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Stephen Saperstein Frug

This Jewish atheist has been praising God’s name

I've said the Mourner's Kaddish, a prayer of elaborate affirmation of divine will, for nearly a year of my life – twice. Here's why
(iStock)
(iStock)

After the initial tumult – the death, the burial, the traditional week of shiva – the central Jewish mourning ritual is the recitation of the Kaddish prayer. It has been not-quite-a-year since I began saying Kaddish for my father – a reasonable thing to do as a Jew, but perhaps a puzzling thing to do as an atheist. I am both. So what does it mean to magnify and sanctify God’s name when you don’t believe in Him?

* * *

The Kaddish is one of the most frequently repeated prayers in Jewish prayer services. That is because it is in Aramaic (which was the successor language to Hebrew among Jews, the language in which the Talmud is written, and, incidentally, the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth), which at one time was commonly understood, which led to the prayer’s frequent repetition. Since Aramaic is now a dead language and Hebrew is a revived one, and even among non-native speakers of Hebrew, Jews are far more likely to learn Hebrew than Aramaic, this ironically means that this prayer is one of the least accessible to most Jews. Nevertheless, the tradition holds, and it is repeated often.

As the “mourners’ Kaddish,” the prayer is said by those in mourning, whether observing a yahrtzeit (the anniversary of a loved one’s death) or in direct mourning. It has to be said with a congregation, a minyan (that is, a quorum for prayer, which in Judaism is at least 10 adult Jews (within Orthodoxy, 10 adult male Jews)). It is not a prayer you say when praying on your own, as I would think even the most pious would do occasionally, and which most of those who pray regularly do often. Indeed, the necessity or desire to say Kaddish is a common motivation for going to daily prayers, for seeking out minyanim to go to, indeed for there being regular minyanim at all. The daily minyan at my synagogue began because a congregant was saying Kaddish, and it has continued in part as a vehicle for others to be able to do so, too.

Significantly, the text of the mourner’s Kaddish is not a prayer to comfort the mourners, or for the soul of the departed. It is instead a very standard Jewish prayer: exalting (with lots and lots of synonyms) God’s name, asking for peace, imagining a better age. So what does it mean to say a prayer to and for and about God when you are an atheist?

* * *

When my mother died suddenly and violently when I was 20, my mind went to the various models I knew for what it meant to grieve, and how to do it. Religion is helpful: it provides the vehicle in which we can express the feelings that are at once unique to us and endlessly iterated: joy at marriage or a birth, grief at a death. So when my mother died, and I needed to perform my grief, I thought of Kaddish. It was one of the things I felt I ought to do, needed to do, wanted to do.

I have a strong guess that I didn’t get this idea from synagogue. I had been going to synagogue (irregularly and unpunctually) for over a year, since I started college, so I had definitely heard the mourner’s Kaddish many times, but I certainly didn’t know it (its Aramaic faded into the equally unknown Hebrew). Rather, I believe I got the idea from reading the novels of Chaim Potok, who was for me (as I suspect he was for a lot of his readers) a gateway into the world of Jewish observance.

Potok, an observant Jewish novelist, wrote about Orthodox Jews (as he had been growing up). In many ways, his books tell the same story: a young man, growing up as an observant Jew, has his faith tested by modernity, and the social and personal troubles that arise from that change him greatly. One of Potok’s books, Davita’s Harp, tells the story in mirror image. Rather than an observant boy, an atheist girl: her parents are communists, not observant Jews; and she finds herself drawn to Orthodoxy, rather than drawn out of it. Of course, there is a great deal of similarity between a photograph and its negative.

In several of Potok’s books, key characters say Kaddish. In The Book of Lights, the saying of Kaddish is central to a single, pivotal scene in which the protagonist, Arthur, a young rabbi who wrestles with guilt about his father’s role in building the nuclear bomb, prays at a memorial to the victims of Hiroshima. Arthur’s friend Gershon follows him and hears him pray a number of prayers, ending with the Kaddish (despite there not being a minyan there):

…Gershon listened to the awesome words of the prayer for mourners—the public sanctification of the name of God; the affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darknesses…. Arthur was reciting the words in English, reading from the prayer book in his hands…. “…say ye, Amen.”

“Amen,” someone answered, and Gershon looked up with surprise and realized that he, Gershon, had answered, and he continued the required response, “May His great name be blessed for ever and ever.” Without a listener’s response the Kaddish was meaningless; the response was the soul of the Kaddish, its living center.

