Kaddish

Kaddish

The service closes with a rhythmic chant without melody, a rhyming, echoing drum-beat, the mourner’s kaddish.  The only prayer in the siddur that is never sung, the mourner’s kaddish intends not to transport us to a different realm, but to ground us and plant us firmly in this difficult reality.

The drum-beat of the kaddish pounds with the thud of the earth shoveled onto the casket, the tread of our steps as we walk to the grave, and back.

We reserve the mourner’s kaddish, called in Hebrew kaddish yatom, or “orphan’s kaddish,”  for our grief.  The words stripped of music, stripped even of any real content, bear a different kind of meaning.  They express emptiness, the human heart bereft in the days, weeks and months after loss.  The kaddish carries us on a journey through the strange land of grief, a foreign and bewildering landscape.  The language itself is not our beloved Holy Tongue, but unfamiliar Aramaic, the ancient Jewish vernacular.  

Finally, in the last two lines, we emerge from the  Aramaic and the valley of the shadow, into the comforting Hebrew of hayyim v’shalom, life and peace. And the entire community says: “Amen.”