Saying Kaddish as an Atheist
Magnified and Sanctified be God's Name, Even Though I Don't Believe in Him
After the initial tumult—the death, the burial, the traditional week of shiva—the central Jewish mourning ritual is the saying of kaddish.
The kaddish is one of the most frequently repeated prayers in Jewish prayer services. The reason for this is that it is in Aramaic (which was the successor language to Hebrew among the Jews, the language in which the Talmud is written; it was also, incidentally, the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth), which at one time meant that it was a more commonly-understood prayer, which lead to its frequent repetition. Since Aramaic is now a dead language and Hebrew is a revived one, and even among non-native speakers of Hebrew Jews are far more likely to learn Hebrew than Aramaic,1 this ironically means that this prayer, inserted for its widespread comprehensibility, is one of the least accessible to most Jews (except insofar as it’s so common people know what it means, having read or heard a translation; but it’s less directly accessible). Nevertheless, the tradition holds, and it is repeated often.
Some of those repetitions are designated as the "mourners' kaddish": rather than being said by the prayer leader, or the congregation in unison, it is said by those in mourning—either observing a yahrzeit (the anniversary of a loved one's death),2 or someone still in direct mourning. This is what is meant by “saying kaddish” (as in, “I’m saying kaddish for my father”): going to synagogue, and standing and reciting this prayer, and having the congregation answer—say “amen”—in response. It has to be with a congregation, a minyan (that is, a quorum for prayer, which in Judaism is at least ten adult Jews3 (within Orthodoxy, ten male adult Jews)); it is not a prayer one says (is allowed to say) if you pray on your own (as I would think even the most pious would do occasionally, and which most of those who pray regularly do often). Indeed, the necessity or desire to say the kaddish is one motivation people have for going to daily prayers, for seeking out minyanim to go to, indeed for there being regular minyanim at all. The daily minyan at my synagogue began because a particular congregant was saying kaddish, and it has continued in part as a vehicle for others to to be able to do so, too.
For whom, and for how long, does an observant Jew say kaddish? In Judaism, the "big seven" relatives whom one is supposed to officially mourn (that is, who by Jewish law, one is obligated to mourn) are a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a wife, a husband, or a child.4 Of those, the mourning period for siblings, spouses and children is a month, but for parents it is for a year. This is not (as I long thought) because parental deaths are supposed to be more profoundly affecting and thus take a year to properly grieve (in which case, I would imagine, a child's death should be mourned for eternity), but because of the biblical commandment to honor your father and mother. And while one can say kaddish for a sibling or spouse or (chas v'shaolm) a child,5 the primary people one says kaddish for, that one is expected to say kaddish for, are your parents. Some people would hold that one ought not to say it at all if both one's parents are living—that it ought to be "saved" for them, as it were, that it would in some sense be dishonoring one's parents if you said it for another first.
Here is the text of the mourner’s Kaddish in English translation.6 The words in italics are said by the congregation as well as the mourner (or, in the case of the word in parenthesis, instead of the mourner):
Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name (amen) throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.
May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.
Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.
May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.
He who creates peace in His celestial heights, may He create peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.
As you can see, it is not a prayer for comfort, or for the soul of the departed, or anything like that.7 It is instead a very standard Jewish prayer: exalting (with lots and lots of synonyms) God’s name, asking for peace, imagining a better age. It is, in other words, not a prayer for the dead nor one written to comfort mourners: it is a prayer to and for and about God.
So what does it mean to say this as an atheist?
When my mother died suddenly and violently when I was 20, and I tried to imagine what I ought to do at that moment, my mind went first to various models I had on hand for what it meant to grieve, how to do it. This is a common response, perhaps an ubiquitous one: in new situations we look to what others have done before us. And it is of course one of the main roles that religion fills in our lives: it gives us a vehicle in which we can express the feelings that we encounter which are at once unique to us and endlessly iterated: joy at a marraige or a birth, grief at a death. So when my mother died, and I needed perform my grief, one of the things I thought of was saying kaddish. The saying of kaddish wasn’t the only place my mind went, of course; one of my fiercest desires was to say the eulogy, a desire which came (fairly consciously) from an essay that the writer Harlan Ellison’s essay about his own mother’s death—not that my eulogy was in any way like his, but that that was the model for what it means to mourn a mother—one of the models that I had to hand. But saying kaddish was certainly one of the things I felt I ought to do, needed to do, wanted to do.