It was this extraordinary literary moment, this act, fictional though it was—a rabbi saying Kaddish without a minyan, with his friend (unasked, or at least not explicitly asked) answering him, an answer that was essential but also inadequate, coming as it did from a single person — that made me want to say Kaddish for my mother. It made me want to bring to the graveside funeral (which was a very small gathering of just family and friends, as opposed to the memorial service later that same afternoon, which was quite large) a Jewish friend who could answer it—since Potok taught me that “without a listener’s response, the Kaddish was meaningless; the response was the soul of the Kaddish, its living center.” In that terrible week, I did not remember Potok’s precise words, but I had internalized the idea.

So I said Kaddish at the graveside — first in Aramaic, carefully reading out from a transliteration (over time, I would grow to know the words by heart, but I didn’t then), which I had practiced assiduously, and then reciting it a second time in English translation. I changed the translation slightly, on the fly: where it says “and for all Israel,” I said instead “and for all mankind.” My mother was not Jewish, and a lot of our family wasn’t; I did not mean the prayer in any sectarian way. Anyway, I figured that that was roughly what the prayer meant, even if it wasn’t what it said. For the person or persons who wrote the prayer, “all Israel” was, in effect, all humanity. So I said that. My mother’s mother, who was undoubtedly the most religious person at the funeral (a Christian Scientist, not Jewish, and with no Jewish roots) told me later that day that she thought the prayer was very beautiful and perfect; I was and am glad I translated it as I did.

And then I said it for a year — or, rather, for 11 months. In Jewish tradition, we take a month back from the year, as far as saying Kaddish goes. The reason is less than inspiring: the saying of the Kaddish by mourners was meant not only to honor the dead, but to speed them through whatever equivalent of purgatory was imagined — to help their soul by showing merit in this life. But to avoid implying that one’s beloved parent was a sinner who really needed the help, one stops a month short, in order to publicly declare that you were sure your parent was right with God.

For the first month, I said it every day. For the next 10 months I said it at least once a week — including in Italy, where I went by myself for three weeks that summer (remnants of a planned all-summer trip that was otherwise shelved when my mother died). I found Italian synagogues and went through their rigorous security procedures to join a minyan and say Kaddish. One week, when I couldn’t find a synagogue, I just said it to myself, in defiance of tradition, thinking of Potok’s haunted rabbi the whole time.

And then the not-quite-year ended, and I stopped.

And, yes, that whole time I was an atheist, although I was less clear about it, less committed to the word, than I would become in later years. If you had asked me, though, I would have been clear: I don’t actually believe any of this.

Yet I did it.

* * *

My father died last year — not quite a year ago, indeed by the Jewish calendar not quite one-month-short-of-a-year ago either (although it has been by the Gregorian calendar). And when he died, I began saying Kaddish: first at the graveside, and then when I was in synagogue. I did not, this time, make a point of going to say it every day nor every week—largely because I haven’t in general been going as much as I did back in college. Also, of course, I am more settled in my beliefs and habits in my early 50s than I was at 20. But I have gone to synagogue at least once a month (or thereabouts), as that is what I usually would do. And when I have gone this past not-quite-year, I have stood and said the mourner’s Kaddish. As it happens, the one-month-shy-of-a-year mark on the Jewish calendar will be the day after Simchat Torah. So I said it when I was in synagogue on the High Holidays and will do so on Sukkot; and then the next time I happen to be there I won’t — although I will make sure to go to a minyan on my father’s yahrtzeit and say it then.

So what does it mean for someone who does not believe in God — an atheist, albeit a Jewish atheist — to stand up publicly and say “Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will….”?

The first thing of course — the most basic thing, the most obvious, but hardly a negligible thing, and indeed one which would, I think, be enough to justify and make meaningful the practice even without the rest — is that it is simply a way to say, in public, to one’s community, I am mourning. There is a certain comfort in speaking those words. You stand and say those words and everyone knows that you are, one way or another, in a state of loss. The emotion gains meaning due to its reflection in others’ eyes. What makes our lives meaningful is inevitably and always bound up in other people.

(Incidentally, this is why I think that those who say Kaddish for abstract “others” are making a mistake. For example, I knew a rabbi who said that they were going to say it every time they prayed until they’d said it six million times. I recently spoke with an Israeli who was saying it for hostages. And I sympathize, obviously, with both those griefs, and do not mean to gainsay in the slightest the intensity with which people feel them. But however overwhelming a communal grief, a personal grief is different: in particular, a family grief is different.)

If you perform grief for strangers, then you will be bereft of means to perform it for those who are still closer to you precisely when you need it most. I don’t mean according to Jewish law or tradition; I mean that it is psychologically true—that you, the sayer of Kaddish, will most likely find it personally true. You will need a way to perform grief someday; you would be wise to leave yourself not only room to feel something you have never felt before, but also to leave yourself language within which to articulate that grief.

