Kaddish at Fenway Park

On the day before Passover I said Kaddish in memory of my father. This is not unusual, I say Kaddish in his memory every day, morning, afternoon and evening. It was the setting that was peculiar. On opening day I was at Fenway Park with my friend Sam, and I did a hasty count. We were two. There were at least three Jewish ball players on the field, that was five; we knew of two Jewish executives of the Red Sox we assumed were on site, seven. Three short. But then I looked at the throng before me and surely, I told myself, of the 37,000+ other people in the ball park, three of them must be Jewish. So, during the Seventh Inning stretch, after singing “God Bless America,” while everyone else warbled “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” I said Kaddish.

Saying Kaddish doesn’t bring my father back to life, and certainly not to health, and I don’t actually believe in the efficacy of prayer to begin with, so I wonder why I arrange my daily schedule to accommodate the needs of someone who cannot possibly know that I stand for him and utter words in Aramaic I do not understand—even when I read them in the arcane English translation generally supplied? Is it ancestor worship as a rabbi/scholar I know maintains? Is it a hope that if I say Kaddish my children will say the prayer for me in my time?—and if they do, how does that benefit me, exactly? I’ll be pretty much dead under the circumstances. Is it for the same reason I keep a kosher diet, so as not to break the link in the chain unlikely ever to be mended, a chain that I suppose goes back to Pharisaic days?

In point of fact I could not deliberately skip the daily ritual for my father any more than I could eat a ham and cheese sandwich with a pork rind chaser, but I can’t rationally tell myself why. Passover, the story of our liberation, has just ended, but it’s also the story of our bondage to ancient law we neither created nor formally consent to except in the observance. Hegel in the 18th century argued that what gives us freedom is acceptance of the burden of law; Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher argued that without law we are no better than the savages whose lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. So, do I obey the law to avoid the chaos of freedom, or does the law give me freedom while it binds me to action, the purpose of which eludes? The law we obey, is it that which makes us Jews? That’s a simple one. No. There are Jews who never consciously observe any Jewish ritual law, and yet they are Jews. (We call many of these people “Israelis”.)

This is my constant quandary, why observe the laws of Judaism. An associated one was added before Passover when I saw the play “Grace” at the Gamm Theater. Grace is the eponymous central character, a professor of natural science. She refuses to call herself an atheist because that defines what she is not, a not believer in god. Instead she defines her attitude as “naturalism”. She mocks William Paley’s creationism and fawns over Darwin. The universe has no purpose. Things just happen. Then her son announces that he is becoming an Anglican priest. The sparks fly.

She attacks: You with your moderate religion are giving cover to Scriptural literalists who turn the irrationality of religion into the violence of bomb-throwing fanatics. But is it true? That’s the question, never fully resolved in the play. Do the moderate practices of religion, the observing Passover, for instance or Lent or Ramadan, provide cover for the fanatics who would destroy all that is not of their revealed belief? If benign religion morphs into cultural oppression or murder, is the irrationality of religion compensated for by its social values? Hamas, after all, runs hospitals.

Religion pretends to be rational when it bothers to. Maimonides and Aquinas believed in Aristotle’s rationality, but even that depends on the irrational belief in an unmoved mover, a contradiction in terms. I’d like to abandon formal religion. But then I’d have no opportunity to say Kaddish for my father in that lyrical little band box of a ballpark off of Yawkey Way, a whimsy that would have brought a smile to his baseball loving heart.

In the end the Red Sox won the opening game, Kaddish was recited, the tulips are coming up; the trees are showing their leaves. Spring is in the air. Let us rejoice.