[powerpress]
I stopped by Mira’s house after work to help with some computer problems. I didn’t have any instruments along—just a Dell laptop from my client—and it became clear that I would not be getting home at an reasonable enough to record a Kaddish, so Mira and I recorded a text Kaddish together using GarageBand on her Mac.
It seems appropriate to me that an audio response to Mira’s kaddish for really bad books ended up displaying really bad reading from me. Even reading the transliteration under the Hebrew characters in Mira’s son Michael’s tsiddur was a bit much for me to handle. We both made some errors—especially me—and couldn’t help laughing in a few places as we took turns stumbling over the words.
Feels like I’m just never going to be fluent in Kaddish. Maybe that’s a good thing. Still — it’s jarring to hear the stumbles. Islam has an excellent attitude toward this: Allahu-wehdu— only God— meaning that God alone does perfection, and the rest of us just bumble around imperfectly.