Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008

Living Kaddish

by Ayelet Amittay

Mourners and Those Observing Yahrzeit, Please Rise. 

OF ALL THE PRAYERS IN the Jewish liturgy, only one lives inside my mouth. Ever since I was ten years old, I have wanted to rise with the other mourners and recite the Mourner's Kaddish. I want to rise, like the mast of a ship, in the sea of the seated congregation. I want to be seen, grief draped white across my shoulders like a tallis. I want to hear the congregation respond "Amen!" as I praise the glory of God's name in my father's memory.

But my father is not dead. One cannot recite the Mourner's Kaddish in memory of those who are living. Not even in memory of a father whose self has died, a father who does pushups to quiet the voices storming his brain. As a child, I saw a classmate mourn for her father and understood the power of the Mourner's Kaddish to make her losses visible. Every day during morning prayers, I watched her praise God's name while we fidgeted on plastic chairs, a dumbstruck supporting cast. Until I heard her single voice stitching together the Hebrew words, I did not know that grief could be so publicly expressed, and publicly received. The Mourner's Kaddish gives both the mourner and her community a way of perceiving and speaking about the loss of loved ones. I write this essay out of my need for a prayer that would redeem other kinds of losses—living losses.

When we were classmates in the sixth grade, Becky Wasserman's father died of cancer. Our whole grade filed into the largest classroom in the school. Such assemblies took place only during special events: to celebrate holidays, to watch on a huge screen as Arafat and Rabin shook hands while Clinton spread his arms between them like an angel, and now to hear this: Becky's father has passed away. The teachers spoke to us from the front of the room; they seemed far away, stiff as potted plants in their long skirts and plaster-colored shoes.

We were encouraged to visit Becky at home. We were told that we need not talk about her father unless she brought it up, that our very presence would comfort her. Even without her in the room, we were witnesses to her loss. Although we went to a Jewish Day School, we did not pray for her. But witnessing is also a form of prayer.

Back in history class, I couldn't concentrate. I smiled into my cupped hand, happiness bubbling for Becky. I was happy because we knew exactly what to do for her. No one had ever spoken to me about my father's mental illness, not even two years earlier when his brief, terrible crime was featured in our local paper. He had stabbed another member of my family, an act so extreme that no one seemed to know how to respond. Walking through the halls of fifth and sixth grade, I had grown used to feeling as if my body were a soundproof chamber, a room where people go to practice shooting guns in silence. I had never known that there was away for my classmates, or any community, to respond to such a loss. Nor had I realized that Judaism has rituals to pull mourners out of their utter aloneness. So when we heard about Becky, I was stunned that someone's personal tragedy could be so completely seen and spoken, and with such compassion. Years later, I would begin to think about words like "obligation" and "responsibility," to consider the silence surrounding me as a failure of my religious community. That morning in history class, as we turned in our textbooks to the Roman Empire, I was simply happy that Becky's loss was visible. And, horribly, I was happy that finally, out of all the two-parent families in our grade, I had acquired a peer.

The teachers had encouraged us to visit Becky during shiva, the seven-day period during which mourners do not leave their home. Jewish law dictates low stools for the mourners, mirrors clouded by sheets, a daily group of community members to help with the prayers. Seven days for a family to walk around the house in a daze. Not working, not going to school, they are supposed to be home, together, falling apart together. I watched Becky the one time I visited her, wanting to tell her: I know what it means to lose what you have lost. I wanted my earnestness to touch her, wanted her to feel our sisterhood and be comforted by it. This was a selfish comfort, my arms held out to her so that she could also hold me.

But she did not see my emotion shining on her face. She was talking with a few of our classmates, smiling, looking the same, no marks on her. I wondered then, do I look the same as I did before my father's illness? I had taken it for granted that what I had experienced glowed on my skin, radioactive. When I sat alone at recess, I imagined that glow swallowing me, so bright that if anyone looked at me they would be unable to see. Perhaps, at the center of those visitors, Becky had enough of being seen inside her loss and wanted back the normalcy of bookbags in the corner and quiet laughter.

The Mourner's Kaddish lets mourners be seen. On their feet among the seated congregation, they stand to praise God and to be seen praising God in spite of everything. But they are also standing to be seen for who they are: people in great pain. What we call the Mourner's Kaddish was once known as kaddish yatom, the Orphan's Kaddish, recited by a son three times a day for twelve months following the death of a parent. Even with its changed name, the prayer retains that sense of having been prematurely left to face the world alone. Standing: feeling alone. But the mourners are surrounded by the solid body of the faithful. The congregation sees them, and they are not alone. The prayer recognizes the impulse of the mourner to isolate herself even as it offers a negation, a redemption, an undoing of that impulse.

This communal participation in the Mourner's Kaddish is so crucial that the prayer cannot be recited without a minyan, a group often adults. There must be a chorus, a group to carry the lines at the heart of this prayer: "May His great Name be blessed forever and for all eternity." And to fall silent in the passages between, to listen to the mourner praising God's name in a public place. In public, for all to see and hear, the mourner reminds herself and the congregation that death has stepped into the circle of their unity but has not broken it.

Ten adults. Sitting in morning services with my classmates, I imagined nine witnesses watching me stand in the center of a chapel. Myself as a standing figure, reminding them of what it is I need: to be seen and heard by them in my grief so the loss is real. Reminding them of what they need: to know that one day they will stand or already have stood for this prayer, that they too will be held or were held in the attention of the congregation, that they were seen, that their loss was witnessed as a real loss.

