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Books: A Prayer for the Living
Francine Klagsbrun
The day after Ari Goldman�s 50th birthday party in New York, his father died in Jerusalem of a heart attack. Because Jewish law requires burial as soon as possible after a death, Goldman couldn�t make it to the funeral in time. Nor could he sit shivah for more than one day. The festival of Sukkot, which began the night of the funeral, canceled out the remaining six days of intensive mourning. The one religious ritual he could observe fully was to say the Mourner�s Kaddish prayer daily for the required 11 months. In "Living a Year of Kaddish," Goldman, Columbia University School of Journalism professor and former reporter for The New York Times, movingly documents his internal journey during that Kaddish year as he grapples with the loss of his father and his new status as an orphan.
The Mourner�s Kaddish is something of an enigma. It praises God, but offers the bereaved no words of consolation. Its Aramaic language has little meaning to most people who say it. And at a time when a mourner might wish to grieve privately, it may be recited only in the presence of a minyan of 10 worshipers. Yet the majesty and emotional power of this prayer have sustained and comforted mourners for centuries.
In his classic book "Kaddish," published in 1998, Leon Wieseltier investigated that power while saying Kaddish for his father. Although he had long since abandoned Jewish rituals, he felt drawn to honor his father with this one. Delving into early Hebrew texts to trace the prayer�s history, Wieseltier kept a journal of his findings and feelings. The book, based on that journal, intersperses short, personal reflections with an in-depth and scholarly analysis of the Kaddish that ranges in breadth across centuries of rabbinic commentaries and interpretations.
Goldman comes from a different place and offers a different perspective on the prayer. Jewishly observant, he recites the Kaddish for his father as he did for his mother four years earlier, out of deep religious commitment. His much slimmer volume is more intimate and revealing than Wieseltier�s. Little concerned with scholarship, it touches the heart instead with its exploration of the complicated emotions that accompany the loss of a parent. Like his previous memoir, "The Search for God at Harvard," it uses personal experience as a peg for understanding broader life issues. There the issue concerned religious identity; here it is about what Freud called "the work of mourning."
At the heart of Goldman�s story is the haunting effect on him of his parents� bitter divorce when he was 6 years old, an event that shaped even his choice of journalism as a profession. The divorce had taught him "to entertain two widely divergent approaches to life, my mother�s and my father�s." Those differences prepared him for conflicts between "Republicans and Democrats, Arabs and Israelis�" and the like.
His father did not approve of Ari�s career choice, certain that deadline demands would end his Orthodoxy. In response, he says, he has spent his life trying to prove his father wrong. He belongs to an Orthodox shul, observes Shabbat and holidays, and, though he may compromise at times, essentially adheres to Orthodox practice.
But the father�s disapproval extended beyond career matters. Goldman longed for but rarely heard words of praise from him, longed to bridge the gap he felt between them. He�d had a close relationship with his mother, but when his father made aliyah at the age of 70, Goldman found the distance between them no greater than what it always had been.
Then came the death seven years later. As he progresses through the seasons of his grief, Goldman discovers connections he had overlooked. His father had taught him to pray, to love Israel, to be devoted to Judaism and its sacred texts. His father had practiced the modern Orthodoxy Goldman continues, one that insists on engagement with the world, not isolation from it.
He shares his discoveries with fellow minyan-goers, who have become his "extended family." There is the statistician who finds Jewish observance "pragmatic;" the law professor who had recited Kaddish in 1965 for United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter at a private memorial service for the judge in Washington, D.C.; the Holocaust survivor who vows to say the prayer all his life for the murdered six million; and others, each with a Kaddish story, each eloquently drawn. Goldman encounters only one woman attending his minyan regularly and a few who show up occasionally for Kaddish. Unlike the Conservative and Reform, the Orthodox do not count women in a minyan and women are not obligated to say Kaddish, although some Orthodox women assume that obligation.
He writes sympathetically, but peripherally, about women�s prayer. His focus remains on the transformations within him. According to tradition, a child�s Kaddish aids the soul of the deceased parent. But as the year ends, Goldman concludes that Kaddish "is more for the living than for the dead." Reciting it daily was a way of "coming to terms with who my father was and who I am." It was also a way of keeping his parents alive for him -- and, poignantly, for us --through his memory and devotion.
Francine Klagsbrun is the author most recently of "The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day."
October 6, 2003
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