Kaddish

Praying during the first grief-soaked month following my father’s death felt rote to me. Awkward. I had taken on the obligation of saying the Mourner’s Kaddish every day for at least a month before realizing I had forgotten how to pray. A professor in college who gave me a C on a paper about James Joyce’s Ulysses said I was like a blind woman trying to describe a painting in front of her. That’s how it felt saying the Kaddish.

I was grateful Judaism had a contingency plan for the faith-impaired like me. It first allows for the fulfillment of commandments without necessarily understanding them. The hope is that, by repeating those feelings of love and respect, the actual feelings will follow.

Among the mourners at the daily egalitarian minyan of ten men and women in my temple, there was a friend nearing the end of eleven months of saying Kaddish for her father. She helped me with the choreography of when to stand and sit during the service. She sensed when I lost my place and pointed out where we were in the prayer book.

Even when I found my place in the text, Hebrew was the starchy language of formal prayer, an obstacle to approaching my father in his afterlife.

My Hebrew was abysmal. I stumbled through words in which I was once fluent, barely pronouncing a semblance of them, with no idea of what I was actually saying until I glanced at the translation on the left side of the prayer book. The Aramaic language of the Kaddish was rooted in an ancient world. I worried the words until they were a tangled, mangled mess.

The same Kaddish — five short paragraphs, each punctuated by an “amen” — occurred toward the end of each of the three daily prayer services. The evening service was my favorite because that was the time of day I had felt closest to my father when I was little, when he came to my room to observe the night sky from my window in the midst of bad weather. “Storms always come in from the south,” he taught me. “And this one will be a doozy.”

I equated snowstorms with the strength I once saw in my father. My childhood home on Asylum Avenue was a corner lot with a lot of sidewalk to shovel. On a snowy day, I watched him clear the driveway and sidewalks and come back invigorated by the outdoors and the exercise.

With my month of daily prayer, I tried to make a place for myself as a daughter mourning her father. I wanted to assert my right to say the Kaddish as a way to fill in the gaps of silence. If I couldn’t find the answers to the mystery of my father, I hoped to find the love I was sure was within me to fill those gaps.

A literal interpretation of Kaddish and daughters yields mixed signals, as there is not a single instance in the Old Testament where a father declares his love for a daughter. Only the five daughters of Zelopehad in the Book of Numbers do more than fade into history by asserting their rights to inherit their father’s parcel in the Holy Land, an early inspiration for women who once had to assert their right to inherit the Kaddish as a spiritual practice and personal expression of grief.

For most of Jewish time, the Kaddish was male-centric. The demarcation was clear: Sons said Kaddish. Daughters did not. The custom goes back to the Talmudic dictum that women are not bound to fulfill commandments that take time away from raising children and keeping house.

I raised children and kept house but, unlike in my old school days at the yeshiva, the Kaddish was my privilege after a sea change in liberal Judaism. Before that, women were at best mute; at worst, relegated to the back of the synagogue. That is why I love the story of Henrietta Szold, the daughter of a rabbi and founder of Hadassah. The oldest child in a family of eight daughters and no sons, Szold declined a male friend’s offer to say Kaddish in her stead when her mother died in 1916. “The Kaddish means to me that the survivor publicly manifests his wish and intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community that his parents had, and that the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation,” she wrote. “You can do that for the generation of your family. I must do that for generations of my family.”

By the end of that first month, I was a regular among the mourners at the evening minyan and had begun to master the words of the Kaddish. They came to me, near Thanksgiving, in a rush of deeper understanding. I finally began to read the words in the prayer book with meaning, with kavanah — intention.

I had truly begun to pray.

I watched many sunsets through the chapel’s domed skylight — not only watching day turn into night but, as Jewish law dictates, I witnessed the sun go down to bring forward a new calendar day. There was renewal in darkness. The daily event had a way of pulling me in, creating a structure for engaging with my father — something I did not have when he was alive.

