Kaddish (Doxology)

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.

Treated as a hymn rather than only as a recited liturgical response, Kaddish has attracted an unusually large body of independent musical setting, both within traditional synagogue cantorial music, where Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities have developed quite distinct melodic traditions for the different versions of the text, and within Western art music composed for the concert hall rather than for worship. The best known instance of the latter is Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 3, subtitled Kaddish, completed in 1963, which sets Aramaic and Hebrew text from the prayer within a large orchestral and choral symphonic work addressing themes of faith and doubt in the shadow of contemporary crisis, a use of the ancient doxology's text entirely outside its liturgical setting and intended for a general concert audience rather than a worshipping congregation.

This musical afterlife, moving from a text recited with a fixed and relatively constrained cantorial melody within the synagogue service into freely composed orchestral and choral settings intended for secular performance, distinguishes Kaddish's later reception from most of the other Jewish liturgical material in this atlas, and reflects the particular emotional resonance later composers and audiences have found in its use as a mourner's prayer, drawing on that association even when, as discussed elsewhere in this atlas under its entry as a formula, the Aramaic text itself makes no reference to death or grief at all, a tension between the text's actual content and its culturally accumulated emotional association that composers setting it to music have often deliberately foregrounded rather than resolved.