The Kaddish is best known as the mourner's prayer, but it is at root a doxology, a hymn of praise magnifying and sanctifying the great name of God, composed largely in Aramaic, the everyday language of the Jews of the talmudic period. Its central line, to which the congregation responds, blesses God's great name for ever, and the prayer as a whole asks that God's name be exalted and his kingdom established, without mentioning death at all. It exists in several forms that punctuate the service, dividing its sections and closing it, and one form came to be recited by mourners and on the anniversary of a death, the association by which it is most widely known, so that the bereaved sanctify God's name precisely in the time of loss. The prayer's antiquity, its Aramaic language shared with the everyday speech of its first reciters, and its focus on the coming of God's kingdom rather than on the dead have all been much discussed, and it remains among the most solemn and recognisable texts of the liturgy.
Because its core is a doxology rather than a meditation on death, the widespread modern association of Kaddish purely with mourning can obscure its original and continuing function elsewhere in the service, where the same or a closely related form marks a transition, for instance between the reading of the Torah and the prayers that follow. Scholars have also noted that its plea for the establishment of God's kingdom speedily and soon gives the Aramaic doxology an eschatological hope, so that the mourner reciting it is, formally, joining an ancient petition for the world's redemption rather than speaking about the deceased at all.