“Gramma, come sing, ‘There Were Bells,’ ” my 8-year-old grandson called from his bed. He was referring to “Till There Was You,” from The Music Man, one of many songs I sing to my grandchildren when I am with them at bedtime. 

As a classic Baby Boomer, my repertoire includes show tunes—even a second one from The Music Man, “Good Night My Someone”—and selections from the Great American Song Book, such as “Over the Rainbow.” For good measure, I trill some of our generation’s most calming and comforting tunes, like Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” And because I live in Jerusalem and have grandchildren in Israel as well as the United States, I sing classic Hebrew songs, including “Numi Numi” and “Shir Ha’emek.”

Finally, we recite the Shema, watch-word of our faith, declaring the oneness of God at bedtime.

I sang some of these songs to my own children, but in truth, I mostly sang to them what my mother had sung to me: sweet ditties popular in the 1940s, all in a waltz-like rhythm, such as “I Gave My Love a Cherry.” At some point, I added Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely?” for my daughters.

As a mother, I was too distracted with juggling bedtimes to fully grasp the deeper meaning of songs sung as lullabies. But over the past decade or so, as a grandmother and as a rabbi newly working in spiritual care and healing, I began to understand the significance of the music we wrap around the children in our care at this special time.

In 1903, French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep championed the term “rites of passage” in a groundbreaking work that defined those rites, especially lifecycle rituals, as comprising three phases: separation, liminality and incorporation. Liminality might be the most interesting, a time or moment fraught with fear, anxiety, hope and promise.

In liminal moments, we need the ritual and the ritual “expert” to take us through the rite. The expert can be an officiant, community or tribe—or a grandmother singing a quiet song rich with comforting rhythm to grandchildren facing the mystery of sleep. As they lie awake and wait in the liminal place, lullabies carry them into the restfulness of sleep

My mother, Jacqueline Kelman, could not sing well, always heartfelt but terribly off-key. Yet more than anyone else, she taught me how to sing. And she gave me her love of musical theater. When my siblings and I were old enough, she took us to Broadway shows. She was known to burst into show tunes at sometimes embarrassing moments.

In my mother’s last 10 years of life, my brother and I moved her out of Manhattan to Jerusalem, where we could better care for her. She went blind and grew more immobile. But she could hear! We listened to her favorite music together. We attended amateur musicals in English, which she enjoyed despite having spent decades attending top Broadway shows. Music sustained her in her twilight years.

My mother was nearly 96 when she passed away in 2019. As she lay dying in the hospital, lights and machines flashing, she was not conscious but was clearly agitated.

Instinctively and without thinking, I began to sing her songs like “I Gave My Love a Cherry” and a few musical theater numbers that felt right, among them “Somewhere” from West Side Story. Slowly, she calmed down.

Only later did I realize that I had given her back what she had given to me all those years ago when I was a child: the gift of lullabies, a full circle of calm and closure. She passed away that night.

At her funeral, I sang a few Gershwin verses: “The way you sing off key…no, no they can’t take that away from me. We may never, never meet again on the bumpy road to love, still I’ll always, always keep the memory of….”

We live in a time when we rush from A to B, from one responsibility to another. We rarely linger in any liminal place, which could provide comfort and relief.

The word liminal comes from Latin, meaning threshold. As a clergyperson, I understand the kind of loving presence that is needed to help people in and out of threshold moments. I have stood under wedding canopies and with children about to become b’nei mitzvah, adult members of their congregations. There are moments when I sing us out of the pressure and anxiety, and moments when I pause to feel the anxiety giving way to joy. 

During periods of war with Iran, I would sing to myself to get through the stress and fear of what could be a night of rushing to the shelter. The singing helped, whether it was passages from Psalms set to contemporary music or Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.”

Lullabies, even when sung to ourselves, carry the promise of sweet dreams. 

Rabbi Naamah Kelman, the retired dean of Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, was the first woman ordained in Israel. She continues to work in rabbinic- leadership mentoring and in the field of faith, healing and resilience.