Can the Mourners’ Kaddish be integrated into the Seder?
– N., San Francisco
I am moved by your question and grateful for the suggestion. The short answer is…yes.
I posted your question on Facebook and a lot of thoughtful responses threaded through a helpful conversation. After many voiced suggestions as to why or why not and if yes then at what point of the Seder, one friend commented, “the question here is more important than the answers.”
For many of us today, mourning does not happen with nearby family or close knit community. Passover Seders become unique moments of gathering, and whether the grief is new or old, we miss our loved ones during our Seders and seek ways to honor their memory in meaningful ways.
Reb Simcha Raphael, founder of DA’AT Institute for Death Awareness, Advocacy and Training, commented as well, linking to his profound essay V’higadeta L’vincha: Passover As A Time for Remembering and Memorializing Loved Ones:
“There is often a mistaken belief that if we give voice to missing someone who died, it will evoke sadness, or even tears. There is a tendency to want to smooth things over, ignoring the obvious elephant in the room, the unexpressed grief felt particularly if the death is recent. Reality is such that the opposite is true: by acknowledging the loss, naming our collective grief, we open our hearts to remembering the person who has died, with love and with an appreciation of their legacy. Doing this can be very healing.”
While Kaddish is not customary during Seder, I want to invite you to find a spot that feels most appropriate to you and those who are with you.
My thought is to include it at the top, right with Kadesh, the opening sanctification over candles and wine. As Seder begins, some choose to leave an empty chair for a beloved family member. Before raising the first glass with the celebration of life, we can, if it feels right, honor our ancestors with a Mourners’ Kaddish (here’s the text + Lab/Shul’s God-optional poetic translation). Not necessarily sad, but present, respectful, and noble. And then let the Seder continue with tears and wine stains, and with the ongoing holy rhythm of ritual and life.
May your mourning be met with kindness, patience and compassion. Please let me know what you chose and how it went. Perhaps we are all forging new paths in the familiar forest of traditions.
A meaningful and transformative Passover,
– Rabbi Amichai
Can my Joy spouse buy my chametz? We live together, I’m Yeshiva educated and he’s a lapsed Christian who does all Jewish life with me. We just started to keep kosher, along with our kids.
– S., Brooklyn
Wow. The short answer is no. A few key terms to unpack before making sense of this super post-modern Jewish question. Chametz: Hebrew for any leavened product, forbidden for Jews on Passover. Some rabbinic traditions evolved enabling Jews to sell their products on a temporary basis during Passover week to gentiles. Joy: a new term based on historical models for a gentile, or “goy,” who lives a Jewish life, often with a Jewish partner and family.
The selling of chametz is a halachic loophole that enables Jews to keep the strict law of Passover while also enabling economic stability. It is one of the happier historical models in which Jews and their Christian and Muslim neighbors have coexisted for centuries. Today the practice is still kept in many religious communities, but for more modern ones it accentuates a no longer firm wall that divides Jews and their neighbors. We are evolving as a people, especially in America, and your family is a part of this emerging pattern.
I love that you are keeping Kosher and celebrating Jewish life with your family. It seems to me that your Joy husband is an essential part of your family’s traditions and lifestyle, even if he isn’t technically Jewish. If you’d like to practice the selling of chametz to a gentile who is not engaged with the celebration of Passover I’d suggest contacting a congregation near you that sells away chametz collectively (Orthodox and some Conservative synagogues offer this service), or contact another friend or neighbor.
You may also consider a less practical and more personal approach to the purging of chametz and invite your husband to a shared process of spring cleansing and discarding hoarded supplies, unspoken conversations and other cluttered crumbs that get in the way of life. No need for sales with this practice, or for tribal boundaries. The meaning-making of this sacred season can work on many levels with the right set of intentions.
And, btw, should your husband want to keep some bagels around in your kosher-for-Passover home? According to Jewish law he technically can…with some caveats. Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch permit for chametz in a Jewish home if it doesn’t belong to the Jewish home owner but to the ger toshav, the ancient precursor to today’s Joy, who lives there also.
“Chametz that that belonged to a non-Jew and was in a Jew’s possession, even if it is in the Jew’s house, is permitted because it doesn’t belong to him. And even if it belongs to a ger toshav […] we do not force the ger toshav to abandon his chametz during passover. But it is necessary to establish a division ten tefachim high between his chametz in order to prevent accidental use of it.” – Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Chametz and Matza, 4:2
It get complicated with the divisions, as I’m sure you can imagine, so let’s leave it at that. Always happy to discuss further.
Thank you for the sincere question that has led me to think about this complex and privileged moment we are living in. As we prepare to once again open our doors and hearts, let’s remember to leave room around the table, on Passover and all other nights, for the prophet, the guest, the other, and our full free selves.
A Meaningful, Kosher and Happy Passover,
– Rabbi Amichai
