Tisha B'av is the Jewish day of collective national mourning. Marked by fasting and other prohibitions on physical pleasures, it commemorates the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by the Babylonians, the rebuilt temple in 70 C.E. by the Romans as well as other calamities. In a sense it is a national Yahrzeit.
Some of the rites of the holiday are the same as those observed during Shiva, sitting on a low stool or the floor, not greeting your fellow, not shaving. As the first words of Eicha (the book of Lamentations) were recited with its mournful melody, I couldn't help feeling myself transported back to the Shiva period for my mother. For the first time in over a month, I felt tears well up.
It is not easy to feel the pain of the more abstract idea of national mourning. It's a lot easier to feel the pain of personal loss. This Tisha B'av the two pains for me were essentially fused and indistinguishable.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
Mistakes during prayer
It's been just over eight months (about 250 days) since my mother died. Since that time I have been called upon to daven (pray) from the Amud (act as prayer leader) many times. My best estimate is about 175 times, since I don't daven on Shabbat, there have been days I didn't lead prayers and these days I'm usually asked to lead prayers once a day, usually at Shacharit (morning prayers). This involves the public repetition of the Shemona Esray (the prayer, also called the Amidah) except at Ma'ariv (the evening prayer).
No matter how many times I recite the words of the Amidah, I stammer, stumble and mispronounce some of them. Not many. Not enough for people to take much notice. But I'm aware of every error. There are a few tongue twisters that often get me. Sometimes I space out and pause before regaining a sense of where I am in the repetition. My Hebrew is fairly fluent but I don't speak and pronounce the language like a native speaker.
Is it a big deal? Maybe. Yesterday the Rabbi taught the fifth Mishna of the fifth chapter of Mesechet Brachot. It reads in part: "One who prays and errs, it is bad sign for him; if he is the prayer leader, then it is a bad sign for those who appointed him, as a person's representative is as if he is the person himself." The Mishna goes on to tell of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa who could tell who would be healed and who would die based on how fluent the person's prayer was.
But, I thought as the Rabbi spoke, I'm not representing the community because I am especially qualified. I am leading because my mother died and so the community had decided I have a "chiyuv" (obligation) to lead prayers. It's my very status as a mourner that has thrust me into this role, a role that is both wanted and unwanted.
After prayers, I talked to the Rabbi who explained that he didn't think the Mishna was talking about minor errors in prayer. It probably had in mind skipping entire paragraphs or reciting them out of order (more likely when prayer books hadn't yet been printed).
In any event, I will probably continue to make mistakes, though I would like to daven a hundred percent fluently on my mother's Yahrzeit. But I'm not going to drive myself crazy about it. Frankly, I appreciate when other prayer leaders make mistakes. It humanizes them. A few months back there was an old man who had to be helped to get through the repetition by someone standing right next to him. I remember that prayer more than the many times I've heard the Amidah being repeated flawlessly.
No matter how many times I recite the words of the Amidah, I stammer, stumble and mispronounce some of them. Not many. Not enough for people to take much notice. But I'm aware of every error. There are a few tongue twisters that often get me. Sometimes I space out and pause before regaining a sense of where I am in the repetition. My Hebrew is fairly fluent but I don't speak and pronounce the language like a native speaker.
Is it a big deal? Maybe. Yesterday the Rabbi taught the fifth Mishna of the fifth chapter of Mesechet Brachot. It reads in part: "One who prays and errs, it is bad sign for him; if he is the prayer leader, then it is a bad sign for those who appointed him, as a person's representative is as if he is the person himself." The Mishna goes on to tell of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa who could tell who would be healed and who would die based on how fluent the person's prayer was.
But, I thought as the Rabbi spoke, I'm not representing the community because I am especially qualified. I am leading because my mother died and so the community had decided I have a "chiyuv" (obligation) to lead prayers. It's my very status as a mourner that has thrust me into this role, a role that is both wanted and unwanted.
After prayers, I talked to the Rabbi who explained that he didn't think the Mishna was talking about minor errors in prayer. It probably had in mind skipping entire paragraphs or reciting them out of order (more likely when prayer books hadn't yet been printed).
In any event, I will probably continue to make mistakes, though I would like to daven a hundred percent fluently on my mother's Yahrzeit. But I'm not going to drive myself crazy about it. Frankly, I appreciate when other prayer leaders make mistakes. It humanizes them. A few months back there was an old man who had to be helped to get through the repetition by someone standing right next to him. I remember that prayer more than the many times I've heard the Amidah being repeated flawlessly.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
My mother's hidden hand?
