While her father attended synagogue only on High Holy Days, he was determined that Kaddish should be recited for him after his death. As she records, the prayer is traditionally believed to help elevate the soul of the departed in the afterlife. With three daughters and no son, he asked her to promise to hire someone to say the prayer on his behalf. As she later discovered, you could engage someone via the internet to do it for the modest sum of $500 (£385).
Sarah Birnbach, whose memoir A Daughter's Kaddish recorded her experience of saying the prayer during her year of mourning (photo: Helen Don)[Missing Credit]
Born in 1949, she herself had had no formal religious education. Her paternal grandfather believed that girls did not need it since their role was to run the home and rather than Sunday school, her father should send her to ballet instead.
When she herself had children, she wanted them to know more about their heritage and while she persuaded her husband to join a shul, he did not share her desire to introduce more Jewish observance in the home. Only after she divorced was she able to adopt a more religious lifestyle, going to adult education classes and koshering her kitchen.
After her father was diagnosed with cancer, she felt: “I did not want a proxy for my prayers. No stranger could show God the respect for my father that I could.” When she first broached the idea with him, he responded, “I will have to think about it.” But when she returned to the subject nearly a year before his death in 2000, he said, “You don’t need my blessing, but if you do feel you do, then you have it.”
It was more than 20 years before she published her book – it appeared in paperback last year –- reworking the journals she had kept during her year of mourning. As she explained to the JC, she had been occupied raising two young children with two jobs and a home to run – managing her own HR consultancy and also working as a qualified social worker with families in court.
But through the book she wanted to show people “the importance of participating in a minyan if they know someone who is mourning and needs a minyan.”
The rabbi of her shul had taken a radical step when he started to encourage women to say Kaddish 40 or so years ago, she said. In her own congregation she found spiritual companionship and formed lasting friendship with some of her fellow “minyaneers”. But it was out of town when she was on business or away for other reasons that she encountered barriers.
Early on in her mourning year, going to her father’s shul in Florida, a traditionalist Conservative community, she drew glares when she donned a tallit. “Women do not wear a tallit,” one octogenarian said, “You will remove it.”
In her own congregation, she had become only the second woman to wear a tallit. “Now many women wear a tallit,” she said. “I started a tallit class with a woman who is a seamstress, a very creative woman. I discuss the history of women wearing tallit and what the tallit and the fringes represent, and she helps women to sew their own tallit.”
One time, she cancelled a weekend break because the only nearby synagogue was Orthodox and when she phoned up in advance, she was told “Women don’t say Kaddish”. But other Orthodox synagogues were more accommodating: when she contacted one, the Chabad rabbi said he would ring round to try to ensure a minyan for her.
While there may have been some frustrations, “I wanted to show a balanced picture, I wanted to show there was so much kindness.”
Sarah Birnbach dancing with her father at a family wedding[Missing Credit]
On one occasion, when she had to rush to her daughter at university who had had a car accident, the Hillel rabbi organised a minyan for her at short notice to say Kaddish. Another time, one Conservative community in a small town which did not hold weekday services not only mustered a minyan for her visit but laid on supper.
Meeting such magnanimity was “a highly spiritual experience for me”. Having felt angry at God over her father’s death (he was 76), she came to appreciate the blessings she felt had been given to her.
Determined to mark the end of her 11 months of Kaddish, she said, “On my last day of Kaddish I led the morning minyan. I was the first woman [in her shul] to do that. Most women, when I was saying Kaddish, were nervous about running the service. I was nervous too – my Hebrew wasn’t that good and I had to practise.”
But she paved the way for others. “Some women said, ‘I guess if you could do it, I could do it.’”
Aware of what the experience of reciting Kaddish had brought her, she still attends shacharit on Mondays to help make a minyan. As she wrote in the book, “I would not have gained a community, enjoyed the support and embrace of others when I most needed it, deepened my faith and my relationship with God or attained the confidence that spiritual discipline has given me.”
A Daughter’s Kaddish, Sarah Birnbach, is published by Amplify, $18.99
