WAITING FOR PROOF:

CHAPTER ONE: of Kaddish By LEON WIESELTIER

THE MOURNER'S KADDISH

MAGNIFIED AND SANCTIFIED MAY HIS GREAT NAME BE IN THE WORLD THAT HE CREATED, AS HE WILLS, AND MAY HIS KINGDOM COME IN YOUR LIVES AND IN YOUR DAYS AND IN THE LIVES OF ALL THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL, SWIFTLY AND SOON, AND SAY ALL AMEN!

AMEN!
MAY HIS GREAT NAME BE BLESSED
ALWAYS AND FOREVER!

BLESSED
AND PRAISED
AND GLORIFIED
AND RAISED
AND EXALTED
AND HONORED
AND UPLIFTED
AND LAUDED
BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE
(HE IS BLESSED!)
ABOVE ALL BLESSINGS
AND HYMNS AND PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS
THAT ARE UTTERED IN THE WORLD,
AND SAY ALL AMEN!

MAY A GREAT PEACE FROM HEAVEN--
AND LIFE!--
BE UPON US AND UPON ALL ISRAEL,
AND SAY ALL AMEN!

MAY HE WHO MAKES PEACE IN HIS HIGH PLACES
MAKE PEACE UPON US AND UPON ALL ISRAEL,
AND SAY ALL AMEN!

I

Everything struck hard. The door slamming behind me in the black car. The shovel stabbing the mound of soil. The wooden box hitting the floor of the pit.

I stood and I swayed and I said what I was told to say. I was presented with the words that justify the judgment, and I justified the judgment. "He is the Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are judgment..." I was presented with the words of the kaddish, the long one for the funeral, the one about the world that will be made new, the one that I had never said before, and I uttered it. "Magnified and sanctified may His great Name be..."

"Magnified and sanctified..." Sounds, not words. Words that were nothing but sounds. The words spilled into the pit and smashed upon my father's coffin. I watched the words disperse across the surface of the wood like the clods of dirt that were falling upon it. I saw them there, the shattering words. I saw the letters and their shades. Finally they vanished into the earth. They were buried with him.

"He is the Rock." And the Rock struck hard. And I struck hard against the Rock.

Justify the judgment, but judge the judgment, too. Bring the judgment to judgment!

Out of tears, thoughts.

Magnified and sanctified... Magnified and sanctified ... Magnified and sanctified...

Sorrow, feed me.

May His great Name be blessed... May His great Name be blessed... May His great Name be blessed...

*

It is in the hall of study that we pray. The beauty of the room is owed to its homeliness. It is decorated only with books. When I stand by the wall of books, I feel as if I am standing on the shore of an immensity.

The spines of books. Books and spines. Books are spines.

Magnified and sanctified... Magnified and sanctified... Magnified and sanctified...

The shul feels so worn. A red velvet cloth is thrown over the rostrum at the front of the room, directly before the ark in which the Torah scrolls are housed. Here stands the precentor, that is, the leader of the service, that is, the mourner; and as I place my hands on this cloth, which is the color of wine, I see the traces of the hands that preceded mine. There are stains in the velvet. In places it is threadbare. This is an exquisite erosion. It is not neglect that thins these instruments. Quite the contrary. The more threadbare, the better. The thinner, the thicker.

May His great Name be blessed... May His great Name be blessed... May His great Name be blessed...

A black river.

Magnified and sanctified... Magnified and sanctified... Magnified and sanctified...

*

I don't know what to do. No, I know what to do. I will open a book.

