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

A religious faith in eternity cannot add anything to the dignity and pathos of mourning; it can only subtract from the mourning by diminishing the sense of loss. This is not to say that avowedly religious people do not mourn. But insofar as they do mourn, their mourning is animated by a secular faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life rath

Yet this is, as Maimonides said, “the way of the world.” We are embodied souls. We are flesh and blood. We grow old. We lose those we love. Outwardly we struggle to maintain our composure but inwardly we weep. Yet life goes on, and what we began, others will continue. Those we loved and lost live on in us, as we will live on in those we love.

A person once came to R. Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, and asked him, “Rebbe, our Sages tell us that we must bless G-d when something good happens, and in the same way, we should bless G-d when something negative happens.10 How can this be actualized?”

used to wonder why, when people were so often trying to kill us, we didn’t seek to comfort ourselves by making the afterlife our primary focus. In some ways, that might have been the more humane thing to do. But we never made that choice. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why we’re still here—because we refused to give up on this world or devalue thi