I am not absolutely certain where I got this idea, but I have a strong guess. It wasn’t from synagogue. I had been going to synagogue (irregularly and unpunctually) for over a year, since I started college, so I had definitely heard the mourner’s kaddish many times, but I certainly didn’t know it: for me its Aramaic faded into a vast sea of equally unknown and similar-sounding Hebrew. So it wasn’t that experience that put the idea in my head. Rather, I believe I got the idea from reading the novels of Chaim Potok, who was for me (as I suspect he was for a lot of his readers) a gateway into the world of Jewish observance.
Potok, an observant Jewish novelist (who was also ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary), wrote about the lives of orthodox Jews (as he had been while he grew up), particularly adolescents and younger adults, who as they grew up had to navigate the conflict between tradition and modernity. I had read his most famous novel, The Chosen (1967), for school in eighth grade, and had gone on to read five others on my own: The Promise (1969), My Name is Asher Lev (1972), In the Beginning (1975), The Book of Lights (1981), and Davita's Harp (1985).8 In many ways Potok’s books all tell the same story: a young man, growing up as an observant Jew, has his faith tested by modernity, and has social and personal troubles which arise from that testing, which all change him greatly, although he typically ends up still being fairly observant. One of Potok’s books, Davita’s Harp, tells the story in mirror image: its progragonist, rather than an observant boy, is an atheist girl; her parents are communists, not observant jews; and she finds herself drawn in to orthodoxy rather than drawn out of it.9 But of course there is a great deal of similarity between a photograph and its negative.
Several of Potok’s books contain important narrative motifs in which one of his characters says kaddish. Those narrative moments usually involve someone saying it in a way that breaks with their community’s traditions. The two that really affected me were those in Davita’s Harp (one of my favorites) and those in The Book of Lights (my least favorite, although I suspect if I reread it I would like it a lot more now). In Davita’s Harp, the protagonist, Illana Davita, says kaddish for her father—even though her father (unlike her mother) was not Jewish, and even though, at the time, a woman saying kaddish was not done (although not strictly forbidden) in the community she was saying it in. Then, later in the same novel, her mother says kaddish for a dear family friend, even though she was not related to that friend and even though, again, she was a woman saying kaddish. Both of these are very powerful narrative threads in the book.
In The Book of Lights, which is about Arthur, a young rabbi whose father was involved with building the nuclear bomb and who wrestles with guilt about it, the saying of kaddish is central to a single, pivotal scene in which Arthur goes and prays at a memorial to the victims of Hiroshima. Arthur’s friend Gershon follows him and hears him pray a number of prayers, ending with the kaddish (despite there not being a minyan there). Here’s a brief excerpt from the scene:
[Arthur] stood there now and began to recite the words to the Kaddish. Gershon listened to the awesome words of the prayer for mourners—the public sanctification of the name of God; the affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darknesses—and a coldness of terror brushed against the back of his neck. His heart began a wild beating. Arthur was reciting the words in English, reading from the prayer book in his hands….
“…say ye, Amen.”
“Amen,” someone answered, and Gershon looked up with surprise and realized that he, Gershon, had answered, and he continued the required response, “May His great name be blessed for ever and ever.” Without a listener’s response the Kaddish was meaningless; the response was the soul of the Kaddish, its living center.
It was this extraordinary literary moment, this act, fictional though it was—a rabbi saying kaddish without a minyan, with his friend (unasked, at least not explicitly asked) answering him, an answer that was essential but also inadequate, coming as it did from a single person10—that made me want to say kaddish for my mother, and made me want to bring to the graveside funeral (which was a very small gathering of just family & friends, as opposed to the memorial service later that same afternoon, which was quite large, and which was when the various eulogies, including mine, were said) a Jewish friend who could answer it—since Potok had taught me that “without a listener’s response the Kaddish was meaningless; the response was the soul of the Kaddish, its living center.” I did not remember in that terrible week Potok’s precise words, but I had internalized the idea.
