Ways of Awe: Kaddish

[Reflective opening string music with slowly-building energy]

Xava: I like to think of it as one of the hinges of the Jewish year, right, where things sort of turn into a new direction.

Binya: Like actually our goal is something much bigger and more beautiful.

Noam: So we’re taking part in creation by speaking these words.

Laynie: In the body.

Jessica: And a slowness.

Noa: And…heartbroken rage-full blessing-full connection, for whatever that’s possibly worth in this moment.

[String music gets stronger and faster]

Xava: By reinterpreting a text, we have the power to heal a wound that’s actually in the past, and our ancestors are already in the future, healing the wounds of the foolishness that we’re saying now.

[Horns enter the music with a feeling of both grief and hopefulness]

Maia: I’m Maia.

Shelby: I’m Shelby. Welcome to Ways of Awe.

Maia: An audio companion to the prayers and rituals of the Jewish High Holidays.

Mónica: Um, we want to honor and remember and face death, loss, destruction. And also we want to agitate the living, give the living practices that will allow us to embody grief and move towards courage.

Shelby: We’ve been studying together for years and Ways of Awe shares some of our translation experiments.

Maia: Woven together with research and soundscapes from where we live and pray, all with the help of mentors, friends and ancestors, known and unknown.

Shelby: Sound is touch, sound is touch!

Xava: Sound is touch, yeah.

Shelby: And our ancestors knew it!

Binya: All these things are trying to access you in every possible way to break you open.

Shelby: It’s crowded inside these prayers. But there’s room. Come on in.

[Reflective music slows, resolves and stops]

[Water lapping sounds]

[Noa reciting Qaddish] 

Noa: Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di-v’ra chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei b’chayeichon uvyomeichon uvchayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba’agala uvizman kariv, v’im’ru: “amen.” Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach l’alam ul’almei almaya. Yitbarach v’yishtabach, v’yitpa’ar v’yitromam, v’yitnaseh, v’yithadar v’yit’aleh v’yit’halal sh’mei

[Noa’s Qaddish continues underneath narration]

Mónica: It’s this gate or portal entryway into grief and memory, and something about the prayer opens and taps into a flow of language and emotions that wasn’t open until you hit that moment ritually and liturgically, and then the flow starts to move and change things…

[Noa’s Qaddish continues]

Shelby: Shana tova. Anyada dulse i allegre. Gut yontif. Let’s go inside the Mourner’s Kaddish. A prayer that’s recited year-round, but has a particular charge during the Days of Awe. 

Maia: Kaddish Yatom is translated literally as “the Orphan’s Kaddish.” Part of all three daily services, with its repetitive solemnity, the Kaddish is for many people the one prayer they know by heart.

Shelby: Maybe you can feel its litany in your chest. Maybe you’ve heard the name but never spoken the prayer.  However you’re arriving to it, welcome. In this episode, we’ll turn towards the history of Kaddish and its propulsive sounds & diasporic grammars.

Maia: You’ll hear the Kaddish recited along with our interpretative translation, and we’ll be joined by a few of our mentors: poet & Rabbi Monica Gomery, teacher and Torah-lover Laynie Soloman, musician, yiddishist, and zogerke Noam Lerman,  and teacher, prayer-leader, scribe-in-training, noa. Let’s step deeper into this prayer together. 

[Noam chanting the yizkor tkhine]

[Zimyl reciting Kaddish]

Shelby: Even when I’ve stumbled through Kaddish, the sounds were in me. Yitgadal v’yitkadash…mumbling along, my mouth curling around the rhymes. The opening “yitga” and “yitka” echo the future, fast-approaching in prayer-time, where about halfway through, those sounds return with a “yitbah” and “yishta” and “yitpa”… and when I say it, I remember my younger self, squirrely by the end of services, thrumming with its syllables. At that age, the Mourner’s Kaddish symbolized the end of sit-down-and-be-quiet-time. I always wondered if the adults were sad about that ending, they all sounded so somber–whereas I was overjoyed. Maybe that young impatient instinct rhymes with the prayer’s logic: the Orphan’s Kaddish is a chanty-whispery-mournful-hooray for how everything must end and so until then (and it is coming quick), may we bless, may we exalt, may we praise.