Soon after her own father died, my mother looked up from correcting school papers late one night and swore she saw him next to her playing dominos at our kitchen table, his white linen guayabera shirt crisp and pristine. I stared at the skylight for a month of evenings, hoping and praying that I would see my father looking down at me in his Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat or, when it was very cold, his blue and white cap emblazoned with the large Y that stood for his alma mater, Yale.

My father’s mysteries had not unlocked for me. I needed more time, so I decided to go ahead and say Kaddish for the entire eleven months. During that year, would I be transformed into a temple-going, non-praying, selectively kosher, non-fasting, skeptical, superstitious, terrified, brazen, monotheistic, mezuzah-kissing, idol-worshipping Jew?

Working a year of Kaddish into my life, determined not to skip a single day, was challenging, often overwhelming. It required the patience and cooperation of my family, which now included a young son, Adam. My husband traveled constantly for work.

There were other factors I couldn’t control, such as ensuring there was the prerequisite number of ten men and women, the required minyan said to offset the isolation of grief, before we could hold the service. Sometimes nine of us waited for a tenth, which made me anxious. I was on a quest and needed a minyan to help me get there.

I minyan-hopped. While Temple Emanuel was my home base, I wanted to keep up my daily routine, not miss a day trying to engage with my father. I widened my search for different minyans so that I never had to pause on my Kaddish journey of getting closer to my father and finally understanding his secrets. Some synagogues were closer to me or fit my schedule better; others were more reliable in raising a minyan.

At an Orthodox synagogue, sunrise and sunset determined the evening services that could begin as early as twilight in winter. At Shaarei Tefillah, one such Orthodox synagogue I sometimes attended during the winter out of convenience and curiosity, I found that among so many men, my voice was shaky and pitched too low, especially when I found myself all alone in the women’s section. Women were welcome to say the Kaddish at Shaarei as long as they remained behind the divider, a makeshift curtain that made me feel claustrophobic.

At Shaarei, I agreed to cover my head with a scarf. The other women who occasionally joined me kept hats in the cloakroom. I often had to wait for a tenth man to show up so that I could say the Kaddish because, as a woman, they didn’t count me in that synagogue’s minyan.

One afternoon, I thought I heard Dad whisper to me, “This is not what I want.” I was halfway through my year of saying Kaddish and wondered whether I was saying the prayer in spite of what he wanted, as if I had read the letter he had sent me that time instead of burning it. I had been waiting to catch a glimpse of him after his death, but all I got was this chiding that perhaps I was more fixated on the undertaking or end goal rather than being genuinely devout or creating a posthumous relationship with him. Was I simply returning to my old obsessive, compulsive, self-calming religious behavior?

On a night when the timing was tight to get to my nightly recitation, I made an abrupt U-turn on broad, highly trafficked Harvard Street to get to yet another synagogue near a restaurant where I was meeting a friend. No sooner had I done so, a police officer flashed his siren to pull me over. Time was evaporating and I was starting to panic.

“Get back in your vehicle,” the officer broadcast from his cruiser as I walked over to rap on his window.

“Can we get on with this?” I said. “I need to get to a religious service.” Up to that point my attendance had been perfect. I was afraid that skipping a night would reset me back to zero.

“Back to your car now!” said the officer. Arms crossed, I stood stock-still. Saying Kaddish in the eyes of God for my father was certainly more important than obeying these petty, man-made rules.

“Hands on the hood so I can see them.”

“You don’t understand,” I yelled. “I have to get to the synagogue to pray for my father. Don’t you have a father? I did, and he’s gone now. I need to get to synagogue to remember him, to honor him.”

The officer stared at me, wide-eyed. “You got anyone to go home to?” he asked quietly.

“I do,” I whispered.

He didn’t give me a ticket. I ran into minyan just five minutes late.

“You’re overdoing it,” was my mother’s assessment when she found out I was still saying the Kaddish past my original goal of thirty days. “You’ll never do that for me,” she added, the source of her true disappointment.

The Kaddish had begun as an obsession with piecing together who my father really was, with finding my way through to him at last. I was not ready to let go, either of my father or the prayer.

