Kaddish and Unlikely Places

By Janet R. Kirchheimer

I didn’t plan to say kaddish in a restaurant, but that’s what happened. It was my
grandmother’s yahrzeit and, to honor her memory, I decided to spend the day doing
things she enjoyed. She liked to pamper herself, so I went for a manicure and pedicure,
had my hair done, bought a new dress, made reservations at a nice kosher restaurant, and
got opera tickets. And most importantly, I wore her watch so that she could be with me
at the opera.

I come from a family where women don’t recite kaddish and it’s something I’ve only
taken on in the past few years. Because I had scheduled the day so tightly, I realized late
in the afternoon that I wouldn’t be able to say kaddish. I felt I was honoring my
grandmother in my own way, but I wanted to connect it to something Jewish. I wanted to
recite kaddish, but part of me felt that I should say it in a synagogue and as part of a
minyan. I didn’t want to say it alone. I thought I’d lost my chance.

While sitting in a kosher restaurant eating dinner, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But
then I started to look around the restaurant and my thinking began to change -- I began to
feel a kinship with the other people there. I began to feel, even though it wasn’t the
traditional place to say kaddish, that perhaps there was a minyan of sorts that could
support me while I recited it. There was a community of other Jews around me, and I felt
comfortable enough to carve out a separate place for myself to pray. I excused myself
from my dinner companion, borrowed a prayer book from another diner, and found a
corner, a separate place, in which to pray. I prayed the mincha service and recited
kaddish.

Afterwards, I was reminded of an old Jewish folk tale in which a rebbe is still praying
long after his students have finished. After several weeks of this, the students decide they
don’t want to wait around for the rebbe to finish, and as soon as they are done with their
prayers they will leave. The next day, as they begin to leave after their prayers, the rebbe
immediately stops praying. They ask the rebbe why he is no longer praying. He tells his
students that he needs to climb on their shoulders in order to pray and without his
students surrounding him he is unable to pray. I felt a bit like that rebbe -- I was not able
to pray without a community of people around me. It may not have been a community as
traditionally defined, but this is an era in which we are all reimagining and redefining the
very idea of what constitutes a community. Whenever I think of that evening, I am
grateful to the unsuspecting diners around me who lent me their shoulders and became
my community so that I could remember my grandmother by saying kaddish.