How is my mother's influence still being felt? How's this: I am planning to go to Israel with my son next week for two weeks. But I'm having a problem. My son's passport expired. (Children's passports are good only for five years, so you really have to stay on top of them to make sure they're still valid.) We applied for a new passport six weeks ago. Heard nothing. Then last Friday we get a letter from the State Department: he didn't sign his application and we have to reapply. I called the State Department many times to make sure we did everything we could to get it on time. On Monday we went to the Post Office again to file a new application. There was no one I could talk to at the State Department who could assure me it would come before our scheduled flight.
This morning after davening I was talking to a friend about the problem. Another congregant overheard our conversation. He said, "talk to Elliot Engel's office" (our local congressman). Aha. Never would have thought of that. And so I did. And they helped. Apparently they specialize in helping constituents with this kind of problem. By day's end, the congressman's staffer assured me the passport had been issued and would arrive tomorrow or Friday.
I left a message on the congregant's Facebook page thanking him for his advice. He responded it was "bishert" (fated) because he was there this morning because he just happened to oversleep. And I was there because I just happened to mention the problem to a friend. Because I am going to shul. Because I am saying kaddish for my mother.
Remembrance: a Project
It's very easy to say things about a deceased such as "their memory will not be forgotten." It's much more difficult not to forget. "Out of sight, out of mind," a cliche that has a lot of truth to it. I have good friends and relatives who live far away. I stay in touch, but do I think of them often? Not really. Do I think of my mother all the time? No. Do I always think of her when I'm in shul and reciting kaddish? No. Sometimes I'm reciting kaddish and have to remind myself of the reason why.
Again, Wieseltier. Why is mourning limited to twelve months? Because, according to Mannasseh ben Israel, "after twelve months the body is gone and the soul ascends and no longer descends." After twelve months, the soul forgets the body. And so "the period of mourning is the year in which desire has not yet been defeated by death. When the twelve months are over, and death defeats desire, the soul will be gone. And the son will be back" (Kaddish, p. 552). A prooftext from Psalm 31, verse 13: "I have been forgotten from the heart like the dead, I have become like a lost vessel." Wieseltier: "We [Jews] don't mind not being wanted. We mind not being remembered" (Kaddish, p. 553).
How to keep memory alive? People pay thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars to try. They hang pictures, donate plaques, dedicate buildings, create foundations, anything to concretize the fact that a person who now is dead once lived. Yes of course the memory of my mother will always be with me, and, I can safely say, with my children. It will be expressed in how we think and act, in subtle ways. I have begun to quote my mother whenever I say something she might have said (sort of like in the Talmud, when one sage states a teaching in the name of a previous one). The point is: keeping memory alive is not easy. It's one of the most difficult tasks I can think of.
And so I am engaged in a project to keep her memory alive. I am fortunate that she liked to write. She edited a book on couple's therapy. She also wrote poems which she shared with us about a year before she died. And there were other writings that I found on her computer (fortunately not password protected), more poems, thoughts about the therapeutic process, thoughts about death, things she might never have intended to share with us, but there they are. And in her filing cabinets there were hard copies of letters and the draft of a book about the problem of drugs in American society. So I took it all and am going through it, and in this way she still speaks to me. My hope is to create a booklet of her writings in time for the first Yahrzeit (anniversary of death). Something concrete that I can say: my mother lived, this is who she was, and, perhaps, this is why and how she will be remembered.
Again, Wieseltier. Why is mourning limited to twelve months? Because, according to Mannasseh ben Israel, "after twelve months the body is gone and the soul ascends and no longer descends." After twelve months, the soul forgets the body. And so "the period of mourning is the year in which desire has not yet been defeated by death. When the twelve months are over, and death defeats desire, the soul will be gone. And the son will be back" (Kaddish, p. 552). A prooftext from Psalm 31, verse 13: "I have been forgotten from the heart like the dead, I have become like a lost vessel." Wieseltier: "We [Jews] don't mind not being wanted. We mind not being remembered" (Kaddish, p. 553).
How to keep memory alive? People pay thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars to try. They hang pictures, donate plaques, dedicate buildings, create foundations, anything to concretize the fact that a person who now is dead once lived. Yes of course the memory of my mother will always be with me, and, I can safely say, with my children. It will be expressed in how we think and act, in subtle ways. I have begun to quote my mother whenever I say something she might have said (sort of like in the Talmud, when one sage states a teaching in the name of a previous one). The point is: keeping memory alive is not easy. It's one of the most difficult tasks I can think of.
