The week of parashat Pinhas also happens to be the week of my mother’s first yarzheit; Shabbat itself is the first Hebrew anniversary of her burial. This Shabbat and this parashah, I find this year, have many resonances with my own emotional state on this significant anniversary. Among other things, this is the first of the three shabbatot leading from the 17 th of Tammuz to the 9th of Av, a period in which we all, as a community, mourn the many calamities that have befallen the Jewish people over our long history, most notably the destructions of both the 1 st and 2nd Temples in Jerusalem.
More than that, though, the parashah itself is full of the anticipation of transition, from wandering in the desert to entering the Land of Israel, and from Moses as the leader of the people, to Joshua and a new generation of leaders. Miriam, Moses’ sister, a prophet and leader of the people, has died. Aaron, Moses’ brother and the first high priest, has died; in this parashah Moses is told by God that Pinhas, Aaron’s grandson and the zealot of last week’s parashah, will receive the line of the High Priesthood for himself and his descendants (chap. 25). A census of men of fighting age is taken, a testament both to the size of the new generation, and the risk facing them in the near future (chap. 26). The story of Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, the five daughters of Zelophehad (chap. 27:1-11), also fits this mold. This is a story about rights, and about the new way of life that is about to commence in the Land – but it is also worth remembering that these women come forward to Moses because their father has died. They are bereaved, and they do not want their father’s memory to be lost to the nation. In the latter part of chap. 27, God gives Moses the instructions to ascend the mountain and view the Land that he will not enter, and Joshua is appointed as the heir to Moses’ leadership.
Oddly enough, however, despite all these resonances, it was the last chapter of the parashah, chap. 28, the chapter for which Parashat Pinhas might be best known, that I felt drawn to as I prepared for this derashah. This chapter details the cycle of the Jewish year and its holidays, and the sacrifices that will be offered for each. One reason to want to explore this material is because this is what we read in the 3 rd year of the triennial cycle, which we are in now. Perhaps the most obvious reason for my attraction to this passage is that it describes the cycle of a year, corresponding to my year of mourning for my mother. I might further note that every holiday, every rosh hodesh, even every Shabbat, at maftir and/or in the musaf prayers, we read and recite some piece of these verses. During a year of attending minyan regularly to say kaddish, I have encountered this chapter, piece by piece, over and over again.
Still – what is this passage doing here? How does it relate to the other themes of the parashah, if it does? A brief parable, a mashal, found in Sifre Bamidbar (piska 142), an early rabbinic midrashic collection to the book of Numbers, helped me think through this question:
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Command the children of Israel and say to them… (28:1-2)
Why is this said (here)? Since it says (just before), "[Let the Lord, Source of the breath of all flesh, appoint someone over the community] who shall go out before them and come in before them" (27:15-16).
A parable: what is this thing like? It is like a king whose wife was dying. She charged him regarding her (their?) children, saying to him, "I ask of you, take care of my children." He said to her, "Before you charge me regarding my children, charge my children regarding me, that they should not rebel against me, and should not treat me in a disrespectful manner." Thus the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses, before you charge Me regarding my children (to take care of them through a new leader), charge them regarding Me, that they should not rebel against My honor with outside gods.
God, of course, is the King, as in nearly all rabbinic king parables, and that puts Moses in the position of the queen. I don’t want to push this parable too far – it wouldn’t fit anyway – or delve into too deeply, except to note 2 things. First, this midrash makes a clear connection between this chapter and the rest of the parashah. Like everything else in the parashah, it suggests, this litany of the holiday and their proper observances are given in preparation of Moses’ death. Even here, the theme of death and transition figures into the parashah.
Second, and here is where this midrash helped me think about my year of kaddish and mourning, it tells us that sometimes we need to turn our expectations around. Moses thinks that the people need one thing – a new leader – and God tells him that in fact they need something else – the discipline of the holidays, and by extension, religious observance and worship. Moses asks God to take responsibility for protecting the people, but instead, God suggests, it is time to ask the people to step up and take responsibility for themselves in respect to God.
