The Kel Maley Rachamim, “G-d Who is Full of Mercy” is a gut wrenching prayer where we ask that the soul of our beloved who has gone on to the next world find perfect peace in G-d’s sheltering Presence. In part, it embodies our respect for the dead, who belong among “the holy and the pure.” More subtly, I believe, it is a response to the helplessness and guilt we feel at being powerless to prevent the loss of our loved one. Simply put, what we couldn’t do for them in this life we ask G-d to do for them in the next, on our behalf. Finally, the prayer has the same counterfactual quality as the other prayers we use to respond to death. With regard to the kaddish prayer, for example, the last thing we feel like saying after a death is that G-d is to be “Magnified and sanctified.” Similarly, when a loved one dies, the last thing we think about G-d is how merciful G-d is.
This tension was captured beautifully, if also cynically, in the brilliant Yehudah Amichai’s poem, “G-d Full of Mercy”:
“Were G-d not full of mercy
there would be mercy in the world,
and not just in Him.”
If this is true for the regular Kel Maley Rachamim, how much the more for the special Kel Maley Rachamim for the Six Million! Here, we pray for our brothers and sisters, men women and children, who were “slaughtered and burned.” How could a G-d “full of mercy” ever allow such a thing? I despair of ever finding a satisfying answer to that question. And perhaps there is in this prayer something of a protest, a way of throwing in a supposedly merciful G-d’s face the consequences of His (in)actions.
At the same time, there is something equally problematic about humanity asserted in this prayer. The holocaust victims are described as having “offered their lives for the Sanctification of G-d’s Name (Kiddush Hashem).” Interestingly, this phrase is not translated in our Shabbat Sim Shalom siddur. Perhaps this is because the assertion that our brethren died in this way is so highly questionable.
Surely, there were many who looked at their death as an act of defiance, a challenge to “keep the faith” in spite of the nightmare they were facing. But I suspect the vast majority of our victims were simply people caught in the horrific tempest created by the Nazis, may their teeth rot. In all likelihood, they died in desperate pain, rather than with a sense of noble sacrifice.
Their death could thus be seen as meaningless, which only increases the horror of it. By our praying for their souls in this way, is it not possible that we are seeking to reintroduce a sense of kedushah, of holiness, into a world from which it was purged in the fires of Auschwitz? In other words, could this prayer be seen as counterfactual not only with reference to G-d, but also with reference to the meaning of human existence?
G-d may not seem merciful We will assert G-d’s mercy. The world may seem chaotic and devoid of meaning We will, through our act of prayer, make it meaningful. So that we, too, in spite of all that is inexplicable in this world, might still believe that we can find our place in Gan Eden, in the Heavenly Paradise, in the next.