A Mourner's Kaddish for a broken world

I have spent the past several weeks filled with overwhelming grief. For trans and non-binary people whose healthcare, passport access, and dignity is being stripped away. For undocumented immigrants who have been incarcerated and deported. For the innumerable people around the world who have lost access to food, healthcare, and other resources due to the gutting of USAID. For the Palestinian civilians killed in the continuing violence in the West Bank. For Sam Nordquist and Tahiry Broom. For the veterans unable to access healthcare, for the federal workers who have been abruptly fired, for so many who have been irreparably harmed.

There is also the preemptive grieving for what looms in the future. The domestic violence shelters that may close. The people who may die of vaccine-preventable diseases. The people who may suffer because of the NIH funding freeze affecting cancer and Alzheimer's research. The potential takeover of Ukraine by Putin's repressive regime. The possible ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The people across Europe who may suffer due to the U.S. elevation of the far right. The potential environmental degradation, starvation, and displacement.

How do we live out the Jewish value of tikkun olam—repairing the world—when those with immense power and wealth seem intent on shattering everything into millions of pieces?

I have spent so many hours since Trump's second inauguration scrolling through the news and Bluesky to soak in all this grief. As a white, straight, cisgender, financially well-off U.S. citizen, I haven't yet been personally affected by the devastation of the past several weeks of executive orders and policies, so I feel that it is incumbant on me not to look away. But this fire hose of suffering blasting into my eyeballs day after day has left me profoundly unwell—at one point, before I finally logged off Bluesky for the foreseeable future, I was sleeping about four hours a night, could barely focus on work, and was too overwhelmed to leave my house to get the mail. My default state was a feeling of numb powerlessness.

Then, layered on top of this infinite heap of grief, the bodies of four-year-old Ariel and 9-month-old Kfir Bibas (and two days later, their mother Shiri) and 84-year-old journalist and peace activist Oded Lifshitz were returned from Gaza to Israel.

Wrapped up in this overarching, numbing grief over the brokenness of the world, and the specific, shattering grief over the deaths of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas and Oded Lifshitz, I logged into a Shabbat service hosted by Judaism Unbound that I had registered for months ago and halfheartedly planned to attend. On that Shabbat, more than any other, I needed to be in a Jewish space, perhaps especially a virtual one.

There were about 60 people in attendance, logging into Zoom from across the U.S. and around the world: Colorado, Maine, Ohio, Australia, France, Argentina. It wasn't a Shabbat service specifically intended to commemorate the grief of the current moment, but the brokenness of the world loomed large in the chat that ran alongside the service, filled with expressions of concern for trans folks, the hostages in Gaza, Palestinian civilians, and friends and family of the Bibas family, Sam Nordquist, and Tahiry Broom.

One of the final portions of the service was the Mourner's Kaddish, a 2,000-year -old prayer which is included in all three daily prayer services. Since it is recited in Aramaic, I had never given much thought to the text, which actually doesn't mention death at all—it's about the greatness of God, ending with a request that he create peace for us and all of Israel. Instead of simply seguing into the Mourner's Kaddish, the rabbi facilitating the service took a moment to reflect upon it. "It can seem like a cruelty that people who are grieving are supposed to recite these words about the greatness of God," she said. "But really, what this prayer is doing is reminding us, at our lowest, darkest moments, that life is worth living."

Then we recited the Mourner's Kaddish together over Zoom. Because of the lag time and the different cadences of dozens of people, the words were out of sync. Some people said the Aramaic words fluently, others pronounced them haltingly, puzzling through the phonetic transliteration. The video display kept bouncing from speaker to speaker, a peek into someone's office, another's bedroom, someone with headphones on, a couple sitting on a sofa.

It moved me to tears, not the photogenic kind. I was sobbing, my nose was running, my eyes were puffing up. In part, it was a release of the suffering I had been storing in my body for weeks, the grief that had been accumulating in my heart and stomach and muscles and soul. But I was also crying because I was in the presence of something truly sacred. The Mourner's Kaddish did, in fact, bring into sharp relief the reasons life is worth living.

It wasn't the words of the prayer—as a pantheist, I rarely relate to personified God language, and my concept of God is not of a being that intervenes in the world to create peace for a specific group of people. What touched me about the Mourner's Kaddish was the act of praying it. All of us in that Zoom Shabbat service were intimately aware of and grieving the brokenness of the world. But instead of giving in to hopelessness, to despair, to nihilism, to the temptation to disconnect and turn inwards, we came together to pray to a God that I suspect few of us believed in (in a traditional monotheistic sense). We recited an ancient prayer not because we thought a divine being was listening but because it connected us to our Jewish ancestors, literal and spiritual, and to each other.

I am still grieving what is and what is to come. I still struggle to see how we can fix the brokenness. But compulsively scrolling through the news and social media to soak up grief certainly is not the answer. Those of us who believe in justice, in human dignity, in democracy, need to come together and affirm that as broken as the world is, life is worth living, and that we can, in some tiny but meaningful way, repair a broken world.

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

-from the Mourner's Kaddish in English translation