The most influential work on dying and mourning in the Jewish tradition was composed by Nahmanides, the religious genius of Spanish Jewry in the thirteenth century. It is known as Torat Ha'Adam, or The Law of Man. It is a vast compilation of laws and customs, drawn from ancient and medieval sources, and its treatment of the practices of mourning served as the model for the great medieval and early modern codes of law. It concludes with a great essay on eschatology called "The Gate of Recompense," a detailed explication of the system of rewards and punishments. But I begin at the beginning, with the introduction to the work. It is a philosophical reflection on mortality, written largely in a rhyming (and somewhat maddening) pastiche of Biblical and rabbinical phrases. "Every individual knows melancholy and joy," Nahmanides declares. Yet there are many ways to interpret human vicissitudes. "There is the man who is happy with his lot. He rejoices in the fullness of his sufficiency, in his rising star. He puts tomorrow out of mind, and drinks to forget his misery and his toil." (The "rising star" refers to the astrological sign that, in the words of one medieval Hebrew writer, "rises at the end of the eastern sky every hour and minute.") And there is also "the wise individual who rejects pleasure and recoils from his time and from every precious thing that he sees. On days of delight he thinks of mourning, and of despair on days of hope. He prefers weeping to happiness, and he scatters joy before sorrow and sighing. He foresees nothing but evil." The man who lives in the present, and the man who refuses to live in the present. Nahmanides disapproves of them both. "The two of them have diseased their hearts." The optimist "errs intellectually"; he does not grasp that no star always rises, for "the sphere is round," and the sign that ascends today descends tomorrow. The pessimist, though he is not mistaken intellectually (Nahmanides has described him as "the wise individual"), "is too clever, and he drinks with cynics." The cynics seek "to make the precious world tedious." Their enigmatic discourses are "a calumny against time." But time, Nahmanides observes, is "a truthful witness and a faithful judge." Time uses "proper weights and measures." It "never treats a man unfairly and never interferes with his deserts." In the consideration of mortality, certainly, the stars have nothing to teach. "The stars and the signs do not have the power to make people die or to make people live, so do not look to them, for they will neither harm you nor help you." No, "it is from the Lord of All that all comes." But the difference between theology and astrology is not only that God is powerful. It is also that God is just. "He acquits the righteous and convicts the wicked, and He makes everything right in its time. And in His ways there are hidden secrets (as the few have agreed, for the many will never be wise), things that are too exalted for creaturely knowledge, such as the distant future and the deep past. What, then, is there for poor, tempted man to do, when he comes before the king, except to justify the judgment and to verify the verdict?."

But I do not wish to justify the judgment and to verify the verdict! Count me, then, among the many who will never be wise. (Or try me another time.)

Help me, Nahmanides. Help me.

And this brings Nahmanides to the matter of mourning. More precisely, to the absurdity of mourning. "I want now to say what my heart believes and what my mind has proven." And what is that? He begins with a perplexity: "Since man is destined to die, and deserves to lie down in the shadow of death, why should we torture ourselves over somebody's death, and weep for the dead, and bemoan him? After all, the living know that they will die. It is puzzling that those who know what will come to pass should then mourn, and call others to lamentation." Nahmanides is describing a collision of the heart and the mind. (No wonder he began with "what my heart believes and what my mind has proven.") He is suggesting that what one knows must have an effect upon what one feels. This seems perfectly true. Did I expect my father not to die? Of course not! But still I wail. What good is philosophy, if there is pain?

Yet Nahmanides does not believe that mourning is absurd. He has answers to his question. This is his first answer: "It was the destiny of man to live forever, but as a consequence of that ancient sin, human beings have gone down to the slaughter. Therefore they tremble, because they are being separated from their true nature." Nahmanides is referring to the sin in paradise, to the consequences of Eve's apple. He is proposing that we do not mourn over death, we mourn over mortality. This is an interesting idea, though it has little to do with the real mourning of real people, who do not have their heads in their hands because they know that they will not live forever. And Nahmanides continues: "Moreover, I have searched and I have reflected, and in the entire Torah there is no prohibition against mourning and there is no commandment to be consoled. All that was prohibited [in Deuteronomy] was that mourners should cut themselves or shave their foreheads for the dead. But do not put off weeping and do not loathe sighing." Thus Nahmanides has established the Scriptural legitimacy of sorrow. Indeed, mourning is a primary religious activity: "It is important for us to understand that mourning is a service of the Lord, which enables us in grief and in belief to contemplate our true end and to know the location of our true home. In accordance with this, it is written [in Ecclesiastes] that `it is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men, and the living will lay it to his heart.'"