So I said kaddish at the graveside—first in Aramaic, carefully reading out from a transliteration (over time I would grow to know the words by heart, but I didn’t then), which I had, in the intervening days, practied assidiously, and then reciting it a second time in English translation. When saying the English, I changed the translation slightly, on the fly: where it says “and for all Israel” I said instead “and for all mankind”: my mother was not Jewish, and a lot of our family wasn’t; I did not mean the prayer in any sectarian way. Anyway, I figured that that was roughly what the prayer meant even if it wasn’t what it said: for the person or persons who wrote the prayer, “all Israel” was, in effect, all humanity. So I said that. My mother’s mother, who was undoubtedly the most religious person at the funeral (a Christian Scientist, not Jewish, and with no Jewish roots) told me later that day that she thought the prayer was very beautiful and perfect; I was and am glad I translated it as I did.
And then I said it for a year—or, rather, for eleven months: in Jewish tradition we take a month back from the year, as far as saying kaddish goes.11 The reason is less than inspiring: the saying of the kaddish by. mourners was meant not only to honor the dead, but to speed them through whatever equivalent of purgatory was imagined—to help their soul by oneself, as their child, showing merit in this life. But one didn’t want to imply that one’s beloved parent was a sinner who really needed the help; so to make it clear that there was no such implication, one stopped a month short, in order to publicly declare that you were sure that your parent was right with God. For the first month—Jewish morning proceeds in stages, with the first week being the most intense, the first month next, and with a year being the third and least circle (just for parents, as noted)—I said it every day. For the next ten months I said it at least once a week—including in Italy, where I went by myself for three weeks that summer (remnants of a planned all-summer trip that was otherwise shelved when my mother died), finding Italian synagogues and going through their far more rigorous security procedures to join and minyan and say kaddish. One week (the third of three shabbatot in Italy), when I couldn’t find a synagogue, I just said it to myself, in defiance of tradition, thinking of Potok’s haunted rabbi the whole time.
And then the not-quite-year ended, and I stopped.
And, yes, that whole time I was an atheist, although I was less clear about it, less committed to the word, than I would become in later years.12 If you had asked me, though, I would have been clear: I don’t actually believe any of this.
Yet I did it.
My father died last year—not quite a year ago, indeed by the Jewish calendar not quite one-month-short-of-a-year ago either (although it has been by the Gregorian calendar).13 And when he died, I began saying kaddish: first at the graveside, and then when I was in synagogue. I did not, this time, make a point of going to say it every day nor every week—largely because I haven’t in general been going as much as I did back in college, and I did not want to take the time (or disrupt my life) in order to do so. Also, of course, I am more settled in my beliefs and habits at 52 and 53 than I was at 20. But I have gone to synagogue at least once a month (or thereabouts), not specifically timing it to make sure that I hit that mark but just because that is what I would usually do. And when I have gone this past not-quite-year, I have stood and said the mourner’s kaddish. As it happens, the one-month-shy-of-a-year mark (according to the Jewish calendar) will be the day after simchat torah, which happens to be the last of the cycle of Jewish holidays that occur almost weekly in one month of every autumn. So when I am in synagogue on the high holidays and on Sukkot, I will say it; and then the next time I happen to be there I won’t—although I will make sure to go to a minyan on my father’s yartzeit and say it then.
So what does it mean for someone who does not believe in God—an atheist, albeit a Jewish atheist—to stand up publicly and say "Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will....", and so forth?
The first thing of course—the most basic thing, the most obvious, but hardly a negligible thing, and indeed one which would, I think, be enough to justify and make meaningful the practice even without all the rest—is that it is simply a way to say, in public, to one's community, I am mourning. There is a certain comfort, even in some sense a certain power, in standing there within a group of people, with nearly all of them silent (and, in some congregations, sitting), and speaking those words. It marks you out, whether this is for active mourning or for a yartzeit: you stand and say those words and everyone sees that you do so, and knows that you are, in one way or another, in a state of loss. The emotion gains meaning due to its reflection in others’ eyes. What makes our lives meaningful is inevitably and always bound up in other people; that is why, or at any rate part of the reason why, we have to perform grief, and not simply grieve. Among Jews, saying kaddish is a way of performing grief.
