A Year of Kaddish

I returned to California last Friday, nearly six months after the funeral and sitting shivah. It’s rained a lot over the past week, which, if you want to read biblical meaning into the weather, you can interpret that as a good sign. Water often equals life, and as I visit with my dad I see a man whose come to terms with his loss. He brings thick, whole-grain Artisan bread, which he calls “the fountain of youth,” to friends and his doctor’s nurses as gifts of appreciation. He laughs. He enjoys talking on the phone. He even went to a dinner party last Saturday night, leaving me home alone.  In short, he’s engaged in life again, including new projects.

One is renovating an old house in front of a rental housing development he built in 1962. He also purchased the office building his property management company offices are in, offices he rented for many years, and he’s excited about owning the building and senses that he’s invested in a good opportunity.

Beth El’s gabbi, or ritual director, Rabbi Howard Sowalsky, gave me a Christmas present this morning. Not intentionally. More accurately, he gave me an honor: He asked me if I would lead the second part of the Shacharit service, the heart of the service, and a section I have never done before. Not true, I did it once before on a snowy morning earlier this month when we couldn’t muster a minyan – I think we had seven or eight brave souls that morning.

So this marked the second time I’d led, but the first time surrounded by a minyan. I had been practicing in spare moments at home, but I was still nervous when I began because several of the prayers contain – for me, at least – enough tricky Hebrew phrases that it felt like traversing an obstacle course. But I made it through that section unscathed so by the time we arrived at the Shemoneh Esrei, I took a deep breath of relief and relaxed.

Asking to lead and being able to say yes connected me back to that time in Sharon, Pennsylvania when one of the old-timers at the traditional minyan asked me to lead. That day I had to defer, knowing I hadn’t yet mastered all the prayer language or the nusach, the special melody used to signify different parts of the service and whether it’s a weekday, Shabbat or Festival.

But it goes deeper than that. We all have our own set of wants, desires, expectations, hopes and visions about how we want to live our lives. How we want to parent, how we want to show up with our life-partners; what careers we choose and how and what kind of work we perform from 9 to 5 or whenever we go to work; how we bring joy into our lives and how we express honestly the whole range of other emotions we feel in the course of a lifetime.

Leading my community in prayer just happens to be one of those things I’ve always imagined doing. And today I accepted a new challenge. I knew it was a stretch because for a moment, after being asked to lead, I felt dred. But I also believe we only grow when we stretch ourselves, even if our default reaction is to resist and stay in our comfort zone.

I click on the cassette tape of Rabbi Alan Ullman’s 1994 class on kaddish. We had been talking about just the first few words of the prayer and how opening up to the feelings triggered by the loss of a loved one — pain, anger, whatever else you’re feeling — how allowing those feelings to penetrate our being can bring us to experience God as larger and more holy.

Rabbi Ullman moves ever so slowly to the next few words and he can’t help but explore them: May God’s great name grow and be more holy – and here Alan reads slowly to accent his next point: “…in the world that God created as God willed.”

The very next part of the verse is talking about God’s sovereignty “lest we forget whose world this really is,” says Ullman. “It’s the world of God’s own creation,” a concept that we moderns don’t always believe, or might we say don’t really believe.

To reinforce the words from the kaddish, Ullman quotes Torah. “Leviticus, Chapter 25, I believe,” and it turns out he’s right, although for reference purposes I double check today. If you want to look it up, you’ll find the quote in Lev. Chap 25, verse 23-24. “And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and settlers with Me.” In other words, the entire world is God’s creation, according to Torah and we are simply tenants. We’re not owners.

“The idea of ownership,” he adds, “somehow applies also to the way we view our lives. We own our lives. We’re in control. And we act as if death is somehow an aberration. “

But by saying kaddish “we are acknowledging and accepting God’s control at that most difficult of moments.

“If we say that God is in control and that death is a natural cycle, then our pain at loss is also a natural cycle. And yet all too often we view pain as unnatural, but I think that’s just part of the whole.”

Thoughts to ponder at the Shabbat table tonight.

To be continued.

For all its ideals and challenges, Judaism can be such a practical religion. That morning last August when Rabbi Judah Dardik gathered us around the kitchen table to explain the customs of mourning, I asked him about the appropriateness of going on a planned vacation in the Adirondacks three weeks into the future.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to find a minyan,” I said. He pulled out his Treo to look up the name and number of someone at Yeshiva University, explaining that for a donation to the school, he could put my mother’s name on a list so that I would be “covered” whenever I couldn’t say kaddish. In my stead, a yeshiva student would say the prayer in my mother’s memory. It seemed like an easy way out. For a few bucks, or whatever price I put on this kaddish service, I would be covered? I wondered: could I get someone to go my dentist’s appointments as well? As it turned out, and somewhat amazingly, I found a minyan in the Adirondacks, the Lake George Summer Minyan, a 30-minute drive from where I was staying, which every time I attended felt like being transplanted into a Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood that had moved to the mountains.