"There is no commandment to be consoled," said the giant of Gerona. I will remember that.

Magnified and sanctified... May His great Name be blessed... Magnified and sanctified... May His great Name be blessed...

And Nahmanides has a second answer to his question. Why mourn, if we know that we will die? "So that we may grieve for the sins of one who has died before his time. Or if a terrible thing befell him in one of his children, it is fitting to weep and to wail over this." Mourning is the proper response to the fate of those who die in sin. Nahmanides offers a reading (which is, again, a partial pastiche) of some verses from the third chapter of Lamentations. "If you repent, and you seek God out, then He will have compassion, according to the multitude of His mercies. For God does not wish to torment men, and He does not desire to bring them grief; nor to crush under His feet all the prisoners of the earth, to show that they are His prisoners and He has dominion over them; nor to turn aside the right of a man or to subvert a man in his cause--that is, when they are sinners before Him. Of all this He does not approve. But since He does not will such a wrong to come to pass, He also said: Do not believe that the many sufferings that befall you are accidental and do not come from Him, for who is he that saith and cometh to pass, when the Lord commandeth it not? Everything comes from Him. He commanded and all the deeds were created, and there is nothing evil or good that does not proceed from Him .... And if everything proceeds from His mouth and from Him, and He has no desire to see evil done, since He acts justly, then wherefore doth a living man mourn and complain? It is for his own sins that he must mourn and complain." Nahmanides concludes, concretely: "Therefore, if a man dies earlier than most people die, or if a man's child dies, it is fitting that he, and those who love him, grieve and mourn--but their mourning must be such that it is a service of the Lord, in the sense that they mourn over the sins that were the cause of their suffering, and repent of the sins of which they are aware, and atone for the sins of which they are not aware. For the individual in pain to fortify himself with despair and to harden his heart in this regard--that is absolutely wrong."

*

A primeval glow in the city at dawn. As I drove to shul, everything was chaste. In the old, old light the buildings paled, the monuments dissolved. The city slipped back into the soil. I drove down to the river, where I observed the fading of human purposes. I saw the light of ancient Washington. A morning without civilization.

Nahmanides appreciates that an acquaintance with death can ruin an appetite for life. And so he seeks to secure the mourner against such ruin--to describe an ideal of mourning that is not despair, that honors the encounter with death but does not succumb to it. The rabbi wishes to harness the power of morbidity, to turn it to good use. I wish him luck.

So the mourner must not think metaphysically about death, says Nahmanides. The mourner must think morally about it. Death is not terrible. Sin is terrible. The death of my father was not a tragedy. It was a criticism.

My father died, so I must improve myself? I cannot follow the rabbi into this. The moralistic interpretation of death repels me.

Death, a reproach?

--He is guilty.
--No, he is dead.

It is ridiculous to suggest that death should not be a reason for despair.

Death is moralized because it is feared. But the moralist does not have the decency to admit that he is afraid.

The fear of death may be mastered, of course. But mastered by good works? I do not comprehend this. What has ethics to do with extinction? The inevitability of extinction lends a certain urgency to ethics, I guess. It is a boon to earnestness. (Live every day as if it is your last, and so on.) Still, a good man will die as surely as a bad man. Death is amoral, indifferent, mechanical; chop, chop, chop. It is a fact, and a value cannot unmake a fact.

God is just, but death is neutral.

I do not intend to be inconsolable, but I do not intend to be deceived.

*

In shul this Sabbath, we read the Song of Songs. There were gazelles in Georgetown.