In my determination not to skip a day of Kaddish, I went searching while on vacation in Rome for a temple among the city’s 900 churches. I found the Great Synagogue where armed policemen surrounded the courtyard. A private security guard asked my husband, Ken, not me, what business he had there. I told the young guard, who was wearing a kippah, that I needed to say the Kaddish for my father. “Americana,” he muttered.

Inside, the daily minyan was formal — like walking into a sepia photograph — with the cantor and rabbi wearing traditional robes and hats. Ken and I had to sit separately. A divider, improvised with a row of tall potted plants as stiff as the policemen outside, walled off the women, who talked throughout the service until I rose to say the Kaddish.

As I stood, the woman next to me put a hand on my arm. “Ladies don’t have to,” she whispered.

I gently removed her hand. “I want to,” I said.

During my year of Kaddish, I finally broke out of the role of passive mourner. It began to happen at Kehillath Israel in Brookline, a traditional Conservative synagogue whose congregants — most of them regulars who went just to be part of a minyan so that people could say Kaddish — raced through the evening service, practically humming their entreaties to God. It was an express train of a service.

The basement chapel looked like an old-world Yeshiva. Many of the congregants were elderly and some arrived with caregivers. This old-style worship service was where I became proficient in the evening service. No one announced page numbers. There were no breaks between sections in the liturgy. The more time I spent there, the more I admired the minyan members for pushing aside their decrepitude and standing as they recited the Amidah — the Standing Prayer that is said before the second recitation of the Kaddish in the service. The praying began with a jangle of voices that sounded like loose change in a pocket. Canes crashed to the floor as this minyan stood and bowed together. By the time we said the Kaddish the second of two times in the service, our voices were one.

I learned the order of the daily evening service called ma’ariv from the first significant word in the opening blessing of the evening service. Its etymology, rooted in the Hebrew word, erev, means evening. Ma’ariv is a version of the word that functions as a verb, meaning “to bring on night.”

I asked the ritual director of my synagogue to make a tape for me of the service. I picked up the chanting the same way I learned to play the violin as a child — mimicking the music I heard. I listened to the tape in the car as Adam, then five years old, drifted off to sleep in the back seat. As I practiced for a solid month, many of the prayers came back to me from my Hebrew Academy days.

By the time I was ready to conduct services as one of the more senior mourners in the minyan, I had the Kaddish memorized. On January 19, 2003, what would have been my father’s eighty-fourth birthday, I led the ma’ariv for the first time at minyan. I was thrilled to learn the order of the service, thrilled to be leading the Kaddish. Thrilled to getting closer to my father and attempting to understand him better.

***

I thought I saw my father one time that year when I woke with a start and glimpsed his back at the door of my bedroom, wearing an old cashmere coat he’d inherited from Grandpa and his trademark deerstalker hat. He lingered a few seconds before vanishing.

The sighting reminded me of a midrash — a story or commentary on a piece of Torah — that I learned at the Hebrew Academy. Moses was the only human in history to glimpse God, and when he did, he only saw the back of God’s head. Maybe ghostly sightings by the living are actually glimpses of the divine. God transforms himself into the image of our beloved dead in a prayer that does not include a single word about death — a prayer that is a sole paean to the Almighty’s power. Had I seen God or my father? Were they now one and the same?

I sat up for a while feeling elated, waiting for him to return, but as much as I tried to will myself into seeing him, he never directly appeared to me at temple.

After the full eleven months, the Kaddish hadn’t worked.

-Judy Bolton-Fasman

Judy Bolton-Fasman has completed a memoir entitled “Prayers ad Trastiendas: A Daughter Tracks Down Her Parents’ Secrets.” She has published in many literary venues and has an essay in the anthology, The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Judy has an MFA from Columbia University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Mineral School in Mineral, Washington and the Vermont Studio Center. She is most recently the recipient of the Alonzo G. Davis Fellowship awarded to a Latinx writer from the Virginian Center for Creative Arts and was the Erin Donovan Fellow in Non-Fiction at the Mineral School in 2018. Judy lives outside of Boston with her family.