Saying kaddish: Meaning-making and continuing bonds in American Jewish mourning ritual

Abstract

Jewish tradition prescribes rituals and prohibitions for the first week, month, and year after a death, which provide an organized framework for meaning-making, constructing continuing bonds, and establishing the memory of the deceased within the community. After reviewing traditional Jewish customs, this article uses ethnographic examples to explore the diverse ways in which these religious and cultural frames manifest in the lived experiences of American Jews, whose Jewish identities and practices are often fluid, contradictory, and continually evolving as they search for personally-meaningful experiences. I demonstrate how individuals, and communities, synthesize Jewish discourses of death and of mourning with the secular, medicalized discourses prevalent in American society.

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Phyllis Rolfe Silverman, who taught me, by her example, the importance of saying kaddish, and who taught the world, through her research and writing, about continuing bonds.

I also thank the participants in the Towards an Anthropology of Grief Workshop, held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in March 2017, for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1 I use the term liberal Jews to refer to the non-Orthodox denominations—Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Renewal—as well as those Jews who are unaffiliated with any particular form of institutional Judaism.

2 Building on the work of other anthropologists (Behar, 1996; Briggs, 2004; Heathcote, 2014; Rosaldo, 1984), I recognize that, when writing about death and loss, there is not a clear boundary between the personal and the professional, the mourner and the researcher of mourning, the participant and the observer. This is especially true for this project, in which my experience of grieving my mother’s death, and my analysis here, are both deeply influenced by my mother’s research on bereavement (Silverman, 2000, 2001, 2004), as well as my own previous research on American Jewry (Silverman, 2016, 2017).

3 For a full explanation of these practices from an Orthodox perspective, see Lamm (1969); Diamant (1998) provides a liberal American perspective.

4 Heilman (2001) provides a detailed description of the taharah ritual.

5 Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement; Shemini Atzeret is the day following Sukkot, the fall harvest holiday; Passover, a spring holiday, commemorates the exodus from Egypt; and Shavuot, in early summer, commemorates the giving of the Torah at Sinai. In the Biblical period, people would make pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem during these holidays.

6 The literature on kaddish includes texts, commentaries, legal treatises, and personal reflections. Wieseltier (1998) provides a thorough overview of all of these.

7 Jewish religious obligations are highly gendered. Traditionally, responsibilities relating to the synagogue and studying of texts were the domain of men, while women’s domain included the religious obligations of the home.

8 Shul is the Yiddish word for synagogue.

9 Mincha is the afternoon prayer service; Maariv is the evening service.

10 E.M. Broner’s groundbreaking book, Mornings and Mourning (1994) chronicles her year of saying kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue in New York City. Although much has changed since she wrote the book—partially because of her publicly telling this story—almost every woman I have spoken to since beginning this project has at least one story of being treated as a second-class citizen at some point during their year of kaddish.

11 Technology has enabled new ways of addressing this problem. It is now possible to participate in daily and Shabbat synagogue services by watching live-streamed services on the internet. There are also “virtual kaddish groups” that meet through conference call, one of which I participated in regularly

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University.