"For love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave ...." Those words! They mark the discovery of finitude in the experience of desire. But in shul I took down from the shelves an edition of the Song of Songs that comes with the commentary of Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman, the Gaon of Vilna, the scholar and ascetic in Lithuania in the eighteenth century who has inspired more awe than any rabbi in modernity; and the Gaon glosses those words much less abstractly: "Love is strong as death, because at the hour of a man's death the parting of the soul from the body is difficult, for there is no love and no attachment and no mixture like that of the soul and the body; and jealousy is cruel as the grave, because there is no jealousy in the world like that of the man who goes to his grave and sees that the world still lives." The Gaon's gloss cuts me. It takes me back to the final days in the hospital when my father knew that the world still lived, and he was jealous.

I told a friend that I had returned to shul. So the circle is unbroken, he said. Maybe a little too unbroken, I thought. I like broken circles. I break circles.

Magnified and sanctified... May His great Name be blessed... Magnified and sanctified... May His great Name be blessed...

Back to Nahmanides. He concludes the introduction to his work on death with an admonition to his son. "My son! If sinners entice thee, consent thou not. For you will discover many sayings of the Greek philosophers and those who think as they do, sayings that harden the heart and stiffen the mind. They rejoice in a thing of nought, and are miserable comforters. They deny the future and they despair of the past. Who chooses them is an abomination--and a heretic. For Socrates, one of their wise men, is recorded as having decreed: `They asked me, "Why have we never seen you sad?" And I replied, "Because I have nothing whose loss would make me sad."' He also said: `He who knows the world will not rejoice over his good fortune and will not sorrow over his bad fortune.' They also said: `The unhappy man is the man who cares.' They also said: `He is deceived, who knows that he is on his way out of the world but seeks to cultivate it.' He and his friends the philosophers said many such things." I expect Nahmanides to denounce these Greeks and their philosophy of detachment, but he has a more intricate temper. "To be sure," he writes, "it is appropriate for them, and for all thinkers, to regard all the activities of the world as less than nothing, as vain, as devoid of purpose." Indeed, there is no need to stray among the Greeks for this wisdom. "After all, King Solomon exceeded them all [in Ecclesiastes] when, inspired by the holy spirit, he compared everything to vanity and declared that man hath no preeminence above a beast." Yet there was a difference between the alienation of Solomon and the alienation of Socrates. "Still, Solomon gave good heed and inquired strictly, and distinguished between good and bad, and between true and false. And so he instructed that in the day of prosperity be joyful but in the day of adversity shed a tear, that there is a time to weep and a time to mourn." That is to say, there is also a time not to weep and a time not to mourn.

I see what Nahmanides is up to. He is conceding the truth of pessimism, and then circumscribing it. Thus he proceeds to an ancient reading of God's observation, in the first chapter of the Bible, that the work of the sixth day of creation was "very good." According to the rabbis, "good" refers to the good impulse in man's nature, and "very" refers to the evil impulse in man's nature. "But is the evil impulse really very good? Only insofar as a man, in the absence of the evil impulse, would not build a house and take a wife and sire sons and daughters." Those are the deep, disabused words of the ancient rabbis. Nahmanides enlarges on their point: "They penetrated far into the matter, and when they rendered the cultivation of the world null and vain, it was because the cultivation of the world cannot be sustained by anything except the service of the Creator, and in this way the world is indeed very good to those that be good and upright in their hearts. For it is a part of the service of the Lord to attend to the affairs of the world, and to the survival of all the species, so that God will forever look with favor upon His creation of us .... It is beyond doubt and it goes without saying that, from the standpoint of the mind, it is sheer idiocy to be angry or astonished at anything that happens; and it is also a sin and an iniquity, from the standpoint of God's justice, against which such individuals have revolted. Consider Job, and the story of his great and awful tribulations. How did he respond to what befell him? He rent his garments, and wept, and observed all the practices of mourning, and blessed his judge, saying: `The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the Name of the Lord!' And this should be the rule, concerning the future and the past: fury and fear lead to foolishness and falsehood. If one surrenders to despair and in this way finds solace, or if one's heart is not keen and one attributes what befalls one to accident or to custom--then one will drive wildly [and not mourn properly]."

