I was sitting with Mrs Tzaddik this afternoon, in the glorious sunshine. Light breeze. Not too hot. One of those rare perfect moments. There too, was one of the caregivers, and my friend T, a large white male akin to a polar bear. I was trying to convince her to record her tales so that…
Category: kaddish in two-part harmony
The Academic and the Musician. The academic immerses in Kaddish with thoughts of thinking rather than feeling—the emotions being too raw. The musician spends her time in making us feel, whether we want to or not. And making the music of kaddish. Making music kadosh. A flurry of emails ensue between the two. Their blogs lock horns, as do the writers themselves. They start a joint blog. They start a podcast.
A commitment to a year-long project has begun: a kaddish in two-part harmony.
A conversation among an anthropologist, a musician, and their audience on themes of death and dying, grief, ritual, the interplay between musician and listener.
A Kaddish for my mother, Ruth Leavitt Kadish
It’s been 7 months since my mother’s passing on September 19, 2010.
the shikse makes more charoset—& mrs tzaddik doesn’t care
After years of making the weak, watery Ashkenaz muck that Mira so disdains, I ran across this recipe in the The New York Times Passover Cookbook, credited to Larry Bain and Catherine Pantsios as an adaptation of his gramma’s.
daily kaddish: tornado victims’ lullaby
Dozens of people have already been reported killed in tornados sweeping through Alabama today. I didn’t feel like playing Kogan’s “Kaddish” tonight. Instead, I improvised a sort of lullaby for those people and their loved ones.
daily kaddish: for lost histories
I’ve spent the evening digging through ancestry.com and a box of old family photos—most unlabeled—mixed up with big envelopes of negatives (also unlabeled except that they were ordered from Bismarck, North Dakota by my great-grampa (Mom’s dad’s dad) Herman L Selvig from Plaza, North Dakota. I haven’t been able to make a whole lot of sense of most of it.
some perspectives from the shikse’s dad
Dad and I were talking about the “kaddish in two-part harmony” project the other night, and he muttered something about spending a career dealing with death. I’d never quite put it together that his thirty years in the Social Security Administration had had him dealing with death all the time—well, duh! So I asked him to write a guest essay about what that was like.
daily kaddish: for don, sr
A kaddish for our neighbor don, sr; we just learned of his passing two weeks ago.
daily kaddish: chez rebecca
Today Mira and I visited her mom, Rebecca, for a mini Seder, and I recorded a kaddish afterward in her great room. Wow.
daily kaddish: mohammed bouazizi
Mira dedicated this kaddish to Mohammed Bouazizi, whose humble reaction to bureaucratic humiliation set off the revolution in Tunisia, which set of revolutions in Egypt and Libya.
daily kaddish: plague of jazz
I didn’t have the energy to engage with what’s important. Instead I played a frippery on the Kaddish—an escapist kaddish that was jazzy in the sense of a plague. Not good jazz, not fun. No, the jazz you play when you don’t feel real jazz.