Kaddish and Other Millin Setimin: Esoteric Languages in Jewish–American Narratives

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing so, the creators of these works evoke the Lurianic notion of millin setimin or “secreted words”—utterances that transcend the communicative function of everyday speech and partake in some profound revelations. I hope to show that from Allen Ginsberg, through Tony Kushner, to the Coen Brothers and beyond, Jewish–American creators have been evoking Jewish tongues both as symbols of a lost past and as millin setimin that aspire to restore the connection to that past, within the Jewish–American community and beyond.

1. Introduction

	קֳדָם רִבּוֹן עָלְמִין
	בְּמִלִּין סְתִימִין
	תְּגַלּוּן פִּתְגָמִין
	וְתֵימְרוּן חִדּוּשָׁא.
Before the master of the worlds
In secreted words
You shall reveal things
And deliver new insights.
“I Shall Set a Feast” (“Asader liseudata”) by R. Isaac Luria Ashkenazi

In 1961, Allen Ginsberg published his book Kaddish and Other Poems, which included the poem-cycle “Kaddish” he wrote after the death of his mother, Naomi, in 1956 (Ginsberg [1961] 2010). As critics quickly agreed, in this elegiac cycle, Ginsberg laments not only the death of his mother and her painful struggle with mental illness, which he inherited (Weine 2023), but also his growing estrangement from Jewish tradition. Early critics noted that “Kaddish” represents a Jewishness which “has undergone violence, cruelty, madness and has been twisted by experience” and Ginsberg—as “the only surviving son of a Jewish universe which died with the death of his mother” (Gartenberg 1960, p. 9; Grossman 1962, p. 108; Cantor 1976). Throughout the cycle, Ginsberg evokes three of the salient Jewish tongues—Aramaic, Hebrew, and Yiddish—as linguistic ghosts hovering over the text, without translation or explanation. At the same time, these texts also partake in the syncretistic spiritual library Ginsberg assembles in his poetic effort to fathom the death and mental illness of his mother and his own acceleration “toward Apocalypse” (Ginsberg [1961] 2010, p. 7; on Ginsberg’s syncretism, see Pederson 2009; Svonkin 2010). I suggest that among a pastoral elegy by Shelley and the Buddhist Book of Answers, “Kaddish” pioneered the use of untranslated texts in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Yiddish in Jewish–American narratives as “esoteric tongues.” Namely, languages believed by certain circles to “hold a secret meaning known only by initiates,” as manifested in mystical traditions such as medieval Kabbalah (Baumann 2008, p. 243).1

As Hana Wirth-Nesher has aptly argued, the crossing and splicing between English and languages such as Yiddish and Hebrew is a distinct feature of Jewish–American writing that sets it apart from other ethnic literatures in America. She identifies multilingualism “as a necessary and compelling tool” for the understanding of Jewish−-American writing (Wirth-Nesher 2012, p. 49).2 As this article will show, Wirth-Nesher’s astute observation is equally relevant when analyzing the work of Jewish–American authors who refer to such languages with familiarity, and those who display a more fraught relationship with them, as “esoteric tongues.” In my discussion of the evocation of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Yiddish in Jewish–American narratives—from Ginsberg’s poem to plays, television shows, and films—I will use the corresponding Lurianic notion of millin setimin. Best translated as “secreted words,” this term is used in the Sabbath morning piyyut (a liturgical poem) “Asader lisudata” or “I Shall Set a Feast,”3 one of only three piyyutim known to have been definitively authored by R. Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (Liebes 1972, p. 540).4 These songs were written in Zoharic Aramaic and were meant to correspond with the three traditional meals of the Sabbath or “the day of the Kabbalah” to use Gershom Scholem’s definition (Scholem 1969, p. 139). As Yehuda Liebes notes, while reflecting the unique Aramaic dialect of the Zohar, the linguistic choice was also understood as a means to prevent the angels “who famously don’t speak Aramaic,” from understanding the songs (Liebes 1972, p. 540). At the same time, the songs became widely popular and are still sung in many Jewish communities. The mystical context of the song on the one hand and its popularity on the other charge the term millin setimin with a multilayered meaning in the context of Jewish–American narratives.

In using this expression, I postulate a dual argument regarding the function of Jewish tongues in Jewish–American narratives. On the one hand, I suggest that by presenting Aramaic, Hebrew, and Yiddish texts as untranslated and sometimes unintelligible, the creators evoke Jewish tongues as a symbol of a lost past. In their incomprehensibility, these words echo a tradition to which Jewish–American characters and creators no longer feel fully connected. They function as an enigmatic speech used by a circle from which they feel almost exiled. Furthermore, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium of each work can be said to be “part of the message” (McLuhan 1964, pp. 7–23). Whether in a postmodernist poem, on stage, or on screen, the media reiterate the formal and sometimes technological abyss between these authors or characters and the traditions and languages of their ancestors. This is especially true in the case of films and television shows that utilize modern technologies and mass dissemination unknown to past generations, and offer only oral access to the words without the ability to consult their spelling. That said, while Ginsberg’s poem and Kushner’s play share the same medium with some of the traditional texts they evoke, namely, the printed codex, the differences in style, sentiments, themes, and narratological tools point to a similar intergenerational abyss.