And Nahmanides concludes with a consoling peroration: "May the Lord whose fury we fear, but whose will is our shield and our buckler, show us soon the restoration of the Temple, and fulfill in us and in our company the verse that declares, `He will swallow up death in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the rebuke of his people shall He take away from off all the earth, for the Lord hath spoken it.'" Look again at that verse. "He will swallow up death in victory... and the rebuke of his people shall He take away from off all the earth." Isaiah could not have been clearer. For the prophet, and for the medieval commentator, death is a rebuke.

"It is a part of the service of the Lord to attend to the affairs of the world." A splendid sentence. Yet Nahmanides' affirmation is a complicated one. He wants to bite into the bitter fruit and to not taste the bitterness. To work in the world and to have no love for the world.

*

Nahmanides' quarrel is with Stoicism. {It is the Stoic version of Socrates that he presents, I think.) He does not believe that Stoicism is completely false. He admires its disdain for the material world, its ideal of inner freedom, its composure, its disenchantment. The Stoic's analysis of the world is right; but he does not grasp what is beyond the world, the remainder of reality. He is like a man who has backed out of a room but will not turn around. And behind his back is God.

God is what stands between Stoicism and despair, says the rabbi. (He is unfair to Stoicism, which is a theory of courage.)

The medieval Jew agrees with the ancient Greek that virtue is happiness. The difference is that the Greek will settle for less happiness than the Jew. (Or so the Jew thinks.)

Socrates, improved by Solomon. Stoicism, improved by Judaism.

The Stoic gives up on the world because it is an unjust world. But the unjust world and the just world are the same world. It is the unjust world that must be made the just world. For this reason, one must not secede from the world.

In the ideal of indifference, spirituality comes into contradiction with morality. (A spiritual victory is sometimes a moral defeat.)

Duty is a kind of passion, isn't it? A joyless kind.

Stoicism in the service of God, or an enchanted disenchantment.

"One will drive wildly." Nahmanides refers to the avenging Jehu, the son of Jehoshaphat, who overthrew the evil kings of Israel and Judah in an orgy of blood in the ninth century B.C.E. (He destroyed the House of Ahab and himself trampled Jezebel to death.) The Bible reports that Jehu was known for driving his chariot wildly, thoughtlessly, in a disordered state. He did the Lord's work, but he was a prince of instability. And what Nahmanides seeks for the mourner is stability, an unextreme attitude toward extremity.

Such wisdom is surely to be wished. But this mourner wants to drive his chariot wildly. Unphilosophically, unreligiously, wildly.

Magnified and sanctified ... May His great Name be blessed ... Magnified and sanctified ... May His great Name be blessed ...

I have to give a speech at the Holocaust Museum. A speech in the evening, which means that I cannot make it to shul. Yet I must do my duty; and so my friends arrange a prayer quorum for me, in the vestibule outside the auditorium. There I lead the worship, and there I say the kaddish for my father, who cherished this place. He sat in the rain with my mother on the day that the museum opened, marveling that it had risen. Now the words of his kaddish float high into the concentrationary ether of the atrium, and fly past the glass on which the name of his burned birthplace in Poland is carved, and drift into the halls that show the pictures of what was done to his world; and the syllables of my father's kaddish cling to those images like spit.

*

Magnified and sanctified ... Magnified and sanctified ... Magnified and sanctified ... Or, the problem of repetition. It quickens. It dulls.

Years ago, when I stopped praying, the disappearance of the religious structure seemed to bring with it the promise of possibility: every day would begin differently. The adventure of self-creation! But really, was every day begun differently? I did not create myself. I merely acceded to other platitudes and other habits. It is not only religion that lives by repetition.

Every morning, a few minutes before seven o'clock, a yellow school bus passes me as I turn onto Massachusetts Avenue on my way to shul. Bless the sameness of the days!

In shul, on a swampy morning. A young man in shorts wants to know whether a certain prayer is said with a blessing or without a blessing. "With pants," he is told.

