were hundreds of shifts to fill.
For almost eight months, hundreds of young men and women sat in that temporary morgue saying Tehillim. I wonder if, like me, they felt nervous every single time they walked into the morgue. Or if they shared these feelings—of getting lost in their own Tehillim, of warmth and caring from the firefighters and police officers who came to “keep their lost friends company,” or of connectedness with those sojourning souls. I remember that, each time my shift ended and I walked back onto the city streets, it took me a while to reconnect with the physicality of the world around me. Even now, New York is filled with the memory of souls. And as for me, I am eternally grateful to the Almighty that I had the opportunity to help fix some of the world’s injustices—at least for these victims.