First, each of us – students and staff – shared a reflection on our fathers. To paraphrase one of my favorite marginal prophets, there were ghosts in our eyes as we spoke of the ones who went away, who were estranged, who drank too much, or took care of others but didn’t know how to take care of themselves.

My father defined himself by almost getting it right, just missing the beat. A shared love of music, though, connects me to his memory. After we listened to “Born to Run” and I sang “Meeting Across the River,” we ate and drank, and then I recited my final Kaddish marking the end of an 11-month journey.

Kaddish is often described as the memorial prayer for the dead recited by mourners in the presence of a quorum. But that description is too narrow. Kaddish is also a liturgical hinge, an on-ramp and off-ramp within the highways of Jewish prayer, marking movement and change.

The word itself, codified in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, comes from kadosh, or “holy.” But Kaddish, as the title of the prayer in its various forms, is not so much about a state of holiness, but holiness as an act – a verb, not an adjective. “Sanctifying” may be the strongest translation. It’s a move, a choice, not merely a signpost on the byways of the spirit, or a tunnel to get to that meeting across the river, but a milestone for time itself.

There is something powerful about repeating an ancient prayer already said by millions and millions of people across generations. It is a shared language of grief and praise for anyone who wants to claim it, a path already marked by the footprints of countless others. Yet that path remains singular for each of us.

Still, for me, this and any traditional prayer has never quite been singular or meaningful enough on its own. And this is where marginal prophets enter.

I began saying the Shema in bed, unprompted by anyone, when I was 8 or 9 years old. That in itself is not unusual. The Shema, perhaps the only Jewish prayer as widely known as Kaddish, is traditionally recited during the waking time liturgy, but also specifically before sleep. Quietly over time, what I added was something else.

As a kid, I would open my eyes before reciting the Shema, then close them, then open them again when I had finished. This made sense. There is a longstanding practice of covering one’s eyes during the Shema, and I must have picked up on that. But what I was reaching for was something slightly different, a moment of reality shifting like turning a TV on and off. I was still at the age where I wondering – or even hoped – that the actors on my favorite shows stopped acting when I wasn’t there. You had to turn them on for their world to be entered. You had to choose your station, your show, your moment, your place, to come inside. Everything became different once you entered that show, and I wanted the Shema to feel that way too.

As I grew older, this and other religious customs faded, like those sitcoms and cartoons. Traditions didn’t ground me anymore. I needed culture. I needed story and myth. Rock and roll, novels, film and television, friendships, longing, memory: the impressions the world made upon me became the essence of my spiritual life more than anything I had received from a religious education that was at first meager, and then became more serious in my early twenties. Ever since, I have been balancing between tradition and culture.

Mourning for my father over these 11 months has been held not only by prayer, but by the voices of marginal prophets. A few have stayed particularly close: Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, and Philip Roth. That they are men has not been incidental. In mourning a father, I found myself listening for models of masculinity that could hold vulnerability and spiritual depth.

And this in turn reflects one of the central questions I wrestle with as a teacher, a writer, and a convener of community: How does culture become a vessel for spiritual life? How do we sanctify what is holy when the visible structures of religion – the robes, the rituals, the authority of those who seem older, wiser, and more certain – feel distant from our own lived experience?

More than a century ago, Max Weber offered a framework that still feels startlingly relevant to this question. My mentor, the late Philip Wexler, a time-traveling scholar of religion, education, and spirituality, helped me see how Weber understood religious life as a tension between two forces.

On one side is charisma, the raw, animating energy of faith, prophecy, and inspiration. On the other side is rationalization. These are the systems, institutions, and structures that organize and preserve that energy. Healthy religious life moves between these poles, its prophecy dancing between the margins of ritual and form. This is how tradition breathes, how it shifts – so that it can be old and refreshing, shared and unique, just as the recitation of Kaddish itself suggests.

But when movement stops, when systems harden and charisma drains away, religion risks becoming something else entirely: rigid and hollow, arrogant and oppressive. It becomes fundamentalist, which, from my point of view, is akin to the death of a tradition. We don’t have to look far to see the consequences.

Despite this tendency for extremes of volatility or stasis, Weber held out hope for tradition:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future… or whether entirely new prophets will arise.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future… or whether entirely new prophets will arise.

I have come to believe that many of those “new prophets” are already among us, not in pulpits, nor in institutions, but in culture. I call them marginal prophets. They stand at the edges between insider and outsider, sacred and secular, so-called high and low culture. They are not authorities in the traditional sense, but carry something unmistakably spiritual in their work. They give us language for what we feel but cannot yet name, translating inherited truths into the rhythms of lived experience.

Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, and in a different register, Philip Roth, are among my favorite marginal prophets. They take the inherited language of tradition – with its myths, questions, and aches – and reinterpret it in ways that feel alive. Weber called these core narratives theodicies, the stories we tell to make sense of both human and divine suffering and grace.

Marginal prophets don’t discard these stories because they are not rock-solid believers. Rather, they reimagine them. They restore “enchantment,” one of Weber’s most resonant terms. They reopen the possibility for connecting deeply with something vibrant and otherly that is also greater than ourselves.

I often return to Leonard Cohen when I am trying to make sense of questions of holiness, not because he resolves them, but because he refuses to simplify what he doesn’t understand. In “The Faith,” in which the “love” he addresses is the bird on a the wire of traditional faith itself, he sings:

A cross on every hill A star, a minaret So many graves to fill O love, aren’t you tired yet?

A cross on every hill A star, a minaret So many graves to fill O love, aren’t you tired yet?

It is a song about exhaustion – of spirit, of history, of belief strained to its limits, and of the bending holy myths into profane oppression. And yet, as Cohen often does, he still sings past his longing, finding rhythm in a slow dance of praise. He sanctifies life even when it hurts. This is the voice of a marginal prophet, and it speaks to me.

After the traditional 11-month cycle of mourning, prayer, music, writing, and being held by a community that takes these questions seriously, I find that I am not tired yet. Heavy perhaps, but also grounded, even girded for something new.

If anything, after metabolizing the loss of a parent, I feel something closer to gratitude: like the soft settling of emotion when Randy Brecker’s trumpet carries the hope and fear of Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River” into calming silence. That was the song I sang after a shot of vodka – and oh how my dad loved vodka – before I recited my last Kaddish.

Such a coda was what Kaddish had been asking of me all along: not only to remember, not only to mourn, but to keep moving, both inside and out. I have noticed the almost imperceptible change in who is here with me and who is not – alone and with others – as life unwinds each day, and then enters the next song.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)