The Mourner As Stranger

by Nessa Rapoport
Special To The Jewish Week

Ayin me-yesh: Death inverts creation. One second God is renewing each day the divine invention of the world. The next, a freefall into primordial chaos, tohu va-vohu, darkness without a horizon, pure, ruthless black.

So it is on the morning when a phone call tells you that the beloved friend your age, with whom you were going to grow old, with whom you were laughing a mere night ago, is gone. Or the friend you loved since you were teenagers. But so it is, surprisingly, when the father who has been leaving, second by second for 10 years, is released with finality while you watch his beautiful last breath.

There is no good way, and either way, you are left unable to cohere. They die. You fracture, and the self you were departs, leaving you to reconstitute the ones who are never, not ever...

The taunting paradox of mid-life: When at last you don the wisdom of experience, death strips away the accrual, leaving you a whimpering orphan. Loss steals language; you have nothing to say.

A loving community buttresses you, literally feeding you, telling you when to stand and sit, thrusting into your slack hand the prayer book containing the chanted words that, until now, only other people knew by heart.

You are the other people now. You are the one sitting on the low chair, slayed by memory. You are the one entering a synagogue, eons of previous praying useless, fumbling through pages, unable to find your place.

In the beginning, your fluidity in your tradition, your adeptness: Gone. I shall not forget J., who handed me his siddur, open at Kaddish, on the first morning after shiva. Or E., who — on the second morning, as I, shocked both by death and by my plummeting awareness that there was no egalitarian Mincha-Maariv near either my home or my job, entered the ezrat nashim, the women’s side, of the Modern Orthodox shul that became my Kaddish minyan — interrupted her ardent prayer to show me the place. Or M., who observed sympathetically, “It’s like trying to catch a plane three times a day.”
Eleven Hebrew months later, we women are a fierce sisterhood, waning and waxing like the lunar calendar. When one of us completes her Kaddish, we are diminished as a community and yet relieved for her — no more panting up the stairs to get to shul in time for the first Kaddish, no more solidarity in our delight at being acknowledged in subtle ways as contributors to the culture of the shul, even if not citizens; or, more rarely, slighted by those who race through Kaddish on the other side of the mechitza as if we are not there. Or who ask in a strident voice, “Is anyone a chiyuv?” Does anyone have the mourner’s obligation to lead the minyan? and the resounding “No chiyuv” as we stand there mute, invisible.

If we lower our voices in humility when we claim in the Grace After Meals that from youth to old age we have never seen a righteous person forsaken and his descendants begging for bread, can you not lower your voice when asking such a question? Or when every morning, to start the praying day, you bless the Lord “who did not make me a woman,” as if we, a hearing, listening community, were not standing in the same sacred space, only a barrier away.

Ger: Convert to mourning, stranger at first to the rhythm of public thrice-daily prayer, halting, not enfranchised, orphaned.

Through holy days and fasting days, through festive days and grieving days, and through many ordinary days, none of which has felt ordinary during this mourning year, I have walked — more often run — to shul. Through seasons of brilliant light or brutal cold, through the darkening days and the lengthening ones, I have sat and stood and recited, almost never alone in the women’s section and occasionally, refreshingly, in a mixed minyan. I have said Kaddish in Vermont, Atlanta, Toronto and Israel. I have been in shul for the early minyan on a Sunday morning at 7:10 and for the latest Maariv of solstice evenings. On June 27, after Mincha, my sisters and I concluded 11 Hebrew months.

I count the saying of Kaddish as among the highest privileges of my life. I entered a world and emerged a different person.

In the beginning, Kaddish was like the frame that descends to right the bowling pins that have been mowed into patternless anarchy. The frame lowers painstakingly slowly, setting in place, but only for an instant, what can never be in order.
Throughout the year, my soul was shipwrecked, but my body, that automaton, walked and bent and intoned. And from the naaseh ve-nishma of assumed obligation has come the return of delight in my father’s essence and in the profligate gifts he gave us, which I can see and savor.

By year’s end, and not deliberately, I have reassembled my father from the ailing, reduced man of his long illness to a man in the flush of his powers, burnished honestly by memory.

He is gone and will not return. But he has been returned to me in this terrible year, in ways oblique but constant, dappled by the knowledge that now he is a sanctuary. The thought is sweet. I am a parent and I know that what brings my child comfort is my consolation. So, somewhere in the gan eiden my father earned by saving so many lives, he wants to ease my suffering.
Once I heard a son cite a passage of Talmud in memory of his father, who had died in an instant, in his presence, when the speaker was a small boy. His father’s students were a decade older than their teacher had been when he left this world. To them, his son spoke these words:

“As long as you’re alive, you’re a holech — one who walks — able to go higher and higher in kedusha, holiness. But the second you die, you go from being a holech to an omed — one who stands still. Unless,” said his father’s son, “your students, or your children, continue your work.”

So much death this year. So many sorrows unredeemed. Friend of my middle years, friend of my youth, father: May you accompany me all the days of my life. n
Nessa Rapoport’s most recent book is “House on the River,” a memoir. Copyright © 2008 by Nessa Rapoport.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization