Featured Post |
Saying Kaddish was different this time.
There was the obvious: a quarter-century ago, I recited the Mourner’s Prayer for 11 months for my late grandfather z”l, at the request of my mother. This past year’s recitation was for my late mother z”l herself.
Yet it was different in other ways as well. This time, as the actual mourner, I experienced Kaddish’s embrace – a hug that starts out tight and loosens gradually, if not linearly, over time. Said daily at congregational prayers (morning, afternoon and night) starting on the day of burial, Kaddish grabs hold of you from Day 1, providing a much-needed measure of focus and structure to a griever’s time and thoughts. It squeezed me firmly during shiva (the first week of mourning) and through shloshim (the first 30 days).
Over the following months, the prayer’s constancy provided a comforting clutch and rhythm, as I began navigating my life’s new reality, alongside mourning restrictions like not attending most festive events. Your spouse goes to weddings, bat mitzvahs, and other special occasions, alone. In parallel, you go to minyan – yet you are not alone; Kaddish is with you.
An exception to this restriction is attending your own child’s wedding, and my wife and I were fortunate to celebrate our daughter’s wedding under my mother’s beautiful, hand-made applique chuppah, just a few months after she passed away. Kaddish’s bear hug was there too. Poignantly, it reverberated across the generations at that night’s ma’ariv, as the wedding coincided with the yahrzeit of my late grandmother z”l, and my father and I said Kaddish together again for the first time since my mother’s shloshim ended.
The mourning year is a year of firsts. While the calendar circles its way back from the funeral to the yahrzeit, so many days mark cyclical events being experienced for the first time without your loved one. And on each of those days, Kaddish is there. On Shabbat and holidays – which my mother always beautified with her exceptional artistic creativity and culinary talents, and which I........