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“You could make the minyan!” Julia said, as we boarded the Roncari Valet Parking shuttle van outside Bradley airport yesterday evening. I looked at my watch. She was right. It was 6:30. If we stopped at Beth El on our way home, I would get there in time for ma’ariv.

I had assumed I would miss it by the time our flight landed and we got to our car. And given those circumstances, I also decided tonight would be a good time to practice the discipline of flexibility, paradoxical as that may sound. But now I was looking forward to making the minyan and saying kaddish. Flexibility could wait for another day.

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I got to the T-shirt shop, “Jungle Paradise,” just before 6 p.m. on Monday. No sign of the rabbi or anyone waiting to pray. Just tourists shopping for T-shirts with funny or stupid sayings on them. Or underwear with funny or stupid sayings on them. Or bikinis or sandals or souvenirs. By 6:20 a few men showed up. Then a few more and one of them signaled to me. “We’ll pray in the back.”

And sure enough, as promised, we had our minyan. Ten of us cramped into a back storage room where boxes of inventory sat. Tangerine-colored skirts hung on a rack next to us and you could hear the muffled sound of FM pop radio – the store’s Muzak in the background. As circumstances had it, David, a 38-year-old Israeli who worked in a shop a few doors down on Key West’s main commercial strip, Duval Street, was saying kaddish for his father who had died last Friday back in Israel. David hadn’t flown back to Israel for the funeral; instead he managed to gather enough of his friends, all Israeli and all who worked on Duval Street, to join him for a minyan each evening for mincha and ma’ariv services.

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“Do you want to davven Musaf?” It was the question one of the old-timers asked me one day several years ago at Shabbos services in the cozy basement chapel in western Pennsylvania where we were visiting my in-laws.  Musaf is the last part of the morning Sabbath service and Leonard Rosenberg, an insurance salesman during the week who ran the chapel service, used the Yiddish word, davven, instead of “pray,” but he was really asking if  I would  lead the congregation down the homestretch.

The building housed a Reform temple, the main synagogue in Sharon, Pa., a  community that once bustled as one of the many steel towns between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, but which, like much of the Rust Belt, had seen better days.  In the downstairs chapel, a small group — mostly men — and most in their 70s or 80s met Saturday mornings for traditional Orthodox services, all lay-led. Herring, challah, a few cookies and shots of schnapps or Crow Royal were served afterwards in the library across the hall. They always were glad to see me because most times that I visited, I made the tenth and the minyan. Read more �

My mom.

My mother, Pearl Felson, died early the morning of August 6 in her sleep in her bed in the home where she had raised me and my two brothers. My dad, Stan, was asleep next to her, when the caregiver woke him to say she thought my mother had stopped breathing. As deaths go, I guess it doesn’t get much better than that.

She was 87. Five months earlier, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,  which, her oncologist told us, is one of those diseases that’s detected too late to beat. I won’t go into all the details except to say that we all visited her as often as we could. Those close by like my brother, Jeff and his family, as well as my cousins who live nearby in the San Francisco Bay Area; and those of us who live farther away, like me and my family on the East Coast, and my brother, Howard, and his wife, who live in Jerusalem.

But this blog isn’t about my mother’s death or life. Not directly. It’s about what happened, what happens, after. The day of the graveside funeral, that morning, the rabbi stopped by the house and gathered us around the kitchen table to talk about the funeral and explain the Jewish laws and customs of mourning. He mentioned that according to halacha, or Jewish law, a spouse is obligated to say Kaddish daily for one month; when a parent dies, the children say it for eleven months. (Why it’s not a year is another issue for another day). Thus, among observant Jews who are mourning a parent who has died, Kaddish, an Aramaic prayer more than two thousand years old, is said at least three times daily during the morning, afternoon and evening services.

It’s hard to describe where I am on the Jewish spectrum of observance. From where many of my religiously liberal-to-secular Jewish friends stand, I’m this close to being a black-hatted haredi, which is meant to mean I am in their eyes too rigid and religious. I belong to a Conservative shul; I feel comfortable in an Orthodox one. But it is, as I say, all relative. Yet, and here’s the point I’m trying to make, after we buried my mom and during that first week sitting shiva (the seven-day period of mourning), I felt compelled to say Kaddish daily at morning, afternoon and evening services. When I returned home to the Northeast, during the sholoshim, or 30-day period of mourning that comes next, I continued to go to shul nearly every morning and evening (many synagogues hold afternoon and evening services back-to-back for practical reasons). And the next month as well. I’m now into the third month, still getting up to make the 7 a.m. morning service; still returning in the early evening.

My idea is to blog about this new phenomenon in my life; how it affects me and those around me. The prayer services are almost all in Hebrew, and the truth is because many who attend morning services need to get to work afterwards and those who attend evening services want to get home, we davven or pray fairly quickly. That doesn’t leave much time for reflection. For wondering how this process is helping me mourn my loss or feel more spiritual or closer to God. I’m hoping this virtual space will give me that opportunity to explore and sit with those questions. I also welcome your comments and your stories. Like any journey, it’s the experiences and people you encounter along the way that touch you. I’m hoping that will be the case here as well.