Reader: This is the ancient Jewish prayer for the dead. It is not customary to recite the Kaddish during the seder but tonight we would like to take a moment to remember all of our heroes and loved ones who have died. From those taken from this world recently, to those whose absence continues to be as palpable as Elijah's, so many years later, let us remember.

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’may raba

b’alma di v’ra chirutay, v’yamlich malchutay b’chayaychon uv’yomaychon

uv’chay d’chol beyt Yisrael,

Ba’agala u’vizman kariv, v’imru, Amein.

Y’hay sh’may raba m’varech l’olam ul’almay almaya.

Yitbarach v’yishtabach v’yitpa’ar v’yitromam v’yitnasay v’yit-hadar v’yitaleh

v’yit-halal, sh’may d’kudsha, b’rich Hu.

L’ayla min kol birchata v’shirata, tush b’chata v’nechemata,

da’amiran b’alma, vimru, Amein.

Y’hay sh’lama raba min sh’maya, v’chayim aleinu v’al kol Yisrael, v’imru,

Amein.

"Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours."

"Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal."

"It will never be okay,” a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. “It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.”.....The unadorned truth of what she’d said—it will never be okay—entirely unzipped me.

It will never be okay, and yet there we were, the two of us more than okay, both of us happier and luckier than anyone has a right to be... though there isn’t one good thing that has happened to either of us that we haven’t experienced through the lens of our grief. I’m not talking about weeping and wailing every day (though sometimes we both did that). I’m talking about what goes on inside, the words unspoken, the shaky quake at the body’s core...

It will never be okay ..And the kindest most loving thing you can do for her is to bear witness to that, to muster the strength and courage and humility it takes to accept the enormous reality of its not okayness and be okay with it the same way she has to be. Get comfortable being the [person] who says oh honey, I’m so sorry for your loss over and over again....compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got."

-Cheryl Strayed


haggadah Section: Bareich