Noa: …and I remember as a kid watching adults say the Kaddish and sort of watching everyone’s body and trying to figure out what exactly it was that was going on… 

[Zimyl reciting Kaddish]

[Water lapping sounds]

Mónica: I thought about my earliest memory of experiencing Mourner’s Kaddish specifically. When I was eleven, my dad’s dad died and my family went to Caracas, where my grandparents and extended family live, and we went to the cemetery and had a graveside funeral and burial. And it was the first time I saw my father cry that I can remember. And, um, we went to synagogue infrequently as a family. We went on the high holidays. And so I don’t have memories of really ever seeing or hearing my father say prayers in Hebrew or Aramaic until this moment. And my memory is when he was called upon to recite the mourner’s Kaddish. He was crying and speaking in a language that he didn’t usually speak in…

[Zimyl reciting Kaddish with water sounds]

Laynie: …there’s something that feels powerful about the fact that basically everyone says the same Kaddish…with some slight adjustments…the initial opening is essentially the same. And there are some tweaks that happen in different communities, but it’s mostly the same thing…

[Zimyl reciting Kaddish with water sounds]

Maia: Kaddish is the most frequently recited prayer of the service, repeated in up to five slightly different forms. It’s a punctuation mark, a structuring principle, a spine to the service, or perhaps the ribs that spur off the spine, holding steady the congregation’s collective breath. By the time we reach the end of the service, we mutter it together in its final form–the Orphan’s Kaddish. 

[Tzali reciting Kaddish blended with bird sounds]

Laynie: (3:07)…My earliest memories, um, connected to Kaddish was a sense of punctuation. Um, I feel like being a little kid sitting in shul and hearing the words of Kaddish…Strange punctuation….

Mónica: …it’s this gate or portal entryway into grief and memory…

[Moishe reciting Kaddish and continues underneath narration]

Noam:…that person is all of a sudden whisked away and then there’s a space where they were and the living fill that in some way and we can’t fully fill it, but we try. Um, and so I think this prayer is kind of a yeah, I guess physicalizing that…

[Moishe reciting Kaddish and finishes]

Mó: …and something about the prayer opens and taps into a flow…then the flow starts to move and change things…

Laynie:…It’s in Aramaic and not in Hebrew. It’s a different language than the rest of the service. I definitely didn’t know Hebrew either, but it sounded weird. It sounds different…

Maia:…I’m really interested in the tension between the Aramaic now is the thing that triggers the strangeness. When initially was, no, no, no, this has to be in the vernacular. This has to be in the language that we chat and gossip in…

Mó:…what was intended to be spoken in the lingua franca so that it would be accessible to people saying it is now this kind of incantation, um, that feels unfamiliar and in its unfamiliarity becomes the most familiar Jewish prayer we have… 

Maia: Written mostly in the literary/study-hall vernacular of the Targum (the first Aramaic translation of Tanakh from the biblical Hebrew), we find some words and phrases in Kaddish entirely in Hebrew however:  v’chayyim aleynu v’al kol Yisrael and v’imru Amen.  These phrases were so ubiquitous that they were understood even by those who did not read or write Hebrew any longer. Though some rogue scholars believe these are vestiges of an older “original” Hebrew Kaddish later translated and expanded in Aramaic, most understand it as the gathering together of Torah sources and concepts (from Hebrew) using the daily Aramaic. This palimpsest text is a record of a post-Temple community reckoning and remaking their tradition outside the priesthood and in resistance to Roman empire-building. 

Shelby: Later, when Aramaic was no longer the shared language of the Jewish street or study hall, we see another layer of (improvisational post-vernacular) Hebrew sneaking back in. 

Maia: The Aramaic verb forms (binyanim) that (gently) hold Kaddish together can be much more flexible than Hebrew. Three Aramaic binyanim that originally seem to have been reflexive, have come to also encompass the passive. In this Aramaic, infused and confused by Hebrew and the historical ebb and flow of Jewish vernaculars, the distinction between the reflexive and the passive is lost. The Kaddish holds the history of our multilingual diaspora in these ambiguities and slippages.  

