shiva minyan, short takes

[cellio]

I led a shiva minyan tonight for the family of a congregant. He was 90 years old and his wife and two siblings (all comparable in age, or so I understand) are still alive. I know people are living longer than ever now, but that's still pretty impressive.

I think I've finally, without really thinking about it, derived the appropriate response to the family either thanking me or praising me: "I'm glad I could help". I mean, you don't want to say "happy to help", given the circumstances, but it feels like I need to say something.

There is a dynamic of cues, some subtle and some overt, when leading a service, to clue people in about when to read together, stand/sit, and so on. Must remember: nothing subtle applies to mourners. They're pre-occupied; do not make them expend cycles on the mechanics of prayer. The ones who pray regularly will know anyway; the ones who don't need the direction.

Must remember to ask my rabbi #1: does our congregation have any conventions about what to do after the service? Leave immediately, accept the offers of food, hang around for 5-10 minutes and then slip out? Not sure. I tend to do the last unless I actually know the family.

<geek> Must remember to ask my rabbi #2: why is there a chatzi kaddish between hashkiveinu and t'filah? I'm so used to skipping over it -- because we almost never get a minyan for weekday evening and it's not there (in Gates of Prayer, anyway) in the Shabbat evening service -- that it took me by surprise tonight in the special siddur for a house of mourning (which I've rarely used). On the one hand, as long as there are interruptions between ga'al yisrael and t'filah anyway (hashkiveinu, v'shamru on Shabbat) what's the harm?, but on the other hand, we don't generally use that as an excuse to compound problems. Hmm. My rabbi and I studied that passage in B'rachot not long ago (well, maybe we'll yet return to the thread) and the sages raised hashkiveinu but said nothing of kaddish. Later addition? </geek>

Short takes:

I don't really care about my hair turning silver -- I actually think it can look striking under the right circumstances -- but is it too much to ask my body for symmetry? Why is the right side of my head so much more melanin-challenged than the left side? One of life's little mysteries, I guess.

From cahwyguy: Google Maps is live. So far, I'm liking it a lot better than Mapquest. (Haven't given it any tough cases yet, but the directions it's given me to a couple destinations I've previously tried with MapQuest are much better.)

Comments

Re: mostly geeking

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Really? Your first time?

I think that in the past the rabbi or one of our "rabbis on call" that we used last year did the leading. I only got called this time because the rabbi couldn't be three places at once!

Do you mean the titkabeil in kaddish shalem?

Yes. It's not in the mourner's kaddish, but there's still some issue of whether to say it in a mourner's home. If you're a mourner (who also happens to be leading the service and thus saying kaddish shalem), you definitely don't.

what do the assorted variations in the different kaddishes mean?

Okay... here goes. I think all I know is about what you know, but it's worthwhile stepping back and looking at the structure of what's happening. First, there's only one kaddish shalem per service. Second, the hatzi kaddishes all occur in the period between psukei dzimrah (for shacharit)or the start of the service (for the other services) and Aleinu. So they're subdivisions within that longer liturgical unit.

To use the book analogy, it's sort of like the end of a chapter versus the end of a subsection within a chapter. Kaddish shalem, mourner's kaddish, and kaddish d'rabbanan are ends of chapters; hatzi kaddish is the end of a subsection.

In this case the "chapters" are of varying length and content. The main chapter -- the core of any service -- spans the following elements:

a) intro scriptural verses
b) brachot over the shema, if schacharit/mincha
c) amidah/tachanun
d) torah service, if there is one
e) other scriptural verses

Hatzi kaddish separates each subsection; kaddish shalem announces the end of that whole main "chapter."

The core of the kaddish is obviously common to all of them -- the fist paragraph, y'hei shemei etc., and the second paragraph. The remainder depends on what it is that is being "concluded" by the recitation of kaddish. The ostensible rationale for any kaddish is that scriptural verses are being recited; the divisions reflect the purpose of those verses. Kaddish shalem contains the line "titkabeil" which asks that God hear our prayer -- so you can see the core of this is that it follows the amidah.

Aleinu is a late addition to the service as is the recitation of the psalm of the day, psalm for days of awe, etc. Each of them is a distinct "chapter" and provides an opportunity for a kaddish. At the beginning of the service, the introductory psalm before Psukei Dzimrah is also a distinct chapter in this sense.

Kaddish d'rabbanan exists because you've just been reading the passages of study, which include scriptural verses, and so it's also a distinct "chapter."

These would be the rationales offered by the sources. Of course, what is really going on here, which you can plainly see, is that the a)-e) material above is the historical/halachic core of the service and that the hatzi kaddish grew up as an internal set of distinctions within that. Other material was added here and there, and as they came to be regarded as fixed, kaddishes were appended to them to announce that they were done. (I think I explained to you before that one purpose was to provide a lot of places in the service for mourner's kaddish, since originally a different mourner recited each kaddish -- so you needed to "invent" kaddishes to go around.)

Of course this is all just how the Ashkenazic service evolved. Other traditions may handle it differently. But that's what I think is going on.

Once you see the different function of each type of kaddish, it suggests a logic and structure to the thing that never made sense to me before I really started studying the liturgy. I think a big reason Jews are so confused about traditional Judaism is that this kind of stuff is never explained to them.

To return to the original question about maariv: it's the 3rd bracha that has the extraneous scriptural verses. Someone decided along the line that if there are verses, this necessitated a hatzi kaddish (akin to between psukei dzimrah and shacharit proper). And yes, I think it's a late development, particularly because that 3rd bracha is not universal to all rites. ArtScroll even admits as much -- a striking departure from their general "this was all fixed by anshei kneset hagdolah" approach.