Kaddish
An Aramaic praise of God's name that marks the joints of every service, and that mourners recite.
An Aramaic praise of God's name that marks the joints of every service. Its most famous form, the Mourner's Kaddish, contains no reference to death; mourners recite it through the mourning period, traditionally eleven months for a parent, and on each yahrzeit, the anniversary of a death. It requires a minyan, which makes mourning a communal act by design.
The Kaddish is in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and its function in a service is structural: it closes one section and opens the next, and it appears several times in every service.
Its best-known form is the Mourner's Kaddish, and the fact most often noted about it is that it contains no reference to death. Mourners recite it through the mourning period, traditionally eleven months for a parent, and on each anniversary after that.
It requires a minyan, the quorum of ten, which makes saying it a communal act by design. A mourner cannot say it alone, and that is the point of it.
Does it have a text?
Fixed text, in Aramaic, and not printed here. Its public-domain Aramaic and English sit in Singer's 1890 prayer book alongside the rest of the liturgy this site has not yet transcribed.
When it comes up
Other forms of prayer in Jewish
- Shacharit, Mincha and Maariv — The three daily Jewish services, and the fixed liturgy each one follows.
- The Shema — Less a petition than a declaration, and the prayer that bookends a Jewish day and a Jewish life.
- The Amidah — The standing prayer at the centre of every Jewish service.
- Berakhot — The short fixed blessings said over food, drink and ordinary acts.
- Jewish prayers of healing and memory — Mi Sheberach for the sick, and El Malei Rachamim for the dead.
This page describes a practice. It does not tell you how to perform it, or whether you should. Practice varies by region, community and household far more than a page like this can carry, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has signed anything here. The full dossier names its sources.