(This is why, incidentally, that I think that those—not many, but I have met a few—who say the kaddish for abstract others are making a mistake. This is usually ideological, at least in a broad sense. I knew a rabbi who said that they were going to say it every time they prayed until they’d said it six million times; I recently spoke with an Israeli who was saying it for the hostages. And I sympathize, obviously, with both those griefs, and do not mean to gainsay in the slightest the intensity with which people feel them. But however overwhelming a communal grief, a personal grief is different: in particular, a family grief is different. If you perform grief for strangers, then you will be bereft of means to perform it for those who are still closer to you precisely when you need it most. I don’t mean that this is true according to Jewish law or tradition; I simply mean that it is psychologically true—that you, the sayer of kaddish, will most likely find it personally true. You will need a way to perform grief some day; you would be wise to leave yourself not only room to feel something you have never felt before, but to also leave yourself language within which to articulate that grief.)
So yes, saying Kaddish is a performance of grief—no less for those who are themselves theists than for atheists: it does not cease to be that even if it is also a religious ritual or a sincere expression of religious feeling. The human heart breaks and we need to cry out in pain; that we believe someone is listening, that someone is there to be praised, does not annul that basic motivation. We perform grief in the language we have to hand, that is ready in our mouths: if you are a Jew, particularly if you are religious Jew, kaddish is a language, maybe the language, that is there to speak. Whatever the literal words of the kaddish mean, the act of saying kaddish means: I am grieving. I am bereft. They whom I loved are gone. Hear me, see me in my grief.
But for me, at least, it means something else too.
Among believing Jews, saying the kaddish is an affirmation: that even in one's loss one can still affirm God's will and praise his name—”the affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darknesses” as Potok put it. It is not precisely an act of defiance, but it is something akin to that—a defiance, perhaps, of grief, of the brokenness and darkness that can overwhelm us at those moments, an act of crying aloud: I am wounded, but I am still here, and I still praise God, exalt his name, and desire his will.
For an atheist—for this atheist, anyway—it means the same thing... without God. It is for me, no less than for a theist, an “affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darknesses”. It is just the meaning which I am affirming that has changed. Oh, sure, the precise words no longer fit—but the meaning in the act still does. Many of our traditions lose their literal meaning while still maintaining their symbolic ones; the kaddish does that for me.
Which simply presses the question: what on Earth might that mean, to affirm meaning in a cosmos that (on any larger-than-human scale) lacks it? What might that even look like? What meaning do I actually affirm?
I am sure that various atheist Jews would give different answers (“two Jews, three opinions”, goes the old joke.) So of course I do not speak for us all (a larger group than most would warrant.) But this, at least, is what I mean by it.
If the Kaddish is a prayer to sanctify God in the face unbearable grief, to say that yes, I am wounded, but I still will stand and praise God and ask that His will be done, then an atheists’ Kaddish is a prayer to sanctify and embrace life. To say that life hurts, life is cruel and its end still crueler, but that the good in it outweighs the bad, that I embrace it anyway, despite everything. It is a plea for life in despite of its bleakness and horror and hurt. There is an old school of thought that “not to be born is best of all”14: the atheist’s kaddish is a rejection of that thought. It is saying, “I am glad to live, even though to live is to be in pain and to suffer loss.” There is so much pain in life, so much loss and disappointment and grief and sorrow and hurt, that it is easy to think that it isn’t worth it, at least to think that it isn’t worth going through, even if you don’t go so far as to think about actually actively ending it. To say kaddish is to deny that, to refuse it, to abjure it. It is to say that yes, there is death and loss and pain, but still, magnified and sanctified be God’s name, where God’s name and will are metaphors for how things happen to be, have to be, are: for life as a whole. For Spinoza’s God, perhaps. I am still here, and I am still embracing all of this, with its pain and sorrow and all the rest that is inevitably bound up with it. I will bless and praise and glorify and exalt and extol and honor and adore and laud life, for all that it carries within it an inevitable wrongness that is bound in its esseence, that can never be purged from it. Although it hurts, and will hurt, and will ultimately take everything I have, though my life will end as all lives end with the loss of everything I am and care for and hope, still I will say yes to it. Still I will bless it, and ask for more blessing.
