liturgical uncertainty

[cellio]

Non-Jewish readers probably don't care.

Explanations: the kaddish shows up in several forms at different places in the service. The most famous one is the mourners' kaddish, which comes at the very end [1] of the service. But there are others, which serve as boundary markers between the different parts of the service. The first of these (in shacharit) is the kaddish d'rabbanan, which is very similar to the mourners' kaddish. Another is the chatzi kaddish ("half kaddish"), which occurs a number of times. There's at least one more that I'm ignoring in this discussion.

It is considered meritorious for a mourner to recite mourners' kaddish, which must be done in the presence of a minyan [2]. Traditionally the mourners recite kaddish alone (the congregation responds in certain places), though in the Reform movement you'll often see the entire congregation reciting it. [3]

Ok, all that said...

This morning I was leading the service and when we got to kaddish d'rabbanan there was no minyan, so I skipped it and we went on. Most of the way through the following section a tenth person arrived, and a mourner called out "go back to the kaddish". I declined to do so because we were already past it and other kaddishim would be coming up. (I don't think you're supposed to go back in the service, in general.) Someone else suggested a compromise: instead of saying chatzi kaddish at the end of that section, say kaddish d'rabbanan instead. So we did that.

I wonder about two things. One is whether that was an appropriate thing to do; consensus of the group is that it was, but there was no rabbi or scholar present. The other is about the motivation of the person doing the asking. He knows, because he's been there every day, that there would be a mourners' kaddish at the end. Why did he consider the kaddish d'rabbanan important? It wasn't his only chance; is there some tradition that says that it's especially meritorious to say kaddish more than once in a single service? (He left immediately after the service ended, so I didn't get a chance to talk with him.)

I haven't seen this situation before, so when it first came up I turned to Dave (the usual leader) and he shrugged. It turns out he hadn't seen it come up before either and he didn't know the local custom.

[1] Ok, here's a mystery. The mourners' kaddish is supposed to be the last thing (except for a closing song if you do one). Our morning minyan ends with Aleinu, mourners' kaddish, psalm for the day, and then a repetition of the mourners' kaddish. I asked about this once and was told it was ancient and venerable tradition, but no one could tell me why.

[2] My congregation does not require a minyan, nor does one local Conservative one (I'm told). The reasoning is that we're not about to either send a mourner away without comfort or fabricate a minyan that isn't really community (e.g. dragging someone in off the street for five minutes or using a sefer torah to fill a slot). In the absence of a minyan we skip all the other parts of the service that traditionally require a minyan, but not that one.

[3] The reasoning here is that there are many who have no one to say kaddish for them and every day is someone's yahrzeit.

Edited to add: this morning service was at the Conservative shul I attend regularly, not my own (Reform) shul.

Comments

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

AFAIK, the custom of there being a mourner's kaddish started because they didn't want orphans to have a reason to "stray" from the community -- keep them close at home, as it were. After a while it became a custom that if there were several mourners in the community, each would say a kaddish. There are actually four times when mourners say kaddish in the daily service -- after study (kaddish d'rabbanan), after the mizmor that introduces psukei dzimrah, after aleinu, and after the Psalm of the Day. And if there's Rosh Chodesh, or it's Elul, yet another. The idea was that there would be enough kaddishes to go around for each individual mourner.

Once it became customary for them to be said by all the mourners together, the custom didn't make any sense, and confusion crept in. There's a strong "folk" sense that the more you say kaddish, the better -- I've had people be indignant that we're not doing mincha at the wrong time, on account of this principle. So other things grow up like saying a psalm and then saying kaddish for no reason (what was done here until recently).

There are different ways with dealing with this folk sense. On Shabbat there's an opportunity for kaddish at the end with Amar Rabbi Elazar (right before Aleinu, though this is often skipped) -- and I think the idea is precisely that you may not have had a minyan at the beginning. I mean, it's good to study too, but I have been in congregations where they only did Amar Rabbi Elazar when they did NOT have minyan for kaddish d'rabbanan at the beginning of the service.

At Beth El (in Mt. Lebanon) I saw them do a fair amount of Psukei Dzimrah, then go *back* and do the study sessions that require a minyan, once they had a minyan, so people could have their "fill" of kaddishes.

There may be mystical reasons for the practice that I am not aware of. But it all strikes me as the phenomenon of abracadabra, i.e., people know kaddish is important, they want to do it as much as possible, though they really don't know why. It's as though "there are lots of kaddishes in the service" + "I have to say kaddish" = "I need to do as many kaddishes as possible."

So in a halachic setting, I would of course ask a halachic authority, but I think one would not go back and say the kaddish out of the blue, since they are there to announce the end of a particular subsection of the service, and if it's been done already, the rationale for the kaddish has passed. I can't really speak to Reform, but I would expect on the basis of what little I know that doing the mourner's kaddish once and only once per service would be expected.

[cellio]

I've never been to a Reform service with more than one mourners' kaddish. Reform, in general, has tried to cut down on liturgical repetition, so there are also fewer uses of chatzi kaddish, musaf is gone, and the chazan's repetition of the amidah isn't done.

Thanks for the explanation; it does make sense that things would develop that way. It's not the only case of a custom or stringency becoming accepted practice over time, after all.

In this case, I didn't insert a kaddish but instead substituted one. I'm still not sure that's kosher, but it seems better than just doing a kaddish willy-nilly.