A Year of Kaddish

For a variety of reasons, I decided to go to the 4:10 minyan this afternoon at Beth David. There was a risk, however. There might not be a minyan. It was raining. It was a Monday. Their track record the past week had been spotty at best for getting 10 men to show up for a weekday service just after 4 in the afternoon.

I opened the chapel door and quickly scanned the room. As my kids would have said when they were learning elementary math and how to approximate, “I estimated about eight men in the room.” That was a good sign. We had about five minutes before the service was to begin. A few more men walked in, then the rabbi, and all I knew was that we had more than the required ten.

When you are trying to say Kaddish and you need a minyan and you come up short  – well, you feel disappointment. I do anyway.

“Doesn’t the effort count for something?” a friend asked me? Yes, I suppose it does count for something. But, the fact remains I don’t  say Kaddish.

I mention all of this because it was dicey the last few days over the Thanksgiving holiday. Last Friday, for example, the morning after Thanksgiving, I decided to go to Beth David, the traditional shul in my neighborhood for the 6:30 service. But, we never got a minyan –- eight men showed up. Maybe regulars were out of town for the holiday. At any rate, without a minyan,  no Kaddish. We skipped the repetition of the Shemoneh Esrei too, in which the prayer leader chants what we all recited silently, or more accurately in a whisper, beforehand. The service ended earlier than it would have. I walked outside and looked at my watch. It was 6:55 a.m.

And then I had a crazy thought. I could drive over to Beth El, my Conservative egalitarian synagogue,  for the 7 a.m. service. Surely, they would have a minyan since they count both men and women. And thus, I’d be able to say Kaddish.

I pulled into the parking lot and walked down the hall at at 7:08 a.m., figuring I had missed the first few minutes. But to my surprise, as I walked into the chapel, a small group of men and women were just sitting there. Waiting for a few more men or women to show up so they would have a minyan. The cantor, who was in charge that morning, was making phone calls to congregants who lived nearby and who might be inclined to do a mitzvah and rush over.

Another case of people out of town because it was the day after Thanksgiving?

We started the service anyway, omitting the prayers, including the Kaddish, that can’t be said without a minyan. It was deja vu all over again. Twenty-five minutes or so later, as we were nearing the end of the service, numbers nine and ten showed up. And so Kaddish could be said.

If you don’t know the rules of the game, this may all sound like obsessing over minutia. But there’s something to observing rules that have been followed for hundreds of years. And so when you get to the point where you can say the prayer under those terms, it feels special, holy, in fact.

That’s why it felt so satisfying this afternoon to be able to pray mincha and ma’ariv with a minyan. Still, tomorrow is another day and another challenge.