Shelby: In our translation process we have marveled at how this unlawful grammar can make more space for our questions–might give us more interpretive room inside our rituals.  

Maia: Sometimes we find Aramaic verbs conjugated Hebraicly or vocalizations that don’t quite make sense in either Aramaic or Hebrew.  We are both delighted by these traces of ancestral tinkering; layers of Jewish voices stretching these words through time.  

[Water lapping continues]

Shelby: And then the fact that the prayer wasn’t originally a mourner’s prayer, but likely a blessing over Torah study. Kaddish comes not from the Temple or early synagogue liturgy, but from the Beit Midrash, the study halls. Our best hypothesis is that the first Kaddish was a version of the Kaddish d’Rabbanan after a study session or a teaching— this crystalized as a ritual at a time when Torah study was punishable by death in the Roman Empire. 

[pages turning sound]

It wasn’t until the 6th Century CE that Kaddish entered the Siddur, not associated with mourning, but as a required punctuation after the inclusion of Torah or Talmud in the liturgy.  Then a great teacher died.  

[pause and water lapping sounds]

Maia: Masekhet Soferim (A non-canonical tractate of the Palestinian Talmud written in the 8th Century) records Kaddish recited at the burial of a Torah scholar.  All his students study in his honor, finishing their learning as they always had with the Kaddish d’Rabbanan.  [sound of a group reciting Kaddish together] By the 9th and 10th centuries we see that Kaddish has come to be expected at a burial–not just for a prominent sage.  

[Group recording reciting kaddish continues & stops]

Laynie:…there’s something that feels powerful about the fact that basically everyone says the same Kaddish. Pretty much. Uh, with some slight adjustments, but that the initial opening is essentially the same. And there are some tweaks that happen in different communities…

[Group recording reciting kaddish continues & fades]

Maia:  in the Ashky Kaddish, we ask for only two things: Y’hey shlama raba min sh’maya v’chayyim – יְהֵא שְׁלָמָה רַבָּא מִן שְׁמַיָּא, וְחַיִּים – peace and life.  In the Sephardi Kaddish, we ask for twelve things instead: (ocean recording starts) v’chayim tovim v’shaba v’yishuah v’nechamah v’sheyzavahurfuah u’g’ulah us’lichah v’chaparah v’revach v’hatzalah – יְהֵא שְׁלָמָה רַבָּא מִן שְׁמַיָּא,[וְ]חַיִּים [טוֹבִים]וְשָֹבָע וִישׁוּעָה וְנֶחָמָה וְשֵׁיזָבָהוּרְפוּאָה וּגְאֻלָּה וּסְלִיחָה וְכַפָּרָה,וְרֵוַח וְהַצָּלָה — peace and life, but also: plenty, healing, solace, liberation, rescue, deliverance, atonement, forgiveness, redemption and salvation.  One joke I have heard is: ‘if we already have you on the line, why not ask for more? 

Our translation, which you’ll hear towards the end of this episode, is a combination of the two (a nod to many of our proud and also sometimes discomfited Ashkephardiness).  

[Ocean sounds get louder]

Shelby: Now, for many of us, neither ancient Hebrew nor Aramaic are shared vernaculars, so our primary grieving prayer requires us to learn, or at least stumble through, the words of Kaddish. When we bring the prayer’s litany into our bodies,  we’re brought into a lineage of learning through grieving (with a prayer that originally blessed learning!). We’re in there with all the teachers, students, and mourners. We’re in the chain… 

[Three people reciting kaddish, starting slightly like dominoes, fades in and out: Avi & Colin & Rachel]

[Kaddish recited by Rachel’s singular voice]

Noa: Often, if I’m teaching it to people who have not much experience saying it or saying it together. (ocean comes back in) Um, so I am also in those moments, trying to be aware of the volume of my voice because I don’t want it to be louder than the person saying it, but I do want it to be loud enough that they don’t feel alone in the words. 

