Kaddish For Mum

“There are circumstances that must shatter you; and if you are not shattered, then you have not understood your circumstances. In such circumstances, it is a failure for your heart not to break. And it is pointless to put up a fight, for a fight will blind you to the opportunity that has been presented by your misfortune. Do you wish to persevere pridefully in the old life? Of course you do: the old life was a good life. But it is no longer available to you. It has been carried away, irreversibly. So there is only one thing to be done. Transformation must be met with transformation. Where there was the old life, let there be the new life. Do not persevere. Dignify the shock. Sink, so as to rise.”

― Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

“The notion of afterlife is far less important than the liberation of the deceased’s soul from this world, meaning that the Kaddish is most importantly a responsibility towards the living. The prayer increases the living’s awareness of the fragility of life. One recites Kaddish to remember one’s own mortality, but also to keep from dwelling on that mortality: ‘[…] the bottom line is startlingly clear. In words and through practice, Kaddish insists that the mourner turn away from death and choose life.”

-Diamant, Anita. Saying Kaddish

Nothing forces me to confront

The divide within me,

Between Kavana and Keva,

Between,

The soul torn between its desire for epiphany, d’veykut,

experience of the oceanic pleroma,

and the realization that that ritual, custom, minhag, tradition

Halacha…survives the erosion of time and enthusiasm of revolution.

Nothing forces me to confront

That divide within me,

More than the KADDISH.

The daily grind, the volume of text to daven to merely arrive at Kaddish

The anxiety of getting to shul ahead of davening

To grab the lectern

Or just make the first kaddish in time

(Which bookends the entire service)

The services requiring your presence throughout, with no interruption.

All this designed to not grieve Mum

But to enact a millennium of custom, ritual behavioral norms of

Grief’s expression within the halachic legal framework and tradition.

All this business has dragged me back to the halachic altar

From where I fled long ago for the spiritual pastures

of a freewheeling romantic hassidic piety.

Where I have fought the battle against hidebound orthodox thinking

And brain dead piety,

Neither the German medieval pietists nor the heady French elite scholars,

But the fertile divide between the latter day

Lithuanian scholarly tradition and the

rhetoric of the Baal Shem Tov’s students as my teachers,

That first generation of Masters,

working through his spiritual revolution,

some 200 hundred years ago.

Now, however, the recitation of the mourner’s Kaddish

Forces me back to the benefits of repetition

The mantra like quality of its recitation

And the polyphony of joining others

An orchestra out of tune with itself,

Some with the same pitch, others tone deaf,

Everyone with a slightly different pronunciation

Betraying their roots, often as Baalei T’shuva with

No roots, but aping the Rebbe who influenced them most.

And it is the repetitive quality that may be working through me

To acceptance

Of the travesty of death

Of the outrageous absence of HER in my life

Of the emptiness of the apartment without her perched on the easy chair

Listening to Heifetz, Kreisler and Pearlman.

The anger is slowly subsiding

The oceanic waves of grief still occur

The dark depression subtending it all,

Yet the very focus on the pecking order each day

The negotiations with other mourners

Of who shall take the lectern,

(The pecking order of who has greater halachic mourning status..)

Watching the clock at home warily,

Ordering the events of the day around these service times,

Arriving before the davening when often the shul is empty,

And the attentiveness to the moment the reader ends the previous prayer

Triggering the cacophony of

“magnified…sanctified, may His great name be blessed…”

All of this..

The attention away from Mum and on this ritual...stuff...

Is the chemical composition of acceptance

and the rabbinic genius and the practice of minhag Yisroel.

I liken it to the keva/Halacha/ritual performance of the wedding ceremony

Where the reading of the ketuba in archaic Aramaic takes some 8 minutes

And all listen or muse while the honor

is bestowed upon an elder to recite it word for word.

The Bride and groom accept this,

despite the preposterously archaic sums of money

Set aside in the “contract”…the ritual reading takes place nonetheless.

These rituals adorn the ceremony and hang like fruit

To be plucked because of tradition

and hallowed in time in the nature of things

That get repeated generation after generation.

It is less the ratio/mind/cause

and more of the tone/ritual communal custom/minhag

That causes the transmission of praxis.

“Surely it is foolish to hate facts.

The struggle against the past is a futile struggle.

Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom.

I know all this.

And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept.

This is not merely an emotional matter.

The reason that one must hate certain facts

is that one must prepare for the

possibility of their return.

If the past were really past, then one might permit

oneself an attitude of acceptance,

and come away from the study of history with a

feeling of serenity.

But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in

our hearts.

It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself.

We repeat history—or we do not repeat it,

if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition.

For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history

that we learn to oppose it.”

Mum is actually teaching me through her absence

Her loss

Her present absence

Each time I think when reciting the Kaddish

By her absence

And the halachic behavior it triggered in my observances

For this year

As her son

And mourner

No greater bond

Acknowledged in Halacha

This need for keva/repetitiveness.

Her structured disciplined life comes to mind, it

Triggers a memory from childhood days

of daily practice of scales and arpeggios on the piano

and my mother’s stick ever present should I slack in the daily routine.

She was harder on herself.

Did this bring out the rebel in me all these years?

To refuse authority, be it political or halachic?

The maverick with a guttural hatred of tyranny

and the heretical refusal to bow to Rabbinic authority?

Does this Kaddish now bring me full circle to the daily

Genuflections -the five bendings of the knee during Kaddish,

Albeit kicking and screaming, as I did as a child,

A metaphorical hint to the need to return to the primal site of trauma

The mother as agent of violence, discipline,

repetitive scales and arpeggios until perfection?

Now from the grave sending this message

etched in my loyalty to memorialize her daily

For a year in this Kaddish, the prayer for the dead,

or maybe this prayer for the living?

Maybe the Kaddish is sent for me? From beyond the grave?

Religion, and the Kaddish, can be used

as a religious strategy that practices both a positive

dogmatism, in the sense of giving support and structure to the mourner,

and negative dogmatism, in the sense that it structures the process

of mourning for the mourner, but not in cooperation with the mourner.

By performing a ritual, obligated or voluntarily,

the mourner repetitively performs the act of mourning,

which is more essential than definition or interpretation.

Because the Kaddish is stronger as a rhythm

than it is in terms of its content, the rhythm and sounds become like a

mantra when it is repeatedly and mechanically recited.[1]

Kaddish is teaching me the value of repetitive ritual,

the recitation, mantra-like, of Aramaic words.

Encoded in Halacha and historicity,

forcing me back to the discipline of practice and the

acceptance of authority outside myself.

Thanks Mum

Once more you influenced me

In your absence your teaching reaches me

In my Kaddish in the key of C# minor,

I feel the discipline you always tried to instill,

Your absent presence once more,

Sanctified, magnified, may her name be Blessed, Mum.

[1]Gillman, Neil. ‘Coping with Chaos: Jewish Theological and Ritual Recourses’. Death, Bereavement and Mourning. Ed. Samuel Heilman. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2005. 135-150.