The Virtues of a Virtual Minyan

These are some of the places I recited Kaddish with my fellow mourners: grocery store aisles, airports, restaurants, cafes, subway stations, ATM lobbies, cars, street corners, doctors’ waiting rooms, the beach, the woods, my office, my bedroom, my kitchen, my daughter’s gymnastics gym, my son’s flag football game, and the middle of Park Avenue with traffic blaring around me. I stopped to say Kaddish while in the midst of cooking, cleaning, working, driving, answering emails, tending my houseplants, doing errands, running in the park, and biking over the Manhattan Bridge. At various points in the compressed period since both of my parents died—my father in March 2021, my mother in November 2022—alarms dinged on my phone throughout the day to alert me that a minyan was about to begin.

Like many before me, I found tremendous solace in saying Kaddish. Yet in any earlier era, I might not have engaged with the ritual thoroughly enough to feel its transformative power. The reason I was able to access Kaddish for roughly 600 days is that I said it mostly on Zoom—a pandemic-born adaptation that I’d argue is in some ways better than the original.

The Mourner’s Kaddish is a core part of every traditional Jewish prayer service that, according to religious law, must be recited daily after the death of a parent (or spouse, sibling, or child) for 11 or 12 months, depending on one’s custom. Based on the lugubrious drone with which we often hear it in synagogue, one might assume that its Aramaic text translates to something terrifically sorrowful. Yet it contains no mention of death, mourning, loss, or sadness. Rather, it lavishes praise on God and calls for abundant peace to rain down on us. Functionally and perhaps most significantly, Kaddish only “counts” if recited with a minyan, or a quorum of 10. Therein lies much of its magic. “It is hard to overstate the power of saying Kaddish with other people,” writes Anita Diamant in Saying Kaddish. “The requirement of a minyan for Kaddish ... turns the prayer into a communalizing force, keeping the mourner among the living—both literally and metaphorically. Indeed, the power of Kaddish comes, in large measure, from the consolations of being in a group that recognizes and embraces the bereaved.”

Everything about losing a parent is startling, and among the shocks is reciting the words of the Mourner’s Kaddish after spending a lifetime until then responding “Amen” to others fulfilling their obligation. Suddenly, the unthinkable has happened to you. When my father died—he was 71 with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a terminal respiratory disease—I found myself expelled from the excruciating, breathtaking, time-stilling, mind-blowingly sacred experience of caring for him at the end of his life into a period of pain and paralysis unlike anything I’d ever imagined. It was hard to do anything except to say Kaddish. The prayer, among other things, is a kind of spiritual technology that can help you put one foot in front of the other at a moment of personal obliteration. And because it was still the height of the pandemic when my father died, and most non-Orthodox synagogues had yet to resume meeting in person, there was an abundance of virtual minyanim to which I could turn to say it.

There was a Reform synagogue’s 7 a.m. broadcast every day on Facebook Live, in which the rabbi led a silent meditation prior to the prayer. There was a daily morning minyan broadcast by the fancy Conservative synagogue that my father himself had become so loyal to watching every Shabbat during the pandemic because he loved their operatic cantor. There was a minyan every Monday afternoon organized by a network of youngish Jewish movers and shakers, in which Kaddish was preceded by a prayer for healing and everyone took turns naming the sick in their lives.

I often attended a 15-minute Kaddish call on weekday afternoons where more than 100 people popped in from all over the country. In the chat, they would share where they were from and who they were remembering, producing a stream of names evoking a stream of love. Before the cacophonous group-recitation of the prayer, a rabbi would offer a teaching, often refracting the experience of loss through the weekly Torah portion.

Another of my regulars was an intimate weekly half-hour Kaddish so sensitively facilitated that it felt like a bereavement group. Week after week, new mourners would appear and release the keening cries of fresh loss before a screen full of compassionate witnesses. Others would note the acute sorrows of milestones as they scrolled by during the first year without their loved one—the first Passover, first Father’s Day, first birthday. Still others would note, with a different flavor of sorrow, that their proscribed time within the tender holding space of Kaddish was about to end.