[Ocean sounds get louder]

Maia: Not surprisingly, when in search of Kaddish – its origins and evolutions – we find it in the blustery historical disputations and tenderly dissected quandaries of our commentaries.  When should we say it?  When should we not say it?  Who should say it? What of our choreographies? …how we move when we say it? 

We find Kaddish in the surprising ‘leniency’ of rabbinic rulings – midrash and legends that get told and retold precisely because when the need of a mourner or a community’s grief seemed to run counter to the law, the rabbis stood with the mourners.  

Can the Kaddish be said even on a festival where we are obligated not to interrupt the joy?  Can a child say Kaddish for a parent even though they are too young to be a prayer leader?  Can a daughter say Kaddish even though she is not obligated halakhically? In some communities these are still debated.  

The historical gossip and on-going disputes behind all our prayers is where I admit to feeling most at home in Jewishness. Talmud and other responsa and annotated siddurim from around the world come to different conclusions.  But our texts model over and over again, that we can break the law to comfort each other.

[Moishe reciting Kaddish]

Maia: We can literally hear this in the beautifully garbled grammar of our prayers–the pull of minhag (the custom of a community as opposed to the Halakha–the text-precedented law). The sound is another kind of record of how we have always changed our tradition to bring ourselves closer to it.  The sound, the rhyme, how it feels to say the words outweighs traditional grammatical sense-making. As we lead or respond, as we bow or step backwards or rock or rise or stay low, the sounds we make and feel in our bodies are the artifacts of our transformations; a document of adaptation. We have been messing around with the knots that tie our words together and join the living and the dead for a very long time…

 [Ocean continues and then fades a bit]

Laynie: It raises an ultimate or foundational tension that I feel in my own relationship to this prayer or incantation, which is, um, there is something that is offered by the intimacy of these words with mourning, an intimate, known, specific, close person. And I think our tradition is really attentive to the power of the relationship between these words and that intimate loss. And there have been times for me where that’s been painful, where I haven’t been proximate enough to someone who felt proximate to me. When my Bubbie, um, passed away, I really struggled with the question of saying Kaddish. And I remember really wanting to. And also, um, it felt like I was encroaching on a kind of intimacy that my mom, for example, um, was having that was really hard for me. Um, disenfranchised mourning, uh, there.. and I think there’s something that challenges that intimacy when we use Kaddish in collective terms. And I’ve felt extremely transformed in moments in direct actions when Kaddish is invoked to honor collective mourning and to create a different kind of intimacy and porousness and openness to collective mourning and tragedy…

[ocean continues and then fades a bit]

Noa: I learned that many have the custom to say the Kaddish for anyone who may not have had people to say it for them. And I remember being really struck by that as a kid and feeling really, really strongly about needing to do that. And so that’s been my, uh, my approach to it since I was pretty small. 

[ocean continues and then fades a bit]

Mónica: Laynie and I, as a havruta, I feel like we’ve talked a lot together over the years about the queerness of kinship that we can learn from Talmud and rabbinic tradition and the ways in which Havrutot or students and teachers in particular, form these intimacies that are outside of the traditional and kind of normative family structures or modes of intimacy that we now think of or that are sort of cultures and societies and even halakha defines for us as what primary relationships look like. Um, and so to notice that saying mourner’s Kaddish for someone is a practice that comes from students saying mourner’s Kaddish for their teacher. There’s something very sweet for me there about like a queerness of relationship that’s in the roots of this as a grieving text. 

[ocean sounds continue]

Maia: Kaddish is named for the second word of the prayer–v’yitkadash. Typically translated as “sanctification.” In Aramaic, the verb is to make or become or proclaim something holy or sacred. The root it shares with biblical Hebrew is often understood as ‘to become pure,’ ‘to be holy or sacred,’ ‘to consecrate,’ ‘to set aside.’  At its core, stripped of all grammatical specificity, kuf-daled-shin means to be cut off or separated.  

Something becomes holy or sacred when we set it apart, when we make a distinction. 

But separation can also be a banishment. At the root of the sacred is a reminder of the tenuousness of belonging.  