If the traditional Kaddish is a prayer of faith in God despite darkness and pain, the atheist’s kaddish is a prayer embracing life despite that same darkness, and that same pain.
So far as I know, no one else has thought of the kaddish specifically in precisely this way (although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn someone had: if you are a non-believing Jew, it is a natural step to take). But the feeling behind it, what I mean by it—that I have seen elsewhere, captured in other words. Or, at least, I have seen words that from one direction or another come close. So in order to further elucidate what I mean I want to quote some other texts by other writers whose words express, to some degree and in some partial way, what seems to me an atheist (or at least secular) kaddish says. I will move from texts that are farther away (although each still contains some key, essential spark of the spirit I am pointing towards) towards ones that are closer; but the differences are, I hope, as illuminating as the similarities.
The first text is the 2016 poem by Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”—one of the great poems of the century, at least so far. As it has already appeared repeatedly online, I give it here in full:
Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.— Maggie Smith
Here we have the poet embracing life in its horror, despite its horror. It is powerful enough that I couldn’t not quote it here. But it isn’t precisely what I mean, close though it is. First of all, Smith is embracing life on behalf of her children—not saying that I (her I) will continue, I will stand up, but rather saying that she wants them to. Secondly, the “terrible” that life is is, in her poem, quite abstract—”For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird./For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,/sunk in a lake.” You don’t get the sense that she has endured these things, at least not particularly, and not recently. And finally, in Smith’s poem she envisions life being better. “This place could be beautiful, right?” She imagines a better world, in which no stones are thrown at birds and no child is ever broken, bagged, and sunk in a lake. Which is a lovely dream, and a dream worthy of pursuing, but even its utmost fulfillment would not mean that no birds and no people ever die: so that the pain she mourns is not quite that which I am speaking of, although it is not wholly different, either.
The second text I want to mention is the poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021)15 “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”. In all honesty, this poem does not speak to me as powerfully as Smith’s does (nor as the others I shall cite here do)—perhaps because I am reading it in translation, not in the original. But I do love the title, which also serves the poem as a refrain: that sentiment, the praise of the broken world, is very close to the feeling I am attempting to convey. Here is a small bit of the poem, as translated by Clare Cavanagh:
Try to praise the mutilated world.... You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world.
The third and penultimate text I want to cite is in one sense the farthest from my meaning of any of the four, since it is an explicitly theist text. It is, in fact, a story precisely about saying kaddish. But it has within it a defiance which fits my meaning well, and for all it is theist, it is also a little… well. Let me quote it.
This is a story by Elie Wiesel, from his book A Jew Today (1978), from a section called “Legends of Today”, which, through a series of stories, gropes its way towards a post-Holocaust theology, or at least a way to continue to believe in the face of such evil. Wiesel starts with one story, which he then deems inadequate, and so tells another, and then another, and finally ends with the one I shall quote. That last story is a story about the expulsion from Spain, one the cataclysmic events in Jewish history. He tells of a ship which ended stranding a family. on a deserted beach. And this is what Wiesel (as translated by his wife, Marion Wiesel) writes:
Among the refugees there was a man with his wife and their two children. Tortured by hunger and thirst, they began to walk, hoping to find an inhabited and hospitable place. But the sand around them extended into infinity.
One evening they collapsed with fatigue. They were four to fall asleep; they were three to rise. The father dug a grave for his wife, and the children recited the Kaddish. And they took up their walk again.
The next day they were three to lie down; only two woke up. The father dug a grave for his older son and recited the Kaddish. And with his remaining son he continued the march.