It was only eight months after I finished saying Kaddish for my father that my mother died of cancer, which had been an ominous but controlled presence in her body and our family’s life for a dozen years. Just after my father’s first yahrzeit, her disease escalated and spread. Once again, in what felt like a stunning déjà vu, I found myself walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Once again, I had to muster more strength than I knew myself to possess, this time to usher my immeasurably beloved mother to the end of her life. And once again, daily Kaddish was there to catch me in the free fall after she was gone.

Even before my parents died, I understood at some level that we Jews are lucky to have a ritual container for grief, unlike the vacuum in which most Westerners find themselves after a loss—a space devoid of structure, custom, or communal recognition. But whereas the week of shiva is widely known and observed to some degree (despite its potential to feel, as a bereaved mother recently wrote in The New York Times, like “a cocktail party in hell”), the mourner’s near-year of saying Kaddish reflects the actual intensity and duration of grief. It affirms that mourning continues long after the cards and casseroles have stopped coming, after the donations have been gratefully received and after friends and family have ceased reaching out with hushed, sympathetic inquiries of “How are you doing?” As the anthropologist Gila S. Silverman wrote in a 2021 paper, “Within a larger social context that still expects people to ‘get over it’ and move on from their grieving fairly quickly, the year of Jewish mourning rituals, and the ongoing opportunities to publicly remember the deceased, send the bereaved a strikingly different message … that ongoing mourning is accepted, expected, and supported by communal norms, rather than being a reason to seek professional help.”

Still, as a working mother of three children whose Jewish identity is strong but pretty uncategorizable, how likely was I to shlep to a synagogue every day for nearly two years? Not very. What the flourishing landscape of virtual Kaddish did, essentially, was to make the practice accessible and inviting to someone like me. With a low barrier to entry and so many ways in, it brought me the balm that observant Jews have long experienced through the ritual’s most healing features: regularity and connection.

Besides easy access, virtual Kaddish had the benefit of giving me a wide-shot view of my place in the scheme of things. Over nearly two years, I gazed at thousands of faces—Barbara from Scottsdale, David from San Francisco, Faye from Rochester, Simon from Chicago, Helen from London, Rebecca from Ashland, and so on. I knew nothing about them except that they were Jewish (presumably) and grieving a loss. I saw the sorrow (my sorrow!) in their eyes, read the names of their mothers, fathers, siblings, and spouses in the chat, and lent my voice to the collective, clangy, everyone’s-now-unmuted recitation of words so familiar they seemed imprinted in our bodies. In this vast borderless crowd, I sensed myself more clearly in the river of time. I could see that we were all holding fast to the same raft that our loved ones had held onto to make it through the rapids.

Perhaps the most exquisite feature of virtual Kaddish was how it helped maintain and even strengthen my sense of bondedness to my parents. This is an obvious feature of saying Kaddish in general and one that has been well chronicled by many who’ve said it in the traditional way. Leon Wieseltier in Kaddish, Ari Goldman in Living a Year of Kaddish, E.M. Broner in Mornings and Mourning, and Anita Diamant all describe Kaddish as a connective link, a powerful affirmation of a relationship that continues after the death of the one being mourned. But there’s something especially poignant about this act when it halts you during whatever activity is underway in the middle of your day, wherever you are, and asks you to stop, commune with your loved one, and be with others doing the same. Especially when the churn of quotidian life has resumed, a Kaddish group popping up on your phone is a gift, a salve, a whisper, a refuge. It’s a perch where the wild tumult of grief can land. It’s a golden thread stitching you to the one who is gone.

Not long ago, I logged on to one of my regular minyans just before the end of saying Kaddish for my mom. It was Sukkot, and the rabbi leading the minyan expounded on an idea the holiday underscores—that everything is fragile and impermanent, yet we must rejoice in life in spite of its flipside of loss. One hundred and twenty-seven people were there—127 people who, like me, had lost someone deeply important to them. “I’ve never felt so much presence the way I have the past three-and-a-half years in this minyan,” the rabbi said. “It’s a new kind of minyan for sure, but it’s a minyan.” Someone posted in the chat: “Actually, sometimes it feels more connected than before Zoom!” A flurry of hearts and thumbs-ups flashed on the screen. Then we prayed for peace to shower down from the heavens—for ourselves, for everyone—and all to each other we said: Amen.