 Noam: I remember my first yizkor, um, my first yizkor after my dad died was Passover. And I remember exactly where I was. I remember when everyone left the room and I was, you know, the youngest person in the room besides a few other elders. And I just remember just crying so hard. I was just like, this is so unfair. Why is everyone leaving? 

Maia: To be cut-off means you can be made holy or condemned with the same act. In diaspora we are told that we are cut-off from our source–are we consecrated or exiled?  And when we are separated from the ones we love most…?

Noam: …then there’s a space where they were…

[ocean sounds continue]

Noam: I’m so grateful that Yizkor exists. Um, I think it’s powerful to have a communal touchpoint into a grief that I’m always carrying with me and that other people are always also carrying this grief with them always…and it’s not as intense as the yarzeit day. You know, it’s like embedded within a khag embedded within yontif. It’s a holiday and there’s joy. And then we get to just take a break in that and be like, okay, actually, some of us are always carrying this little well of grief in us, and now we get to dip into that, and then we dip back into the joy, which I think is just so, real. It’s just so connected to life. That’s what we’re always doing. We’re balancing between joy and grief and all the other feelings.

Mónica: There’s something powerful to me about saying the farther away you get from a loss, it’s still not enough just to have a yartzeit or a meldado to have one point in the year when you really go there and remember like a person, a human system actually needs more than one time. And even as we re-enter the world of the living and sort of walk around among everyone else, we still need these touchstones throughout the year.

Noam:… there’s a space where they were… and the living fill that in some way and we can’t fully fill it, but we try. …

[Ocean sounds]

Laynie: I feel like the additions during the yamim noraim to the regular daily Davening part of what happens for me is that it just shocks me…it’s like I’m going about my life and I’m like, oh, pull myself back, I forgot this. You’re going about your life. Go back. You messed it up. Fix it. Do it again. So I do think there’s some, um…creation of small t’shuva moments, that the davening additions facilitate for me…

Mo: Both as a davener and especially as a shatz, as a prayer leader, this is this liturgical way that I track what time of year we’re in. And it really stands out to me all throughout the season of Yamim Noraim and I wait for it all year, and I savor it, and I feel really responsible as a prayer leader. Um, when we get to Erev of Rosh Hashanah, Maariv and the first moment of Le’ela u’le’ela. I really just want to do that justice give the alley oop to the cahal that we’re, now shifting in time in a big way. 

[Ocean sounds]

Laynie: The ways in which we can stretch the capacity of our rituals that are about intimate familial loss as they’re legislated to, to expand them, to enable us to hold the kind of collective loss, grief, responsibility, shame, accountability, all of the things that we’re trying to hold. And it would make sense to me too, that we do that on a holiday. You know, that makes sense to me on Yom Kippur, certainly because of the way we are called to take accountability for who we have been and who we haven’t been, but I think, on any other holiday, because it’s the time we’re all together. 

[Water lapping]

Mo: …and I think on that continuum of intimate and collective losses for me also specifically because you brought up Yom Kippur, there’s this continuum between the Martyrology service and Yizkor, where the Martyrology service is, where we grieve these collective losses and yizkor you kind of come back into a tight circle of those whose names you are saying aloud personally, but both are communally witnessed and both are done among the everyoneness, the gathering for chag, for yamim noraim. Um, grieving is also connected to t’shuva in this courageous way—to shame and to accountability and to repair. Um, that we slow that down too. On Yom Kippur and say, we have these these martyrs people who have died, unjustly in ways that reverberate through our history and our communities and those who were targeted and persecuted and killed by others and in contemporary communities today also were willing to look at by Jews, you know, um, but to say we have, we have to slow this down. We grieve these collective losses and we also make space for these intimate griefs and they’re not mutually exclusive. Those are both practices of making t’shuva.

