We don’t know why some souls go through such convoluted spiritual journeys
Kaddish is a powerful tefillah at any time, but there’s a particular sadness when it’s a father mourning a son. Then it becomes a marker of the fact that the natural course of events has been reversed, that a young life has been cut short, leaving the parents to mourn what will never be.
Take that Kaddish and multiply it by dozens, and you’ll get some idea of what it’s like to daven with a group of bereaved parents in post-October 7 Israel, as I did over a recent Shabbos.
As dozens of fathers mourned their fallen children, victims of the Nova massacre and combat in Gaza, it was a shiver-inducing Kaddish; one that might have been heard in a post-Holocaust DP camp.
The event was a shabbaton run by Menucha V’Yeshua, an organization that supports families going through a medical crisis. Since Simchas Torah, they’ve pivoted to helping those who’ve lost children in the war, with shabbatons giving families a chance to rest, and join others who are enduring the same pain.
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