At the same time, I hope to show that since these Jewish–American creators evoke Jewish tongues as utterances that transcend communicative function, these words also have the potential to restore the linkage to that past. Furthermore, as idiosyncratic cultural markers, these tongues hold the power to demarcate the unique place of Jewish culture within the American ethnic tapestry. Following the Sabbath morning piyyut, I suggest that such authors achieve the use of Jewish languages as both a symbol of a lost past and a bridge to that past in a Lurianic manner. In doing so, they echo Scholem’s own engagement with “the loss of tradition in a modern environment,” considered “a ‘work of mourning’ [Trauerarbeit] over a Judaism lost” and “an attempt to productively mourn and […] counteract the withering of tradition”(Ferber and Schwebel 2014, p. 305).5

Similarly, the authors I analyze here evoke experiences and rituals of mourning and grief, thus creating an analogy between the plotlines and their symbolic references to a lost past. At the same time, they use “millin setimin” or “secreted words” to “reveal things and deliver new insights” about Jewish–American identity, adding a new chapter to modern Jewish representation. Yet the effect of their chosen “millin setimin” transcends the question of the actual familiarity of readers and viewers, Jewish or not, with any specific term or text, thus also offering a comment on intergenerational cultural tensions in general. Their choice to charge these words with a substratum of esoteric tongues marks them as an intrinsically unfamiliar and powerful presence, thus serving as a potent symbol for the struggle for cultural belonging, both within the Jewish–American community and beyond.

2. Kaddish for Naomi

In the first stanzas of Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” which he later adapted into a screenplay, Allen, the narrator, describes himself walking from Greenwich Village toward Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He portrays this stroll as a trip back in time, from his bohemian starting point as a young artist—before he relocated to San Francisco, where he wrote the poem—toward his mother’s impoverished starting point as a young immigrant. Geographically so close yet culturally so far apart, the walk between these two sites is already dotted by mentions of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Yiddish:

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I’ve been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles’ blues shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm the rhythm—and your memory in my head three years after—And read Adonais’ last triumphant stanzas aloud—wept, realizing how we suffer—

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers—and my own imagination of a withered leaf—at dawn—

Dreaming back thru life, Your time—and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse, […]

as I walk toward the Lower East Side—where you walked 50 years ago, little girl—from Russia, eating the first poisonous tomatoes of America—frightened on the dock—

then struggling in the crowds of Orchard Street toward what?—toward Newark—[…]

Toward the Key in the window […] as I walk down First toward the Yiddish Theater—and the place of poverty

you knew, and I know […].

(Ginsberg [1961] 2010, pp. 7–8; my emphases)

These languages continue to flutter atop Ginsberg’s entire elegy like faded remnants of a severed past in constant movement “toward the key” but with no key offered to decipher them.

Like the opening Hebrew words of the Shema (Ginsberg [1961] 2010, p. 27), the third Aramaic stanza of the Kaddish in Ashkenazi pronunciation (Ginsberg [1961] 2010, p. 24) appears in the text without warning or translation. They punctuate the text alongside Yiddish names of dishes—like ‘miltz’ (Ginsberg [1961] 2010, p. 23)—and people, including Ginsberg’s Hebrew-Yiddish name “Svul Avrum” (Ginsberg [1961] 2010, p. 27). As Wirth-Nesher notes, the combination of the opening of this specific Hebrew prayer and everyday Yiddish terms has the potential to carry into Jewish–American texts a sense of a fundamental and familiar Jewish repertoire (Wirth-Nesher 2012, p. 48). However, in Ginsberg’s text, these orphaned linguistic remnants burst into the text inexplicably, like antiquated ghosts. The words of the Kaddish oddly appear between an uncomfortable memory of Allen’s mother flirting with him in the haze of her mental delirium and the remarrying of his father, poet Louis Ginsberg:

One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her […] She needs a lover.

Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu.

And Louis reestablishing himself in Paterson grimy apartment […] but found himself a girl he later married, falling in love again—tho sere & shy—hurt with 20 years Naomi’s mad idealism

(Ginsberg [1961] 2010, p. 24).

As Alicia Ostriker notes, Ginsberg grew up in a Jewish home, where Jewish ideas and languages “would have saturated the air he breathed,” but which was also “adamantly atheist” (Ostriker 1997, p. 28). While he himself had some access to Yiddish, Hebrew, and maybe even Aramaic, in “Kaddish” Ginsberg evokes these languages, and the Kaddish specifically, as symbols of both belonging and detachment. Nestled between his communist mother and socialist father, the untranslated words of the Kaddish assume a symbolic stance of millin setimin, unable to move the narrator of “Kaddish” to tears. The words that hold such power for him are those of “Adonais,” a requiem by the Romantic English poet Percy Shelley for fellow poet John Keats. In that sense, the presence of the Kaddish in Ginsberg’s poem represents death not so much due to the context in which it is traditionally chanted. Rather, it evokes a sense of mourning due to the unbridgeable distance between the speaker in the poem, as well as many of its readers, and the words’ meaning. The words of the Kaddish remain dead even after Allen reads them aloud, unlike Shelley’s words that he reads aloud as well, but to a moving effect. At the same time, these words are acutely present, giving the poem and the collection its title and echoing throughout the poem, which offers itself as a fragmented personal version of the prayer.

