Kaddish
The kaddish is a Jewish prayer said over the body of a deceased person. It affirms the absolute sovriengty and transcendence of God in the face of death. There is very little to be said for the dead themselves:
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Glorified and sanctified be Godâs great name throughout the world
which He has created according to His will.
May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days,
and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon;
and say, Amen.
May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.
Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored,
adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that
are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.
May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.
He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.
The comfort of the ritual derives from placing God over and above all strife, all loss, all laceration. What, then, does this prayer offer after the death of God? In one of his early diary entries, Scholem describes the fall of the eternal, transcedent heaven to which the Kaddish pays tribute, understanding modernity to be the process of heaven slowly collapsing.
He writes:
- âIn the 19th century, heaven was broken up until it vanished forever. After the age of romanticism had still retained the old dreams, there were two major periods of change. The first period was represented by Schopenhauer, Marx, and Stirner: âSchopenhauer was tbe one who murdered the absolute God. Itâs just as Nietzsche said: God is utterly dead, even if his murderer limited himself to metaphysics.â After Schopenhauer came Marxâs turn to shatter the illusions of the transcedental heaven and Stirnerâs turn to say kaddish over God: [See Bauer on the relationship between the Unique One in Stirner and Substance in Spinoza] âAfter which a second generation - Stridberg, Nietzsche, and Ibsen - came on the scene to rattle heaven with their romanticism. Fior the upper classes they created a lot more stir in the dubious region of heaven than the other three. Next came Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, two giants who, no doubt, unwittingly destroyed heaven through their deep religiosity. We today have nothing left of the heaven of the past.â
There are a few remarkable claims in this early fragment of Scholemâs:
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1: Heaven was destroyed in a number of stages. The first stage began with a metaphysical analysis of the Will and itâs incapacity to grasp its objects (Schopenhauer), then in the political-economic impossibility of Heaven on Earth in Marx, and then in the culling of the basic unity and purpose of the soul in Stirnerâs egoism.
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2: It is possible to demean heaven further through oneâs attempts at revival. Is it also possible that this desecration is a necessicary step in the struggle to redeem Justice? [the end of satan].
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3: Scholem has Stirner reciting the Kaddish over God. This is the most perplexing choice he could have made from the authors listed. I see the vision. âThe Unique One is substance driven to itâs greatet degree of abstractionâ. Scholem seems to anticipate that the ghosts in the machine to which Stirner first gave an voice of their own would be the means to escape the systematic murder of God by the very form of logic that once guaranteed his transcendence.
âNothing Human Is Alien to Meâ (taken at the summit above Bascilica de Guadelupe in Mexico City)
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