This week, I am revisiting my second post about grief and the importance of humanity in the face of intolerance and violence. For millenia, humans have struggled to hold on to humanity in the face of death. Nothing signifies this so clearly as the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. In the Hebrew, the prayer is anything but mournful or grieving. Instead, it is a dedication to the glory of God and a message of gratitude for the beauty of humanity and the strength of the human spirit:
The Mourner’s Kaddish manages to do what every human being strives to do: to uphold and strengthen one’s faith in humanity even as one is surrounded by the worst parts of the human experience. The Mourner’s Kaddish is a prayer for peace and life, an overwhelming message of gratitude to God.
The poet Allen Ginsberg reflects upon this prayer and the Jewish-American experience in his poem “Kaddish,” a dedication to his dead mother. In “Kaddish,” Ginsberg focuses not simply on the sorrow of his mother’s death but on the bittersweet contradiction between destruction and poetry, beween mourning and gratitude. Ginsberg writes of the innocence and naiveté of ignorant beings striving for some higher divinity in the face of the droll absurdities of life. Ginsberg is mezmorized by the words of the Kaddish, repeating it endlessly and remembering his mother. His is a modern adaptation of an ancient psalm, the essence of humanity in its standoff with death, a dedication to our unique potency to remember and feel the intricacies of lifeforms long gone. This is the very essence of what humanity and humanitarianism means. Hope in the face of death means a recognition of the constant presence of both tragedy and poetry, a reckoning with the inexplicable mystery of death.
These themes of hope and humanity have power far beyond simple stories and poems; they are uniquely capable of helping ordinary people come to terms with events of extraordinary horror. In the early seventies, a television program called M*A*S*H was beamed into homes across America. It was the effort of a small group of actors and writers to explain war to a nation of greiving parents and rightfully angry young people. M*A*S*H, set during the Korean War but aimed at a generation struggling with the moral dilemmas of the Vietnam War, stars Alan Alda as a witty Maine surgeon who uses humor to overcome the absurdity and random atrocities of war. Through acts of kindness and compassion, the characters of M*A*S*H show the immense value of humanity in the face of death. Much like the novels of Saul Bellow or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, M*A*S*H embraced a philosophy that placed the inherent value of life above all else. The show makes no excuses. The dying do not die heroic deaths; they are suffering children struggling with absurdity. M*A*S*H is television’s eulogy to all those lost in the endless foreign wars of the late twentieth century, its explanation for the ones who live.
What shows like M*A*S*H and poems like “Kaddish” tell us about the human experience is difficult for many of us to swallow. We are not a band of heroes resisting evil, nor are we a band of degenerates destroying goodness. The protagonists of these stories show us that humanity, at its core, is the struggle to understand death and tragedy, to make sense of the absurd, to make poetry from inexplicable experience, and somehow manage to keep on living. Humanity’s greatest strengths are not its mental abilities or its technological might, but its striving for sanity and its capacity for compassion in the midst of the endless biological struggle for survival.