PRAYER can be of profound significance to non-believers. In Heart and Soul (BBC World Service, last Friday), Michael Goldfarb’s exploration of the history and meaning of Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, culminated in him, as a Jew and an avowed atheist, teaching the prayer to his 19-year-old daughter.
Rabbi Herschel Gluck, of Stamford Hill, explained that prayer for the dead helped the person praying as well as the deceased. His was an unintentional contribution to the debate about whether Christians should pray for the dead — one not entirely resolved even within the Church of England.
Professor Ruth Langer surprised this goy by explaining, first, that Kaddish does not mention death, and, second, that it is mainly written not in Hebrew, but in Aramaic — the daily language of Christ, and of most Middle Eastern Jews at that time. Although its current liturgical usage did not crystallise until the High Middle Ages, it probably emerged from the reaction to the destruction of the Second Temple: the phenomenon that helped to fuel the early expansion of Christianity.
As Kaddish is a call-and-response liturgy rather than a solo prayer, it requires a minyan of at least ten men to be performed correctly. In an era of secularisation, reciting the prayer for family and friends attracts people to attend synagogue who would not otherwise do so: the prospect of helping the soul of a loved one touches something even in those who reject the idea of anything non-material.
Goldfarb’s questions to Rabbi Gluck on why people feel grief even though death is simply part of life revealed a deep void of human self-understanding at the heart of secularism. That secularisation can also leave Judaism’s faithful departed, especially those most isolated and deprived in life, unmemorialised, lacking ten male mourners to pray for them. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s mother, institutionalised in a mental hospital, was one such case.
On a vastly greater scale, the victims of the Holocaust were another. It is perhaps the abyssal space for grief left by the Holocaust which explains why culturally Jewish unbelievers have continued to recite Kaddish in a God-rejecting era. That framed the powerful conclusion, when Goldfarb’s daughter recited the prayer for the first time in her life on the site of Gas Chamber 3 at Auschwitz.
Before the US Presidential Inauguration, Sunday (Radio 4) interviewed Franklin Graham, son of Billy, on the prayers that he planned to lead at the ceremony.
Graham is generally an admirer of Donald Trump, his main objection being the President’s use of foul language at his rallies. Many will cavil at his contention that God had made Mr Trump a better man over the past seven years. Yet it is important to remember that we are called to pray even for leaders of whom we disapprove.