Then one night the two stretched out. But at dawn only the father opened his eyes. He dug a grave in the sand and this is how he addressed God: “Master of the Universe, I know what You want—I understand what You are doing. You want despair to overwhelm me. You want me to cease believing in You, to cease praying to You, to cease invoking Your name to glorify and sanctify it. Well, I tell you: No, no—a thousand times no! You shall not succeed! In spite of me and in spite of You, I shall shout the Kaddish, which is a song of faith, for You and against You. This song You shall not still, God of Israel.”
And God allowed him to rise and go, farther and farther, carrying his solitude under a deserted sky. (pp. 135-136)
You see why I hesitated to call it fully theist, don’t you, reader? The sky is deserted! The song is not only faith for God but also faith “against” God. The man’s words—which, note, are in the text where, in every other case, he or his children say kaddish, so that it is, structurally, placed as if it were the kaddish—are an explicit defiance of God’s will, or what the man takes to be God’s will: God wants to break the man, make him cease his belief and his prayer, his glorification and sanctification of His name. But the man shouts his defiance of that will, of that God, to the sky.
I feel that way about life: I will praise it, for it and against it, even in time it will kill us all, and leave nothing but the darkness of mere being16 in its place.
My final example is a speech from Tony Kusher’s play cycle Angels in America (made up of Millennium Approaches (1991) and Peristroika (1992). These plays are not theist—the author is secular (I believe an atheist)—even though they depict a world in which angels are real, and God is too (although he is absent, absconded, a deadbeat Father).17 But despite God’s presence in the story (or at least His present absence within it), despite this speech being spoken to angels and calling for a blessing (which Kushner, in his playwright’s notes at the play’s end, defines (following Harold Bloom’s translation of the Hebrew word) as “more life”), despite all this, it is a clearly, distinctly secular speech, asking for life on secular terms. In this speech Prior Walter, the prophet of America, who is dying of AIDS and has been cruelly abandoned by his lover, confronts the host of angels and says the following:
But still. Still. Bless me anyway.
I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.
I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse, but . . . You see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but . . . Bless me any- way. I want more life.
— Tony Kusher, Peristroika, Act 5, Scene 5 (ellipses in the original)
And here we have it all, or almost all: Kushner’s hero is not asking for others, he is speaking for himself: I want more life: I, and not another; I, and not a child. And he is speaking not of horrors in the abstract, but of horrors he has witnessed and indeed suffered. It is still not quite all which I mean in speaking the kaddish, for it lacks the element of praise. But it is as close as any text I can think of comes.
Except, perhaps, for the kaddish itself.
Last weekend was Yom Kippur; this week the fall festival, Sukkot, begins. I will probably be in shul a few times during Sukkot, and will stand and say, again: This place could be beautiful. I praise the mutilated world. In spite of me and in spite of You, for You and against You. Bless me anyway: I want more life. Magnified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. And then, after Simchat Torah, less than two weeks away now, I will have buried both my parents, and, save for their annual yartzeits and any time I happen to be in synagogue for the quadrennial yizkor, I may never say kaddish again.18
But I will still mean it: or, at any rate, I hope to. Life may break me, after all: sooner or later, it breaks all of us. But I want to stand and say it as long as I am able to stand.
The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and there are people who are more sores than skin, burned and in agony, or with flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children. The world is mutilated, and one by one God or life will kill us all. And my mother and my father are dead. But life is still worth it. I still believe, in what I can only describe as an act of faith, that life is worth living, that we should be glad we are alive, that the good outweighs the bad. I am still glad that this whole, horrid, beautiful, wretched, blessed experience is a good thing. To be blessed and praised and glorified and exalted and extolled and honored and adored and lauded.
So bless me any way. I want more life. Magnified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. Say ye, amen.
Programming note: I usually post Attempts on Thursdays at 4, and do not intend to change that, but since this Thursday is a Jewish holiday, I decided to post this on Monday instead.
And I would guess that the number of people who learn Aramaic without first learning Hebrew is minuscule, if indeed there are any at all.
The word is Yiddish, and its roots mean "year time". If there is a Hebrew equivalent, I don’t know it. The closest English equivalent is “anniversary”, but of course in English an anniversary is more often something positive—a wedding anniversary, or a fancy term for a birthday—that its bald use is misleading, although we do speak of the anniversary of tragedies and horrors and sorrows too.