So too, as I reflect on my year of kaddish, I want to push myself to turn my expectations around. As Leon Wieseltier documents in his book Kaddish (see pp. 40-43), the earliest manifestation of this custom comes from the medieval work, Makhzor Vitry, a book which originates in northeastern France at about the same time that Rashi lived. A story appears there about Rabbi Akiva, who has a strange encounter with a man carrying a very heavy burden of wood. The man, Rabbi Akiva learns, is in fact dead, and is being punished for sins committed during his lifetime, notably oppression of the poor. The only way this tormented soul might find relief is if his son would recite the kaddish prayer in the synagogue, and the congregation were to answer "amen." Rabbi Akiva undertakes to locate the son, and teach him Torah and the prayers. When the son has performed his part, the father appears to Rabbi Akiva in a dream to thank him. Within a century of the telling of this story, the saying of kaddish (at least on occasion, if not at every service) by the son of the deceased had become a widespread Ashkenazi custom. That is to say, in its origins kaddish is a practice we undertake on behalf of the soul of the deceased person, to elevate it from Gehenna to Gan Eden. This is also the source of saying kaddish for eleven months rather than the full year of mourning that is expected for a parent: elsewhere in rabbinic tradition it is taught that the maximum punishment for the most wicked of souls after death is 12 months, and no one would want to imply that his or her parent needed that full time to be absolved of his or her sins in life.
But at the end of a year of mourning, and eleven months of kaddish, I am just begin to assess this experience, and find myself wanting to turn around my expectations a bit. What does kaddish do for the mourner, what does it do for the community? A friend of mine likes a bit of black humor: "If my mother knew that this is what it would take to get me to put on tallit and tefillin regularly, she would have passed away sooner." But the thing to know is that he said this to me while we were sitting next to each at morning minyan – on an ordinary morning that was well after his year of mourning and kaddish were over. Turn our expectations around: kaddish was not only a task, a burden undertaken on behalf of the soul of the deceased, it was an opening for the mourner’s soul to reconnect with Jewish prayer and practice. Maurice Lamm, author of one of the best know works on Jewish mourning ritual, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, suggests that when a mourner is not able to join a minyan to say kaddish, that other acts can be substituted: studying a passage of Bible or Talmud, for example. Lamm emphasizes that these acts of piety on the part of the child or children of the deceased, be they prayer or study, bring honor to the parent’s memory – but of course these acts touch and change the soul of the child as well.
And the community? During my year of kaddish, I was not able simply to stay in one place, attend one minyan. Everywhere I went, I tried – both out of my own commitments and in honor of my mother’s ideals and values – to find egalitarian communities to pray with. I attended a number of Conservative synagogues, some only once, in a variety of places, and was always welcomed. Groups of people, some of them strangers to me, joined together to make minyanim in all sorts of unlikely places so that I (and sometimes other mourners I found along the way) could say kaddish, including in hotels, on college campuses, and even at Faneuil Hall in Boston. I attend many – too many – shivah minyanim to comfort other, newer members in that unfortunate club, "the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." Turn our expectations around again: because some of us are in mourning and saying kaddish at any given time, all of us are called to support them. The souls of the deceased are elevated to Gan Eden, but so too all of us are, hopefully, elevated in this life to be more compassionate, to be responsible for each other.
I’m still evaluating just what my year of kaddish means. I’m evaluating what I learned about prayer, and calculating just how many dollar bills I stuffed into the pushke. It may take another year, or many more cycles of years, to really understand it all. But we all start by being open to turning our expectations around, and seeing what we find.
Shabbat shalom.
p.s. for those of you who were not present on Shabbat Pinhas, you can hear me give an earlier version of this drash at: limmudla.org/podcast/2007/07/03/gail-labovitz-parashat-pinchas/. There are also other great drashot for other weeks on the limmudla.org site!