The double embrace of Kaddish

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 found to be especially challenging occasions this year – Kaddish’s embrace came in extra measure, in the form of an additional recitation amid expanded prayers.

Towards the end of the 11 months, with most of the period’s Mourner’s Prayers behind me, several friends told me to get ready for the “Last Kaddish.” Having experienced the intense emotions and tears which accompanied it 26 years earlier, I was already on the lookout for it. And indeed, I was deeply overcome this time as well. Tears flowed during the final recitation, and returned just minutes later, when the next Mourner’s Prayer came up, and I did not say it.

Thus, on a random Wednesday mincha, Kaddish’s final, delicate embrace bid me farewell.

But the Last Kaddish represents more than just the concluding recitation. In their wisdom, the rabbis established for Jewish mourners multiple stages of “letting go” of the departed: upon hearing the news; at the burial; shiva; shloshim; and on the first, and each successive, yahrzeit of the passing. For one saying the Mourner’s Prayer for 11 months, however, there is an additional stage of letting go, marked by the Last Kaddish.

From then until the yahrzeit, the final stretch until full re-entry into “regular” life, I was accompanied by the mourner’s (halachic) status, but not by the Mourner’s Prayer.

As I write this, the process is reminding me, to a degree, of a parent teaching a child to ride a bike: holding tight at the beginning, walking alongside; gently easing up on the grip (and now jogging) as the child’s confidence and balance increase; maintaining minimal touch – primarily as psychological assistance, and without physically supporting – in the moments before full independence; until finally letting go entirely, as their offspring, now hitting stride, takes off unaided.

For the mourner, wondering how to go on with life without their loved one, Kaddish succeeds in generating its embrace by focusing not on the deceased, but rather on God. Indeed, the prayer contains no references to death or mourning; it is primarily about praising and sanctifying His Great Name. Its implicit message to the mourner: in an unstable world, of which death is an uncompromising element, remember that God – “The Rock,” as Moses puts it in Deuteronomy (32:4) – is always there. He has got your back. He is with you every step of the way (though Himself not moving), all the while clutching you as you figure out how to move forward – even after Kaddish concludes.

King David captured this sentiment well when he wrote, in a prayer said twice daily during the period surrounding the High Holidays, which began a few weeks before my Last Kaddish and concluded just before the yahrzeit: “Were my father and mother to forsake me, the Lord would gather me in” (Psalms 27:10). When one’s earthly parent departs, our Father in Heaven steps in, providing both a spiritual hug and something onto which to hold fast: the Kaddish. Reciting this Psalm as I segued out of the Kaddish period was especially meaningful. Indeed, doing so provided a double-boost in this respect, since an extra Mourner’s Prayer is (in many communities) added after it.

Interestingly, while the mourning year restricts attendance from certain public gatherings, Kaddish – which may be recited only with a minyan present – ensures the mourner avoids seclusion. As such, for those committed to saying it consistently, Kaddish can become something of an obsession. Mourners who are not shul regulars are quickly introduced to the challenges of constantly needing to think about where they can catch the next Kaddish, conducting time-consuming searches for minyans near out-of-town work meetings, and frantically rearranging their daily schedules to accommodate them. My litigation partner, for example, recounted halting Supreme Court hearings, because his only chance to say that day’s Kaddish at mincha was at the Court’s minyan — only in Israel!

This is nothing new for “minyan guys” like me (or our long-suffering extraordinarily-patient close family members — thank you, guys!). To be sure, we have our own adjustments to make, such as regularly leading the weekday prayers, and trying to match the pace of the congregation (in my struggles to keep up, I discovered “gears” I didn’t know I had).

Being so reliant on others, one comes to a greater appreciation for the members of the congregation who, by coming to pray, enable you to say Kaddish. I owe a great debt of gratitude to all those – from my local shul-goers, to attendees of my minyan at work; from my non-observant law partners (who saved the day as the sun set on one of our partners’ meetings), to anonymous worshipers around the country – who, simply by showing up to daven, helped me perform this mitzvah (I missed just once: Iranian missile threat…). While perhaps not their primary reason for attending minyan, enabling others to say Kaddish is also an important consideration for many. In this way, Kaddish envelopes the mourner yet again – with the subtle embrace of the congregation at large.

Over the course of 11 months, saying Kaddish became second nature; in its various forms (Mourner’s, Rabbis, and – for one who leads the prayers – the Full- and Half-Kaddish), it is recited by the mourner literally thousands of times. While it was not hard to train myself to not say Kaddish, its public recitation by other mourners does continue – months later – to make me pause and dwell on the fact that I am no longer doing so. Anticipating the Last Kaddish and its accompanying emotions in the final months, I started to feel nostalgic for saying the mourner’s prayer, even before I had finished doing so. During the silence of Month 12, it gave me some comfort to know Kaddish would visit again soon, on the yahrzeit. And while its next return is relatively far off, its embrace endures.

Kaddish’s hug need not be a one-way matter. When my mother asked me, as my grandfather’s oldest male offspring, to recite Kaddish for him, it was a responsibility that, despite the sorrow, I was honored to embrace. So it was again this time.

From here on, we are left with many wonderful memories, and the yahrzeits – when we will again, if only briefly, be warmly enveloped by Kaddish’s double embrace.