"Adult" here is defined of as the age of moral responsibility, that is, bar or bat mitzvah, which is 13 for a boy, 12 for a girl.
Obviously this list dates from long before non-binary genders had developed as an idea. And, of course, the number "seven" is entirely dependent on how our language genders various roles (and you could make it eight by listing “daughters and sons” separately). at heart, one might say, there are four types of people one ought to mourn officially: a parent, a sibling, a spouse, and a child.
Indeed, one can say Kaddish for anyone—particularly if one of one's parents has already died. If one has a sibling, spouse or child die while both one's parents are alive, but has no children of their own, it is (in sufficiently orthodox circles) a practice to ask (or even hire) someone to say kaddish for them, so as not to "dishonor" one's parents by saying for another, but also not to have them not spoken for, as it were.
While the various kaddishes are substantially similar, they do differ in certain ways, hence my specifying that this is a translation of the mourner’s kaddish.
There are other prayers for that, ones said in a house of morning, and said in synagogue four times a year, on the final day of Passover, the second day of Shavuout, on Shemini Atzeret, and on Yom Kippur.
Those were all he had then published save his (then) most recent novel, The Gift of Asher Lev (1990), which had come out after I had read all the others. He had also written a number of nonfiction books which I hadn’t (and still haven’t) read.
As someone who wrote a book in which the two protagonists move in and out of a religous faith, I think that reading Potok was probably more formative for me than simply teaching me about Judaism and making me want to say kaddish, although I will admit that I had never made the connection until writing this essay.
And, eventually, two Japanese tourists who stop and watch them pray, although who (presumably) do not understand the prayer or its context
For those observant Jews who follow other mourning restrictions, such as not attending certain types of parties and dancing, the other restrictions last a full year. I have seen parents not dance at their children’s weddings, since they were still within mourning, although they were in every other respect fully celebratory.
One underappreciated aspect of the New Atheism, and in my view one of its unalloyed triumphs, was its consciousness raising and, well, not quite pride (in the June sense of the word) but at any rate defiant openness that it inspired among atheists. Before the New Atheism, atheists were non-believers, but they were—certainly I was—hesitant about using the word, and a bit abashed about it: the nonbelief that dared not speak its name, lest it give offense. The New Atheism, which had a number of problems and was hardly an unblemished positive as a movement, wiped that away, and with the fierceness that gay pride (in its defiant early days, when it was risky and brave and angry and not the widely-accepted fete adorned with politicians and corporate endorsements that it has later become) inspired in gay men and lesbian women, people would say—I began to say—yes: I am an atheist.
The Jewish calendar is lunar, adjusted to keep in time with the solar year by adding leap months, seven every nineteen years, which causes the Jewish date (most notable in Jewish holidays) to jump around (compared to the Gregorian calendar) quite a bit, which is why in recent years Hanukah has been as early as Thanksgiving and as late as after Christmas.
This is found, e.g., in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus.
I can’t help noting that his life, although at 75 years was not precisely short, was still within the chronological bounds of my father’s life, being born when my father was living and dying before my father died. And I did and do not feel that my father lived as long as he might have, as long as I wanted.
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” —Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston. (Vintage, 1989 (originally 1961)), p. 326.
I’ve seen it noted (by Joshua Pederson in "More Life" and More: Harold Bloom, the J Writer, and the Archaic Judaism of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3 (FALL 2009), p. 587, ft. 10) that God’s full reality is only established in an optional scene—where Roy Cohn talks to him on the phone—which can therefore dramatically shift the meaning (and cosmology) of the play by its inclusion or omission.
At least I hope I won’t, since if I did it would presumably mean my wife or son or sister had died. Yet time and chance commeth to us all, as we shall be reminded in synagogues this week when Ecclesiastes is read upon the holiday of Sukkot.
Note: an (abridged) version of this post was published at the Times of Israel here:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/saying-kaddish-as-an-atheist/
There has been some discussion in comments there although not, alas, always of the highest quality. (My wife: "you READ the COMMENTS!?!?")