Saying Kaddish: How to Comfort the Dying, Bury the Dead, and Mourn as a Jew

With the Kaddish, perhaps we are acknowledging that God is grieved and diminished by the loss of our loved one, just as we are, and we’re praying for God to be restored, once again magnified and sanctified. Understood this way, the Kaddish implies that we and God are mourning together.

perhaps the Kaddish is not asking us to praise God despite our grief but because of our grief, maybe even out of gratitude for our grief.

by placing mourning rituals at the heart of Jewish life, the Rabbis enabled the Jews to go on living with exile.

So maybe we’re not declaring that God’s name is presently magnified, sanctified, praised, etc.—we’re pleading for it to become so. The Kaddish could therefore almost be understood as a challenge to God, a way of saying, “Your name really isn’t so great and holy to me right now.”