A Mourner’s Prayer in Morocco

In 1998 I traveled to Morocco.

I wandered around the Jewish quarter of Marrakesh, enjoying the gorgeous sun-soaked morning. Seemingly out of nowhere, a partially blind, diminutive rabbi appeared. He was dressed in loose white linen and brown leather sandals. One eye was glassed over, cloudy, wandering, drifting, the other eye sharp, alert, focused on us. “Est-ce que vos parents sont toujours vivants?”

I don’t remember how I understood that he asked if my parents were still alive. It’s almost like I sensed this would be his question. Or how I mustered the ability to construct a response in French.

“Mon père est mort.” My mother was still living, but my dad was long gone. I was ten, and in a flash he dropped dead in front of me on a visiting day in my fifth grade classroom. He was 46. Gone from my life was also his observance, belief, spirituality, the sacred sense of Judaism he’d been bestowing on me by example, with warmth and love.

The rabbi, a woven blue, yellow, and purple kippah on his head, recited the Kaddish, an ancient Aramaic mourner’s prayer:

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba b’alma di v’ra chir’utei; v’yamlich malchutei b’hayeichon u-v’yomeichon, uv’hayei d’chol beit yisrael, ba-agala u-vi-z’man kariv, v’imru…

I stood still, overwhelmed, moved, transported. The rhythm, cadence, and lugubrious tone of Aramaic, a language that predates Hebrew, resonated deep inside me. My world became self-contained. I saw and heard nothing around me except for him and his prayer. My body relaxed, releasing a stabbing ache in my gut, the center of my grief, where I tried to mask my pain by overeating.

I didn’t know the meaning of the mourner’s prayer. I preferred ignorance though, content just to listen to the sounds of this plodding, soothing, wailing prayer for the bereaved.

I first heard the Kaddish when I was at my father’s funeral, shell-shocked, not knowing how to make sense of what happened, my world turned upside down. I heard it over the years for all the people I lost subsequently, more than seemed my fair share, if one could even talk about death and loss in those terms. I have only heard the Kaddish in New York City. No one I knew ever died outside New York, my home, my place of deep connection, trauma, and history.

How did the rabbi know I yearned for this recognition, this spiritual connection to my father and Judaism, when I didn’t realize it myself? Was it standard practice for him to ask anyone who came by if he could say the Kaddish for them? Probably.

Both sides of my family came to New York in the 1800s, fleeing Eastern European pogroms, long before the Nazis. Distant relatives died in the Holocaust, but we didn’t know their names.

Being Jewish was like being part of something almost inescapable. Not that I wanted to escape it, I just didn’t want it to define me. But it seemed to, whether I desired it or not. In New York City, being Jewish was not exceptional. The city’s culture and language were infused with Jewish influence, part of my identity, but not the only part. I was a proud New Yorker, raised on the inclusive, diverse, multi-cultural Upper West Side of Manhattan. I described myself as an Upper West Sider, a New Yorker before anything else.

But here I was in Marrakesh, brought right back to the core of my being, to my father, through a mourner’s prayer more than 2000 years old.