[Water lapping]

Mó:…and something about the prayer opens and taps into a flow…then the flow starts to move and change things…

[Water lapping]

Shelby: After reciting Kaddish for both my parents, I started to feel something I’d never felt in the prayer before. The maximalism of its praises sometimes felt like they forced me to separate from the dead, even when I was in the early stages of mourning where I felt closer to them than the living. And Judaism accounts for this, it gave me a period to get low to the ground, to feel the soil they entered, to wallow, to wail, to shut out the light and the days of my still-breathing life. That period of “shiva” is the first seven days. Mirrors covered, sitting on the floor, barely eating, ghosting around my mom’s house. But the stages of mourning roll onwards, they ask that we re-enter the world of the living, into shloshim (the first thirty days) and then into the first year of mourning. For much of that first year, we are asked to say the Kaddish daily. Every day, from the maw of grief, as we notice all the empty spaces we inherited from our deceased, we praise life, life, life, light, light, light, the great and beautiful and sacred name! It felt painful, betraying—but also necessary. Like it was pushing me to not become codependent… with the dead. Yes, they are gone. But I am still here and I am going to live. I’m choosing to live, or trying to choose to.

[Water lapping continues and sounds of children playing]

But the Kaddish also knows that grieving is not just for the living. By linking heaven and earth explicitly in our parallel eternities, the Kaddish ensures the dead’s safe passage while turning alivers towards life. The well-being of the living AND the dead are inextricably linked. To say that bigger: death belongs to life. It’s a member of our family, no matter how dominant culture attempts to cast it as an outsider. 

[Water lapping continues]

Maia: We are carrying the dead, they speak their Kaddish through us, and we are rallying ourselves, we are adding our grieving link in the chain of tradition, but that’s not all. We are also consoling G-d. The entire prayer is about invoking the magnification of the Great Name. But if the name is great, why does it need us to re-magnify it?  Hasidic tradition teaches that the death of every one of G-d’s creatures causes a gap in G-d’s circle. We say the Kaddish to fill the gap, to re-sanctify the Name that has been diminished by a small and essential loss of one person. 

G!d is among the mourners. 

[Water sounds continue]

Noam:… there’s a space where they were…[reverb]  

Mo: We make it possible for Gd to grieve by doing this ritual three times a day. So Gd also can have an outlet for mourning. God needs to move grief through God’s system in order to be a whole God.

Shelby: It’s okay, G-d, we whisper, we coddle, it’s okay, we’re still here. 

[Water sounds blended with Noam chanting their Yizkor tkhine]

Together

Maia

Shelby

Maia & Shelby: Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mey raba

Maia: Swelled & set aside for sacredness Shall Their Multitudinous Name be

Maia & Shelby: B’alma di v’ra chirutey

Shelby In the eternity They carved From their desire

Maia & Shelby: V’yamlich malchutey b’chayechon uv’yomeychon uv’chaye d’chol beyt yisrael

Maia: And may their sovereignty sway you in your lifetimes and in all the days of your lives And the lives of all within the House of G-d Wrestlers

Maia & Shelby: b’agala uv’izman kariv 

Shelby: Suddenly–and at the time so near it almost touches us. v’imru: 

Maia & Shelby: Amen

Shelby: & You-all say: 

Maia & Shelby: Amen!

Y’hey sh’mey raba m’varach l’alam ul’almey almaya

Maia: May their numerous name be numinous Towards this world And the world to come, forever’s forever

Maia & Shelby:

Yitbarach v’yishtabach v’yitpa’ar

v’yitromam v’yitnaseh v’yithadar 

v’yitaleh v’yithalal 

sh’mey d’kudsha

Blessed & sung & adorned & soared & stirred & bedazzled & unburdened & honored Be the name of the Separate Sacredness    

b’rich hu l’eilah u’l’eilah mikol birchata v’shirata tushbchata v’nechemata d’amiran b’alma 

Shelby: Chosen be they, Beyond all choosing & songs & glories & consolations told in the eternal world.