A friend calls to see if I have on my shelf the writings of Elijah Capsali of Crete, the sixteenth-century rabbi and historian. Capsali's chronicles of his time are among the most vivacious Jewish writings that I know, and I do have them, and I am glad to check a reference for my friend. Especially glad because I bump into an account of the death of the great rabbi Judah Minz in Padua in 1506, and the election of his son Abraham Minz to succeed him as head of the academy. The narrative includes this detail: "From the day of the death of his father, our teacher Rabbi Judah Minz, may his memory be a blessing, would lead the prayers in the synagogue, evening, morning, and afternoon, and he was wrapped in a black prayer shawl." A black prayer shawl! Where can I find one? It sounds exquisite. The garment was, no doubt, a version of the crepe that the Italians hung in their own hours of mourning; but lamentation, too, has a sumptuary aspect, and this Italianate indulgence would not deflect me from my spiritual purpose, I promise. Capsali notes also that "it was his intention to pray in this manner for a full year after his father's death, but he was expelled from his home." Abraham Minz was banished from Padua by the Venetian authorities because he presented a gift to the conquering German army. He fled for his life to Ferrara. I wonder if he left his black shawl behind.

Friday night. The Sabbath arrives in splendor. The rabbi introduces me to two men. They are brothers and they buried their father this morning. They have come to say kaddish, but they are not familiar with the words and the customs of the prayer. They are helpless. The rabbi asks me to help. At the moment in the worship when the mourners are supposed to be brought in, I bring the mourners in. (The unblind leading the unblind.) As soon as the brothers enter, the congregation breaks into a melancholy greeting: "May He who is everywhere console you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem!" Soon it is time to recite the kaddish. The brothers rise with me. They read a transliteration of the prayer. "We're the dunces," one of them says. "No," I reply, "the dunces are the ones who don't try." I didn't like the sound of what I said, exactly; it reminded me of the smugness in which I was schooled. Yet what I said was right. As I watched the brothers struggle with the transliterated prayer, I admired them. The sounds that they uttered made no sense to them. But there was so much fidelity, so much humility, in their gibberish.

The golden bricks of the shul in the light of the summer morning. I arrived early and was filled with love for the sight.

The shul is losing its strangeness for me. This worries me. In a strange place, solitariness is possible. Sociability poses a threat to spirituality. Now I'm coming to know my fellow petitioners. They are no longer strangers, they are becoming friends. How do you pray with friends? How do you pray with anybody?. Prayer is a throb of individuation, at least for me. And yet the congregation is one of the conditions of my kaddish.

I used to stay away from shul in part because I was too easily influenced by it. I wanted so much to be like the people with whom I prayed. This troubled me. One should not wish to be influenced. One should wish to be convinced.

It is more than twenty years since I stopped living according to Jewish law--since I threw off the yoke of the commandments, as the rabbis would say. Alas, I cannot say that my reasons were purely philosophical. I was governed also by my appetites. But one of the reasons for my failure was my experience of prayer. It was a disaster. Thinkingly and unthinkingly, in shuls and in schools and in forests and in fields, I had been praying for decades, and not once in those decades, not once, did I ever have the confidence that the cosmos in which I prayed was like the cosmos that my prayer described. I never had an intimation of objectivity. My prayers were increasingly frantic exertions of subjectivity, nothing more; and I could not persuade myself that the intensity of my feeling about what I said had any bearing upon its truth.

It was not within my power to provide the proof. Indeed, any proof that I provided would not be proof. The proof had to come from outside. I was sick of interiority. I dreamed of exteriority; of its certainty and its majesty. But I never found it. And so I came to consider my prayer a desolating and debasing form of utterance, and I stopped. And here I am, praying morning, noon, and night. The gorgeous, familiar, impotent words are tripping off my tongue. What am I doing?.

Do not deny the invisible, but do not address it. The invisible may be inquired into, but it may not be importuned.

These seem some of the saddest words ever written by an intelligent person. Imagine for a moment that you applied the same rational standards to your love of any visible being. Since you'll never objectively comprehend either a person or love you'd be forced never to love. What a waste.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 1, 2005 11:42 AM