GRIEF PRAISE PETITION

I’ve been thinking about this rhythm in our prayers for a deceased person.  Too many people are reciting Kaddish in the world, particularly after October 7 which has resulted in the death of many Jews and thousands of Palestinians, innocent and otherwise.

I’ve also been thinking about it in terms of the death of thousands of Ash trees in the Arboretum in which I hike.  The management decided to fell almost all the Ash trees because they are dying from the Ash borer.  The Ash borer is an Asian native innocent, cute little bug that doesn’t particularly harm the native Ash trees in Asia, but the Ash trees that grow here have no defense against it.  We deliberately exported the American Ash tree to Asia because it is more desirable from a narrow human perspective than the Native Ash tree and we not deliberately imported the borer.  The borer eventually discovered that the American ash trees have a lower defense against it and are dying in Asia and dying here.

Now some of you might say how can I possibly mention the death of Ash trees in the same breath as the death of humans?  But that’s precisely the point in believing that we humans are part of the more than human world. We’re not likely to be Ash trees in our next lifetimes, because there aren’t that many of them that are going to survive, but I wouldn’t mind being a white oak.

We recite the Kaddish for humans.  It is a prayer recited at times of grief that doesn’t mention loss at all, but only praises the divine. “May the great name of the divine be exalted and sanctified throughout the world, which the divine has created according to the divine will.”  (it sounds much better in Hebrew). But if we grieve whenever someone close to us dies, we grieve all the more so when the death is premature.  We will all die, a fact we want to pretend isn’t the case.  I believe we should pray to live out the fullness of our days and to accomplish the unique purpose for which we were born into this world at this time.  And then we will die fulfilled, mourned and missed but in a good way. 

The fullness of our days.  For humans that might be 80 or 90 years (the older I get the higher the number goes). For the microbes in the soil upon which our lives depend that might be a day or two.  For a robin that might be at least 2 years but could apparently be as many as 14.  For the white oak that’s 350 to 500 years, for a mountain that’s thousands of years.  A white oak that dies at 200 years has died as prematurely as a human who has died at 40 or 50.  A tragedy.

We recite El Maleh Rachamim at funerals as well.  El Maleh Rachamim (usually translated as God full of compassion but which I translate as the many wombed God) is a prayer for the maintenance of cosmic order in the form of having the soul of the departed follow it’s correct predestined path instead of hanging around the human world.  El Maleh is the fundamental indigenous Jewish affirmation of the cosmic rhythm of birth, death and rebirth—because if the soul doesn’t go where it is supposed to, then there can be no proper rebirth.

Grief, praise, petition is a deep rhythm that I seek to cultivate in my own life. We all have much to grieve, we are blessed to be alive in this beautiful world, and we have much to ask for to make this world a better place.