Jason Byassee: The mourner as leader
Steven Kepnes’ terrific book “Jewish Liturgical Reasoning” is not about leadership. It’s about the way that Jewish liturgy creates a specifically Jewish, post-critical form of reasoning in service to the world. But it has a short portion about the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning for the dead, and what it says about leadership.
This second-most famous prayer in Judaism (after the Shema) is based on Daniel 2:20 and its refrain, “Blessed be the name of God from age to age.” It’s a prayer offered in a sort of future passive tense, announcing that God’s name will be praised. There is very little in it that sounds obviously like a mourner’s prayer. It is more like a praiser’s prayer, except the praiser is barely present as well. It’s a prayer that is first and last about God.
And it is not offered alone. Jewish liturgy always requires a quorum of ten people, and this is never more appropriate than for the sake of one who mourns a death, for the “mourner should not be left alone but needs the support of the community.” And not support simply in a passive sense. “Instead, the mourner is thrust into the role of leading the Kaddish prayer.” The one who has just lost parent or spouse or child stands and addresses not only God but also the gathered community, offering them this blessing: “May He establish His Kingdom during your life and during your days.”
“By making the mourner the leader,” Kepnes writes, “the liturgy expresses the confidence in the spiritual resources of the mourner who now, at this low point of doubt, is still able to praise God.” The Kaddish is further an affirmation of faith in the goodness of creation, here in the face of death, to the point that it forges “a link across the abyss of death over to eternal life.” As the newest mourner prays, those praying along pray also in memory of those whom they have loved and lost. God remembers them. And the living offer them a good deed that the dead, being dead, cannot repay. The whole cluster of acts represents a reminder that “all of life for the Jew is a liturgical act.”
This is how to lead in the face of death. To stand and announce with a community of fellow praying people that God is King, that God will establish his reign over creation, that God’s name will be praised, and to ask that God would bring all this about soon.
What’s this have to do with how we lead our organizations? I honestly don’t know. Except that we’re all barreling toward death faster than we’d like to imagine. That our organizations, if they’re worthy of our work, are meant to establish a sort of hedge against death and its effort to creep into portions of life where it should not be. So we call on a great God, the only one who can push back this creeping tide, this one whose name will be praised-- if not by us then by the stones themselves. And perhaps that leadership is the sort of chutzpah to spit in death’s eye precisely when it looks to have won a not-insignificant victory.
Jason Byassee is an executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
Death and Leadership
Jason, you ask what mourning has to do with leadership, or more specifically this Jewish mourning ritual. In my view, it has plenty to do with leadership. Leaders are almost immediately seduced into thinking that their time, effort, planning, strategizing, and brilliance will bring about successful organizations. And we think these organizations are God's instrument to do his work on earth.
Death, and a leader's embrace of our utter reliance on Christ's defeat of it, remind us of the falsehood of the seductive idea that we work on behalf of God.
God works. He works in and through us. But he does not work because we build institutions and achieve goals. Those are good things which may coincide with God's work. But we shouldn't confuse our work with God's.
Making mourners leaders, and making leaders mourners (in addition to being healthy for those in grief) make for good institutions because they remind us that it is God's work that matters. In the end, we are dust and to dust we shall return.
Thanks Rob
I hear there's a really good book on this by . . . Rob Moll. May its buyers increase.
Your graf on the relationship between God's work and ours is rich and could call for lots of unpacking. There is certainly some space for "God's whimsy," as Amy Laura Hall calls it, in where God decides to work and where God decides not to. And there can be idolatry in our thinking we can mandate God's works like he's some sort of totem at our whim. But I'd want to hold out some place for God's promise to be present in certain ecclesial practices where God has promised to be present--eucharist, baptism, etc. Not because we can make God do anything, but because God has promised to be there, and so will be there. Where ELSE God decides to work or not is, of course, up to God. I love that the words over the sacrament are called words of institution--that's what we're trying to be as a vibrant institution, a place that does what Jesus says to do, and teaches others to, because when we do he's there in judgment and grace to transform us into his body.
Jason, Thanks so much for
Jason,
Thanks so much for this. I love the image of the mourner becoming the leader of the liturgy. It's a powerful image of a tradition providing us with rituals and words to say when we might not have any of our own. Conversely, might not resources like the lament psalms also provide the mourner with words of grief, yet still embedded in the context of hope and trust in God's faithfulness - when it can sometimes be hard to name and express grief in a ritual way, especially in church? (I have a vested interest in this, since I'm studying lament in the NT!) I'm trying to think through how belief in the resurrection has sometimes hindered the practice of lament in the Christian tradition, but also how Christian eschatology (along with Israel's lament tradition) provides rich grounds for lamenting in these in-between times. And thanks for reminding me about Rob Moll's book; I've been meaning to pick up a copy.
Unpacking
Yes, Jason, there's a lot to unpack. Thanks for doing some of that which I'd neglected. You're right, Christ is present in those institutions.
The seduction I was thinking of is when we build institutions surrounding those "institutions" in which God is present with us. God is with us when we serve the poor. But pretty quickly, we're holding fancy dinners with people who are "blessed to be a blessing" in order to have money to serve the poor. It's good (right?) when these actions involve more people in an institution in which God is present. But we all, leaders and followers, get caught up in the event planning, mailing, marketing, relationship building, strategizing and infrastructure building. Soon that becomes the center of our activities that surround an action instituted by Jesus, in which he is present.
Death and mourning help remind us that Christ is with us in his ways, not ours.
Yes yes
Amen Rob, we're dust indeed. I love this local story in Durham, when a hurricane came through and killed the power, and a local caterer couldn't preserve the caviar and salmon etc they had ready for a reception at the luxury hotel. So they sent it to the homeless shelter and there was a feast of another sort. Seems to me we'd want to identify the kingdom both in the unplanned feast of the world's uninvited, and also in the feast at the altar, with gratitude that we're especially bad at planning the former.
Post new comment