Atelier TenouaTalk18 April 2023
The Kaddish: secret of a prayer
1h 29min
A workshop recorded on the evening of Yom HaShoah, back from the reading of the names at the Mémorial. Why has this prayer, wrongly called “the prayer of the dead” though it never speaks of death, become the most sacred to so many Jews, believers or not? An inquiry running from Leviticus to Leonard Cohen, from a legend of Rabbi Akiva to the secret of Ne’ila. In French.
“In the span of twenty-four hours, we manage to read only half the names of the Jews deported from France. […] It is, in a way, the longest prayer of the Jewish year: a prayer without words, without Hebrew liturgy, a prayer of descendants, of heirs, of survivors who remember.”
“The kaddish, wrongly called the prayer of the dead. Why wrongly? Because the kaddish does not speak of death at all. It does not speak of dying, it does not speak of mourning, it does not speak of the dying.”
“It is no accident that it sounds like abracadabra: both the kaddish and abracadabra are Aramaic words. Abracadabra means “he did as he said.” It is the performative word in Aramaic.”
“Nothing honors the dead better than the speech of the living, and the possibility for that speech to turn into acts.”
“The secret of the kaddish is the secret of a human greatness that finds itself able to survive the worst catastrophes and to live with the apparent absence of the divine. […] The kaddish is the prayer of Jewish continuity, or perhaps of continuity itself.”
“It is not rare, in the Ashkenazi world, to hear someone introduce their child by saying: “Here, meet my kaddish.” […] And you need not be a parent to choose yourself a kaddish: we place in the world beings, works, writings that will one day be our kaddish.”
The session
The workshop opens on the return from the Mémorial: the uninterrupted reading of the names, and the memory of Marceline Loridan-Ivens reading the names of her own convoy up to her own. Then three traces of the kaddish in culture: Simone Veil asking for a kaddish at her grave, Leonard Cohen translating Yitgadal veYitkadash in You Want It Darker, and Rocky reciting the kaddish for his trainer. The inquiry goes back to the Leviticus verse and the root of kadosh, to the minyan, to the kaddish punctuating the service like breaths, to the Aramaic that even the angels do not understand. Then the legend of Rabbi Akiva and the damned man without a son, studied in havruta, and the key: at Ne’ila as in the kaddish, the assembly answers the officiant as the people once answered the high priest at the Temple. Since the destruction, these responses reenact the return of an eclipsed presence. The workshop closes on the eleven months of mourning, the child called “my kaddish,” and the literary kaddish of Isaac Bashevis Singer receiving his Nobel in Yiddish.