Kaddish

A Review of Lesser Prophets by Kelly Sinclair

Published by Blue Feather Books, Ltd., USA/UK, 2010
 http://www.bluefeatherbooks.com/

Reviewed by Lee-Anne Phillips

In the Jewish liturgy, there is a general-purpose sort of prayer called the Kaddish, Sanctification. Here’s the first bit of it:

Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw B’allmaw dee v’raw chir’usei.
May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified in the world that He created as He willed.

It’s used in many contexts, including the end of a sermon, and in fact is taken in large part from the same Jewish and Biblical origins as the overall arc of the Christian Lord’s Prayer. One important context in which it’s mandatory is what’s called The Mourner’s Kaddish, although it doesn’t actually mention death or mourning at all. Instead, it asks us to contemplate the world around us, to see the divine presence in everything, and to sanctify it, to see the entire world as a holy place. Then it asks for peace, in many forms, shalom, health and peace, and life for everyone, the two peculiarly human, and Jewish, benevolent good wishes:

Shalom: Be at peace; Be well and happy; Be whole.
L’chayim: To life!

Death unsettles us, frightens us, makes us feel small and helpless. Reciting the Kaddish puts us back in touch with the universe, with the source of life and holiness, and reëstablishes our sense of agency, because we’re doing something, even if only to honour our dead — although reciting the Kaddish is much more than that in many Jewish traditions; it’s an obligation so important that if one is unable, for whatever reason, to fulfil this duty, one must arrange for someone to act on your behalf. Since women were not permitted to recite the Kaddish in some strictly Orthodox services, it was and is traditional for a male relative or friend of the family to volunteer his help, but there are commercial services to supply this need if no other alternative is available. Reciting the Kaddish insists upon the worth of our own lives, that we are present and active in the world, and that what we do matters. We are, through our participation in this communal prayer, actively affirming the worth of our own lives, and acting to heal the world at large, perhaps even ourselves.

Y’hei shlawmaw rabbaw min sh’mayaw,v’chayim awleinu v’al kol yisroel, v’imru: Amein.
May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and life upon us and upon all Israel. Now respond: Amen.

Oseh shalom bim’ro’mawv, hu ya’aseh shalom, awleinu v’al kol yisroel v’imru: Amein.
He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace upon us and upon all Israel. Now respond: Amen.

Amen.

Lesser Prophets is not an entirely optimistic view of the future, and allows us to guess the score by the second page, so I’m not giving too much away, I think, when I point it out. It’s hard science fiction, but not the razzle-dazzle ansible and spindizzy stuff with third order rays of destruction. Lesser Prophets is all about viruses, vectors, and the vicissitudes of epidemiology, with a little discourse on the vagaries of Mendelian inheritance along the way.

It’s also about what it means to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual, an extended dystopian riff on what it would mean — and what it would take — to move a small population minority from the fringes of society to centre stage with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Would politics really change with roughly equal numbers of men and women running things? Would it matter?

The story is told from the viewpoints of multiple narrators, and spans continents, and the confusion thus evoked precisely mirrors the reality of huge events. They’re hard to grasp in totality, because they’re too big for a single mind to comprehend, and too much is unknown. Do any of us, for example, know — other than in broad outline — what really happened on September 11th, 2001?

In one sense, the actual events of that terrible day were local; bad things happened in three specific locations. In another, it happened all around the world, even in places where it didn’t really seem to matter. If ten thousand people die in Bangladesh, does it matter in Texas? If three thousand people die in New York, does it matter in Nairobi?

I saw it on TV, essentially ‘live,’ with the obligatory invisible delay to allow a nameless censor to ‘bleep out’ any words which might offend an idiot, so my view was entirely mediated by the viewpoints of people peering through the peepholes of camera lenses, held by someone who may have had less of a clue about the ‘big picture’ than I did, and I knew little enough. What I did know — and the woman who’d called me to tell me to turn on the television remarked on this as well — was that it was going to be bad for people like us, because it would encourage hatred and rage on the part of all the usual suspects, and that bloodlust for revenge would spill over on any handy target.

Catastrophe does that to some people, and we were very handy indeed. It wasn’t even a day before the speech writers of the generic megalomaniacal hate-filled viewpoint were blaming everything on gays, on women, on liberals, on Jews, and the American Civil Liberties Union, not necessarily in that order and not necessarily all at once.

Lesser Prophets shows this quite clearly — and realistically, I think — leaving us to suss out what’s going on from the clues we’re given, to look for meaning in what seems to be limitless tragedy. It’s just like life itself; there’s no instruction manual, just the fact of it. We make of it what we will.

In the end, that’s a major theme of the book itself, that we are all responsible for the state of the world, that we have an obligation to be aware of the consequences of our own actions, and that the burden of these consequences is communal. It does no good to point the finger and say, ‘It’s not my fault. It wasn’t me. Let someone else make amends. Let someone else put the world back together.’

It’s a book about reality, not an adolescent male fantasy of omnipotence, but of struggling to get by, of making do, of building a family out of nothing at all but the work of one’s hands and the striving of one’s heart, of reaching out to other human beings.

Humanity, coming together after loss, the river of relationships, of lives intertwining, runs through the book, and in its own way, it’s a work of beauty and tenderness, a novel which celebrates life, and love, and the inevitable impulses which lead us forward into more abundant life, in spite of everything.

-o~O~o-

The lesser prophets in the Tanach, what Christians call the “Old Testament,” are not only those with books named after them, but also those whom the Bible avoids mentioning except in passing, Miriam, who danced on the shores of the Red Sea and in whose merit the people of Israel were provided with a miraculous well of living water which followed her through the wilderness and by means of which the entire community survived; Deborah, prophetess and Judge, who led the Army of Israel; Huldah, who was called upon to verify the authenticity of the Torah itself, and sparked a religious revival and renewal.

But there are others, Yael, the woman warrior who saved the Jewish people in time of war; Hagar, daughter of Pharaoh, mother of Ishmael by Abraham, who was cruelly cast out into the desert with a jug of water and a bit of bread to live or die on her own, but who survived to be the mother of a great nation, the Arabs and their kin; Rahab, the prostitute, who risked her life to protect the spies sent into Jericho to ferret out the weak points in the city defenses, and was saved from the general wreck to marry Joshua, the man who led the army which destroyed her city, become a respectable married woman and a mother in Israel, ancestress of Huldah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other prophetesses and prophets of the Jewish people.

Some claim that she was an ancestress of King David, and all the Kings of Judah, but one never knows.

The moral of this, of course, is that you can’t tell what people will become by looking at their history. We’re all of us capable of greatness, of taking our place in the world with honour and dignity, no matter what we’ve been. One can’t forecast the future from the past. One never knows.

We’re all in this together.

We’re all doing the best we can.

Like Horton’s Whos, who call out from obscurity, “We’re here! We’re Here!” we can save the world. We can heal it. All we have to do is speak. All we have to do is listen.

Take care not to ruin and destroy my world, for if you corrupt it there shall be none to come after you and repair it.

— Kohelet Rabbah (Midrash — Commentary — on Ecclesiastes)

Copyright © 2010 Lee Anne Phillips — All Rights Reserved