A Liturgical Quandry

[debka_notion]

Those of you who've used certain prayerbooks have encountered the version of Kaddish with the names of concentration camps interspersed between each of the words. It's absolutely horrid, in terms of the meaning of the text of Kaddish, which praises G-d, and is not actually a mournful text.

On the other hand, I've seen it used, and while I despised it, I also found it frighteningly effective, as an emotion-provoking piece. I don't know why it works, but it does.

So, when faced with something so contradictory, what do you do?

Comments

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

I'm not fond of the piece myself, but I can see why it works. It was best illustrated for me when I heard a very effective musical rendition of it at a cantorial concert. The soloist sang through the Aramaic text, initially with a boisterous and self-assured tone and melody, but every now and then someone in the chorus would call out one of the massacre sites, and over the course of the composition the soloist struggled more and more to continue saying kaddish. It was the first performance of this that I've ever seen (and the only one to date) that showed some sensitivity to the text itself, rather than the text as imagined in popular culture.

That said, I have no idea how to convey it that way in a congregational setting. For now I just bear with it, and think to myself "this is a poem, this is a poem," because otherwise we're saying a kaddish in the middle of an amida, and what's that about?