So yes, saying Kaddish is a performance of grief — no less for those who are themselves theists than for atheists: it does not cease to be that even if it is also a religious ritual or a sincere expression of religious feeling. The human heart breaks and we need to cry out in pain — that we believe someone is listening, that someone is there to be praised, does not annul that basic motivation. We perform grief in the language we have to hand, that is ready in our mouths: if you are a Jew, particularly if you are religious Jew, Kaddish is a language, maybe the language, that is there to speak. Whatever the literal words of the Kaddish mean, the act of saying Kaddish means: I am grieving. I am bereft. They whom I loved are gone. Hear me, see me in my grief.

But for me, at least, it means something else too.

Among believing Jews, saying Kaddish is an affirmation that even in one’s loss, one can still affirm God’s will and praise His name — ”the affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darknesses,” as Potok put it. It is not precisely an act of defiance, but it is something akin to that – a defiance, perhaps, of grief, of the brokenness and darkness that can overwhelm us at those moments, an act of crying aloud: “I am wounded, but I am still here, and I still praise God, exalt His name, and desire His will.”

For an atheist — for this atheist, anyway — it means the same thing… without God. It is for me, no less than for a theist, an “affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darknesses.” It is just the meaning of that which I am affirming that has changed. Oh, sure, the precise words no longer fit – but the meaning in the act still does. Many of our traditions lose their literal meaning, while still maintaining their symbolic ones; Kaddish does that for me.

Which simply presses the question: what on Earth might that mean, to affirm meaning in a cosmos that on any larger-than-human scale lacks it? What meaning do I actually affirm?

I am sure that various atheist Jews would give different answers (“two Jews, three opinions,” goes the old joke). So of course I do not speak for us all (a larger group than most would warrant). But the following is what I mean by it.

If the Kaddish is a prayer to sanctify God in the face of unbearable grief, to say that, yes, I am wounded, but I still will stand and praise God and ask that His will be done, then an atheist’s Kaddish is a prayer to sanctify and embrace life. To say that life hurts, life is cruel, and its end still crueler, but that the good in it outweighs the bad, that I embrace it anyway, despite everything. It is a plea for life in spite of its bleakness and horror and hurt. There is an old school of thought that “not to be born is best of all.” The atheist’s Kaddish is a rejection of that thought. It is saying, “I am glad to live, even though to live is to be in pain and to suffer loss.”

There is so much pain in life, so much loss and disappointment and grief and sorrow and hurt, that it is easy to think that it isn’t worth it, at least to think that it isn’t worth going through, even if you don’t go so far as to think about actually actively ending it. To say Kaddish is to deny that, to refuse it, to abjure it. It is to say that yes, there is death and loss and pain, but still, magnified and sanctified be God’s name, where God’s name and will are metaphors for how things happen to be, have to be, are: for life as a whole. For Spinoza’s God, perhaps. I am still here, and I am still embracing all of this, with its pain and sorrow and all the rest. I will bless and praise and glorify and exalt and extol and honor and adore and laud life. Although it hurts, and will hurt, and will ultimately take everything I have, though my life will end as all lives end, with the loss of everything I am and care for and hope, still I will say yes to it. Still I will bless it, and ask for more blessing.

If the traditional Kaddish is a prayer of faith in God despite darkness and pain, the atheist’s Kaddish is a prayer embracing life despite that same darkness, and that same pain.

* * *

Last weekend was Yom Kippur; this week the fall festival, Sukkot, begins. I will probably be in shul a few times during Sukkot, and will stand and say, again, “Magnified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will.” And then, after Simchat Torah, less than two weeks away now, I will have buried both my parents and, save for their annual yahrtzeits and any time I happen to be in synagogue for the quadrennial Yizkor memorial prayer service, I may never say Kaddish again.

But I will still mean it: or, at any rate, I hope to. Life may break me, after all: sooner or later, it breaks all of us. But I want to stand and say it as long as I am able to stand.

The world is at least 50 percent terrible, and one by one, God or life will kill us all, and my mother and my father are dead. But life is still worth it. I still believe, in what I can only describe as an act of faith, that life is worth living, that we should be glad we are alive, that the good outweighs the bad. I am still glad that this whole, horrid, beautiful, wretched, blessed experience is a good thing. To be blessed and praised and glorified and exalted and extolled and honored and adored and lauded.

So bless me anyway. I want more life. Magnified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. Say ye, Amen.

For the unabridged version of the above, please read here.

About the Author
Stephen Saperstein Frug was born in New York City and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was educated at the Commonwealth School and studied philosophy at Harvard and history at Tufts and Cornell. He is the author and illustrator of 'Happenstance: A Photographic Novel,' and the author of the essay series, 'Attempts' and of 'Retcon: a Mosaic Story in Three Movements.' He lives in Ithaca, New York with his wife and son, where he commits occasional acts of illeism.
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