[powerpress]
I’m writing this post the day after its date.
Last night I had a longtime friend over. It was overdue.
We made dinner together and finally got back to talking to each other—really talking and really listening. And that made me realize what I hadn’t been facing, which was that I needed her help with something as much as I thought (wanted to believe?) she needed mine with something.
Dinner and talking went late. Very late. Stay overnight late. I love the friendships where that can happen.
So it was yikes-o’clock when I finally excused myself for a few minutes to make the day’s kaddish, and I was too tired and my head was too big a swirl to deal with warming up, emptying, and playing my horn. I just wanted to get it done, and on an evening where it came down to communicating by talking and listening, I felt like the kaddish should be spoken, not played.
And—well, yikes. I’m still having a hard time with the Hebrew/Aramaic even though I hear it nearly every night. I have it almost memorized, but standing in front of a mic, I needed to read it. With Mira’s help I’m starting to get the Hebrew aleph-bet back into my brain, so I can actually read most of it in the Hebrew now, but not at read-aloud-in-front-of-a-mic speed or confidence, so I was reading the transliteration, and even that was hard.
So, yikes.
This yikes-twice-over spoken Kaddish was my Kaddish for the time that didn’t need to pass before we talked and listened. It’s probably mostly my fault. It’s too easy for me to forget that the listening has to be bigger than and sooner than the talking.