Going Vertical

By Judith Bolton-Fasman

Living a Year of Kaddish
By Ari L. Goldman
224 pages. Schocken Books. $22.

The day after Ari Goldman’s fiftieth birthday, his father Marvin died of a heart attack at home in Jerusalem. Goldman, who directs the journalism program at Columbia University, is a modern Orthodox Jew who distinguished himself as a religion reporter for the New York Times. 

In his affecting new memoir, Goldman juxtaposes the historical roots of Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, with his year-long, daily recitation of the prayer as a mourner, a son, and an orphan. This ancient Aramaic poem that praises God is one of the oldest parts of the Jewish liturgy. Goldman notes that more than likely it was first said in synagogues established just after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE on Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av. Mourners sat outside and were led in Kaddish by the leader of the congregation. During the Middle Ages mourners sat among other worshipers and led the prayer themselves. By then the connection between Kaddish and Tisha B’Av—an annual day of Jewish mourning—was explicit. While Kaddish is intense and powerful, it is also an all-purpose prayer and is recited, for example, after studying Torah. In the words of Rabbi Maurice Lamm, it is “a self-contained, miniature service that achieves the heights of holiness.”

I too recently said Kaddish for my father for the required eleven months. Early on in my Kaddish experience a fellow mourner advised me to think of myself as distinctly vertical. She said that each time I stood up to say Kaddish, I was a monument to my father. The tradition surrounding the Kaddish also operates on a metaphorical vertical axis: Goldman cites the Jewish view of death in which the soul initially spends some time in hell and from there begins its ascent to heaven on the breath of Kaddish.

After reading Goldman’s memoir I realized that missing from that analogy was the horizontal dimension of saying Kaddish. Goldman relates Rabbi Lamm’s articulation of the unique spiritual graph that Kaddish creates. “The recitation of Kaddish has united generations in a vertical chain—from parent to child—while the requirement to gather in a minyan [a group of ten adults] for Kaddish has united Jews on the horizontal plane.” For Goldman these two distinct movements bind the mourner to the past and present, to a life with and then without a loved one.

For most of the year Goldman said Kaddish in the early morning minyan that gathered each day at Ramath Orah, a small Orthodox synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side. Founded by Belgian Jewish refugees in 1942, Ramath Orah, Hebrew for “Light on the Hill,” is a paean to the city of Luxembourg. (“Lux” is the Latin word for light and “bourg” means hill in German). However, by the 1980s, the synagogue had fallen into such disrepair it was nicknamed the “mildew shul.”

For Goldman Ramath Orah was a reminder of the Orthodox Judaism of his childhood—a time when “Orthodoxy was a big tent, an identity, not an absolute list of behaviors. This was before the arrival of two countervailing trends in American Judaism. In the next generation, Orthodoxy would begin to move sharply to the right, powered by a wave of fervently Orthodox Eastern European refugees from Hitler’s Europe.”

Goldman felt this division personally and sharply as the obligation to say Kaddish led him to other minyanim. Praying in different synagogues can sometimes feel like crossing the border into another country. Each minyan has its own customs and dialects. As a woman, I felt this most keenly when I ventured away from my Conservative egalitarian minyan to say Kaddish in a modern American Orthodox synagogue and in a more traditional European synagogue in Rome. By Orthodox standards women are not required to say Kaddish; my presence and determination to say it were met with varying degrees of acceptance, indifference, or contempt. Goldman briefly touches on the subject in a conversation he has with a fellow minyan participant whom he calls Lani. He asks Lani if she is frustrated that she is not counted in a minyan. She replies that she has “a tremendous reverence for halacha [Jewish law] and has found no reason to question its wisdom in relieving women of the responsibility of participating in a minyan.”

My own experience of sitting behind a mechitzah—the curtain or divider that separates men from women in Orthodox synagogues—was lonelier and more frustrating. But as Goldman so eloquently and candidly records, even men in traditional minyanim are not immune from feelings of alienation. On vacation in upstate New York, he attends Hasidic services in the village of Kiryas Joel and ultra-Orthodox services on the grounds of a summer camp. Both options are problematic for Goldman in that they collide with his modern sensibilities as well as his appreciation of kahal or community.

I never felt at home at any of them [the minyanim]. They reminded me that while I call myself Orthodox, Orthodoxy as a whole has moved relentlessly to the right. My shul, Ramath Orah, is an anomaly stuck in time—the 1950s perhaps—when Orthodoxy was more open and tolerant. Much of contemporary Orthodoxy was no longer willing to engage the modern secular world. I prided myself on being able to live in both worlds—the Orthodox and the secular. The Orthodoxy in Monroe [New York] clearly said that this was no longer possible, that one had to choose one or the other…It was a rude awakening.

Goldman’s encounter with ultra-Orthodoxy was yet another way in which he engaged with the past and present through Kaddish. Remembering his father enabled him to concentrate on his ongoing commitment to his faith, something with which he poignantly admits he struggles. Kaddish embodies that struggle. Here is a prayer solely focusing on praising God that must be recited at a time when one’s faith in God is sorely tested. Goldman illuminates many of these contradictions and ambiguities in his lovely and moving account of his Kaddish year.