From the Chabad-Lubavitch site:
According to the Talmud and the Zohar, those righteous souls who have passed on from this world are still very much in touch with their students and family and care for them and their problems. We petition them to pray on our behalf--and they do and often their prayers are more effective than our own. After all, we often don't fathom the seriousness of these problems from our limited perspective as much as they might from their much more lofty view.
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Talmud and Sohar are the preservation of the traditions of men that Yeshua denounced in Matthew 23.
Interesting particularly to those living in darkness.
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