And so I am engaged in a project to keep her memory alive. I am fortunate that she liked to write. She edited a book on couple's therapy. She also wrote poems which she shared with us about a year before she died. And there were other writings that I found on her computer (fortunately not password protected), more poems, thoughts about the therapeutic process, thoughts about death, things she might never have intended to share with us, but there they are. And in her filing cabinets there were hard copies of letters and the draft of a book about the problem of drugs in American society. So I took it all and am going through it, and in this way she still speaks to me. My hope is to create a booklet of her writings in time for the first Yahrzeit (anniversary of death). Something concrete that I can say: my mother lived, this is who she was, and, perhaps, this is why and how she will be remembered.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Reading Kaddish
Tonight I finally finished Leon Wieseltier's book, Kaddish. A long time fan of his from my days as a subscriber to the New Republic, I bought it shortly after it was published (1998). I got through about half of it then and put it aside. In the back of my mind, I knew I'd pick it up again when kaddish became a reality.
I began rereading it shortly after Shiva ended, starting at the beginning. (I'm a slow reader. Also, it's 583 pages.) For the past few months, I've been reading it only on Shabbat. As I went along, I tagged the page with a post-it when he said something I liked. The book sits on my desk with yellow, orange and green post-its sticking out like weird decorations. If I refer to one of his comments in this blog, I remove the post-it. Many remain.
It's definitely the best book I've read about mourning both from intellectual and emotional standpoints. In reality, it's not really a book, but more of an intellectual travelogue of his year mourning his father's death. We find out little about his actual life, nothing about wife and kids, some about his father, a Holocaust survivor. The majority of pages are devoted to translations of rabbinic sources on mourning, the study of which he devoted himself during his kaddish year. These in themselves are quite interesting, but it's his reflections on these sources and thoughts on kaddish and mourning that make the book so moving.
Lately I've sought out other books about kaddish and mourning. Why? I want to better understanding the process of mourning and am curious what others have to say about it. (Also my taste in reading tends to be on the heavy side.) I've read Ari Goldman's Living a Year of Kaddish (a fast read, too warm and fuzzy for my taste). I skimmed through Anita Diamant's Saying Kaddish (a nice general primer on Jewish traditions associated with death). I just purchased an out-of-print book edited by Jack Riemer called Jewish Insights on Death and Mourning, published in 1995. I've gone through Maurice Lamm's classic, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, a compendium of Jewish law related to burial and mourning. And I recently purchased A Daughter's Recitation of Mourner's Kaddish by Rahel Berkovits (2011), a compendium of laws related to women saying kaddish.
Am I being morose by reading these works. A bit, but that's what's interesting me these days. In a way, kaddish is not just a prayer, it's a mindset. Here's a bit of Wieseltier (p. 455) that speaks to this:
He's right. Reading these books is a way of acknowledging my mother. I'll do anything to stay as close to her as possible.
I began rereading it shortly after Shiva ended, starting at the beginning. (I'm a slow reader. Also, it's 583 pages.) For the past few months, I've been reading it only on Shabbat. As I went along, I tagged the page with a post-it when he said something I liked. The book sits on my desk with yellow, orange and green post-its sticking out like weird decorations. If I refer to one of his comments in this blog, I remove the post-it. Many remain.
It's definitely the best book I've read about mourning both from intellectual and emotional standpoints. In reality, it's not really a book, but more of an intellectual travelogue of his year mourning his father's death. We find out little about his actual life, nothing about wife and kids, some about his father, a Holocaust survivor. The majority of pages are devoted to translations of rabbinic sources on mourning, the study of which he devoted himself during his kaddish year. These in themselves are quite interesting, but it's his reflections on these sources and thoughts on kaddish and mourning that make the book so moving.
Lately I've sought out other books about kaddish and mourning. Why? I want to better understanding the process of mourning and am curious what others have to say about it. (Also my taste in reading tends to be on the heavy side.) I've read Ari Goldman's Living a Year of Kaddish (a fast read, too warm and fuzzy for my taste). I skimmed through Anita Diamant's Saying Kaddish (a nice general primer on Jewish traditions associated with death). I just purchased an out-of-print book edited by Jack Riemer called Jewish Insights on Death and Mourning, published in 1995. I've gone through Maurice Lamm's classic, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, a compendium of Jewish law related to burial and mourning. And I recently purchased A Daughter's Recitation of Mourner's Kaddish by Rahel Berkovits (2011), a compendium of laws related to women saying kaddish.
Am I being morose by reading these works. A bit, but that's what's interesting me these days. In a way, kaddish is not just a prayer, it's a mindset. Here's a bit of Wieseltier (p. 455) that speaks to this:
"For as long as I have been organizing my life around the kaddish, I have been organizing my life around my father. When kaddish is over, he will be gone. My strict observance of the year of mourning has had the consequence of delaying the return to normal life. I have lived in a state of suspension, shielded from a fatherless world by a fatherful practice. The Jewish way of mourning has turned an absence into a presence."
He's right. Reading these books is a way of acknowledging my mother. I'll do anything to stay as close to her as possible.
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