Maia:v’imru 

Maia & Shelby: Amen

Maia: & all of you 

Maia & Shelby:chorus the response                                         

                                       Y’hey shlama raba Min sh’maya

Maia: There will come a great wholeness from heaven’s ceilings

Maia & Shelby:

v’chayim tovim v’shaba 

v’yishuah v’nechamah 

v’shey’zava’hoor’fuah u’g’ulah 

us’lichah v’chaparah 

v’revach v’hatzalah

& life,plenty & healing & solace & liberation & rescue & deliverance & atonement & forgiveness & redemption & relief.

 aleynu v’al kol Yisrael 

Shelby: Be upon us and upon all those wrestling G-d. 

v’imru 

Maia & Shelby: amen

Shelby: & all of you say: 

Maia & Shelby:may it be so

Maia & Shelby:

Oseh shalom bimromav 

hu ya’aseh shalom 

aleynu v’al kol Yisrael 

Maia: The one who cares for peace up high will make peace over us and all those making home firmly.

Maia & Shelby: v’imru, amen

Shelby: And say: 

Maia & Shelby: True.

Maia: And say: 

Maia & Shelby: Enduring.

And say: Amen. 

[Water & bird sounds]

Maia: The students who first said this as a mourner’s prayer over their beloved teacher’s death–can you picture the moment they forever altered the Kaddish’s path? [pages turning recording] They were sad. They were together. They thought, let us study with him one last time. They said the thing they always said, except with their teacher’s voice gone from their chorus. 

[pages turning]

Shelby: Here we are, chanting, murmuring, rumbling out that same prayer, [Avi recitation of prayer starts very low] and even if we don’t know what it means, we are doing their doing, we are tugging the never-ending sentence of our tradition…

[Avi ends at first “v’imru amen”…footsteps & bird sounds recording starts and continues underneath]

Maia: V’imru amen means, “and yall say amen.”  A plural of the verb amar, whose deepest and oldest meaning is ‘to knot or join,’ later understood to refer to the joining of words to compose a text, to speak, or to think.  We knot ourselves to one another when we say these words with each other. We are enjoined (obligatory & together). The Kaddish joins us.

Shelby: Let me put it this way: there is a gold thread in your fists.  V’imru, Amen could mean “and you all: tug the thread.” Do you feel it? You’re tugging it now as you sway, as you sing. The dead hold the other end of this chain. When you pull, like you are right now, you say to them, Still here. They pull it too, calling back, Still here! Let’s think again about the word, וְשִׁירָתָא, which comes from the root “shir” usually translated as sing, but at its core, this word means “chain.” So perhaps Kaddish is the string we sing to the dead, the one they sing and string back to us.

[Birds sounds]

Shelby: Ok, you-all feel this gold thread in your fists. No no make it rope now, a golden glistening cord (soft on your palm), held so taut and thick that it is strong enough to bear weight. We can hang things on this line, we can send things back and forth along it, heavy things, enormous things, unwieldy things, utterly devastatingly, expansive and wild things, indeed the entire world can be–no, is—balancing on this rope. In this very moment, it trembles, poised upon it. Like Rava says in the Talmud, (Masekhet Sotah 49a), in an age in which sacrifice in the Temple no longer exists for atonement from sin (in their age and our age to be clear), “the world is maintained by the recital of the phrase Y’hey Shmey Raba (Let His great name be blessed).” In other words: The world is held together by the Kaddish. You’re holding it. Your dead are holding it. We’re all holding it together, tugging and singing, tugging and singing. 

[Birds in the distance, ocean waves]

[Noam chanting Yizkor tkhine with bird sounds]

[Reflective show music returns]

Maia: Ways of Awe was written by Maya Brown and Shelby Handler, based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, Washington, on unceded Coast Salish, Duwamish land.

Shelby: All episodes edited by Maia Brown. Audio engineering by Daniel Guenther.

Maia: We’re indebted to each of our interviewees for their brilliance and generosity, and we’re grateful to the community who lent their prayer voices to these episodes.

Shelby: Thank you to our friends Ross Kirshenbaum, or Levoneh, Jimmy Austin and Peter Lippman for our show music, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings.

Maia: Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program, the King County Office of Arts & Culture Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop—without which this project would never have made it into your ears, dear listener.

Shelby: Thank you to all of our mentors and teachers. Thank you to our ancestors. We feel you with us. We’re hoping the feeling is mutual.

[Show music continues and fades out slowly]