Looking back at my middle school years, at my longing for and fascination with Becky's Kaddish, I know that it seemed a way to understand loss and be understood inside of it. As I grew older, I tried to find my own substitute prayers that could do the work of the Mourner's Kaddish. All through high school, I woke in the early grey light to recite Yehi Ratzon Milphanecha, a prayer to heal the sick, speaking my father's name into the space that is left blank in the prayer-book. The prayer-book seemed to know I needed that space. But I knew this was not the prayer I needed; I knew that my father would never be healed. I needed a prayer that said, "Help me grieve for the father whom I hug across a long linoleum table, other prisoners on either side of us. Help me find a way to tell people about this father without stunning them silent." The Jewish liturgy has many prayers for strength in a difficult time, prayers praising God in the face of death and our enemies. But there are no prayers that say, "Help me grieve the many little deaths of my life as I knew it." I wanted a Mourner's Kaddish for living losses.

I didn't know then how problematic my desire might seem. A wish to say the Kaddish might seem to carry inside of it a wish for my father to have died. But in truth, I felt his death had already happened: the loss of my father was so total that it felt like death. During the time when I began this essay, I went to see a local rabbi to ask about religious practices of mourning. I wanted to ask him whether the Mourner's Kaddish, with its connective ropes that bind individual to community, might serve as an example for how the Jewish community can address mental illness. I wanted to ask his blessing for using the Mourner's Kaddish to speak my own loss.

The rabbi's office was crammed with expressions of determined optimism: pictures of his young son, books with cheerful titles like To Life! and Celebration and Renewal. The rabbi leaned back in his chair, far across the room from me, and admonished me to have a more positive attitude. After all, even if my father's mind were broken, wasn't his body still healthy? Wasn't my father still alive? Couldn't I, if I wanted to, pick up the phone and call, fly to Israel and take him in my arms?

I wish I had told him what I thought then: If you knew my father, if you knew the dark thicket of his speech, his sudden surges of paranoia and lewd comments, you would not be so quick to get on the phone with him. I wish I had said: How dare you sit across the room and judge my life.

Instead, after several minutes of silence, I asked, "So you do not think it is fair to apply the ideas of the Mourner's Kaddish to my father's situation?"

"No, I don't," he said. Which meant: a comparison of your losses to death is immoral. He shuffled through books, looking for the prayer to say over the healthy body, I thought: He does not see my loss, just as no one else has seen it.

Without a prescribed response to a loss, there can be no true perception of that loss. Without the Kaddish, there was—and still is—no formalized way for the Jewish community to perceive and react to my family's situation. I want to recite the Kaddish for the visibility it renders, not for its occasion. I want to be seen in this grief just like any grief, seen until the stigma and shame of it burns off, wears away.

Mental illness is still taboo when it is not confessed in front of a live TV audience. My father was hospitalized over the summer; an article appeared in the newspaper, and once school began again I was haunted by this brief blink of publicity. What did people know about me? What were they thinking and not saying? Worse still, in some ways, was the thought that they knew nothing: that I carried the mortification and loss invisibly, the event real but unseen and therefore untouchable. I thought of the shiva calls to Becky's house, the talk with its constant undercurrent of yes, you are in pain. Steaming dishes left on doorsteps. In high school, lying on my front lawn with two friends studying for a math test, I froze when one of them mentioned a stabbing that had happened in this neighborhood. My stabbing.

According to Jewish law, mental illness erases the personhood of the person who is ill. Maimonides wrote that the actions the person commits while mentally ill should be considered never to have happened. Other Talmudic scholars argued that while such actions did take place factually, the actor cannot be held accountable by Jewish laws since laws apply only to people—and personhood requires consciousness of one's actions. Thus, the mentally ill cannot be considered people. I think of my father, how considering him a "non-person" would make it so easy to turn away from the reality of his life. To not see who he became or what he had done. To not see my mother struggling to keep our family from buckling, carting my father from doctor to doctor, listening for ambulance sirens as if they were calling her name. To not see me as I left school every day, going home to the house where these griefs were readying to blossom.

Judaism does not give us a way of understanding and speaking about mental illness. So people turned away to spare me, and themselves, from seeing my life. One or two teachers might have expressed a generalized concern, pulling me aside as the others were emptying from the classroom, but I do not remember their words. I remember looking down at my hands, one folded inside the other. At the beginning of fifth, sixth, seventh grade, my mother would go in to tell my teachers about what had happened with my father. I never asked her why she did this or what the teachers said. I imagined this trip as a journey, her carrying a basket full of stones, the weight of what had happened given over to my teachers in handfuls. What they did with that handful of stone was unknown to me. My teachers taught me Hebrew and Bible stories, celebrated Jewish holidays with construction paper art projects and songs. To me, they were the embodiment of Jewish knowledge, and their silence said: we see you are doing well in class, so we will let lie the pain in your life.

I want to say the Kaddish for my father so that my community, the Jewish community of my hometown, my world, will know exactly what to say in reply to my story: "Amen, may his great name be praised for ever and for all eternity." In the face of loss words can seem sparse. In this prayer the community has a place to go, something they can give. The mourner and the congregation are tied by the bond of liturgy, call and response. The mourner's praise of God is also a crying out: hear me, see me. And the community hears, sees, and responds. My fathers illness seemed outside human experience. For a long time, I thought this meant that I, too, was outside the circle of the human. The community that lets one of its members slip her moorings has lost a piece of itself. And that piece is valuable, no matter how damaged it has been. Each man is made in the image of God: even my father has some God in him.

What I need is a way to say: I remember my father. I praise God even in the face of his illness. Even now, may his great name be praised.

Congregation: Amen.

Ayelet Amittay is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan. Her poems have most recently appeared in The Cream City Review and Cimarron Review. This is her first published essay.

Amittay, Ayelet. 2008. Living kaddish. Tikkun 23(1):64-65,67-68.