In her reading of ghost meter in “Kaddish,” Hannah Loeb draws a parallel between Ginsberg’s depiction of loss and “the presence-in-absence of iambic pentameter” (Loeb 2024, p. 187). I want to draw a similar link between the presence in absentia (of meaning) of esoteric Jewish tongues and Ginsberg’s depiction of the loss of a parent. In their unexplained nature, these millin setimin echo Naomi Ginsberg’s growing mental confusion, but they also reveal insights about Ginsberg’s relationship with his mother and, metonymically, about intergenerational relations within Jewish–American culture.

Three years after the publication of Kaddish, Allen Grossman compared Ginsberg to nineteenth-century Irish poets in England. Like these poets, Grossman argued, Ginsberg too

possesses a vast body of literature in another language—the Zohar, for example—which constitutes a symbolic resource as yet unworked in terms of English literature. […] Kaddish is presented under an aggressively Jewish title despite the fact that it is in no simple sense a Jewish book.

(Grossman 1962, pp. 102–3)

Grossman significantly emphasizes other languages and the Zohar as part of “the Jewish symbology” that Ginsberg “made available within American poetry” at the same point he “found it necessary to document the death of the Jewish cultural fact” (Grossman 1962, p. 108). In developing Grossman’s observation, I suggest that by recounting his mother’s turbulent life and death in a poem containing Jewish texts, Ginsberg not only represents “the death of the Jewish cultural fact” but also breathes some life into it.

Before reaching the epilogue of his poem, titled “Hymmnn,” Ginsberg concludes “Kaddish” with the words of his mother from a letter that reached him only after her death:

Strange Prophecies anew! She wrote—‘The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window—I have the key—Get married Allen don’t take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window.

Love,

your mother’

which is Naomi—(Ginsberg [1961] 2010, p. 31)

Naomi’s “Strange Prophecies anew” allude to a key, which is already mentioned in the opening lines of the poem, while offering two ironic decrees—“Get married Allen don’t take drugs”—which Ginsberg so famously defied. Yet, the references to the key that surround these decrees and the love with which Naomi concludes her letter seem far more significant than any specific life lessons she was able to offer her son at this point. The physical key Naomi claims to have reads like Allen’s proverbial key to her past, to Jewish tradition, and to esoteric languages, which seem to have vanished with his mother. Yet as vague and inaccessible as they are, these linguistic phantoms assist him in reviving a poetic silhouette of his mother and her culture by creating his own version of the Kaddish. Through a variety of millin setimin, Ginsberg “reveals things and delivers new insights” about intergenerational dynamics between fin-de-siècle Jewish immigrants to America and their American-born children while making these words “available within American poetry,” probably for the first time.

3. Kaddish for Roy Cohn

The influence of Ginsberg’s poem on American poetry cannot be overestimated, but Ginsberg’s choice to revise it into a screenplay also foreshadowed its more far-reaching impact on American popular culture, and specifically American theater. While the screenplay Ginsberg wrote was never produced in its entirety, a play inspired by it, titled “Kaddish (or The Key in the Window)” has been produced several times, and the echoes of the poem behind it still resound loudly on stages in America and beyond (Mather [2009] 2011).6 Yet it seems that nowhere was the echo of Ginsberg’s unique simultaneous project, of lamenting and reviving Jewish culture in America, more evident than in the work of Jewish–American playwright Tony Kushner.

Often read as the bookends of twentieth-century American gay literature (Bram 2012), Ginsberg and Kushner are also prominent representatives of the evolving depiction of Jewish–American identity in popular culture. This connection is most clearly showcased in Kushner’s epic play and its celebrated miniseries adaptation Angels in America (Kushner 1995; Nichols 2003). The two-part play—“Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika”—premiered in 1991 and 1992 to great acclaim under the full title Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Set in 1980s New York, Kushner’s text is timelessly compelling in its juxtaposition of minorities and generations in America, within its depiction of the effects of a global crisis—the AIDS endemic—on gay individuals and communities. In his review of the 2003 television remake, John Leonard described Angels as an “operatic lamentation” which is a “choral response to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (Leonard 2003). Indeed, the poem “Howl,” published just before Ginsberg began writing “Kaddish,” offers a more direct engagement with his own gay identity and the struggles of his gay peers in 1950s America, when homosexuality was still against the law (Ginsberg 1956; Selby 1996).7 However, several elements in Angels, and specifically several scenes where characters recite untranslated Hebrew, Aramaic, or Yiddish texts—including the Kaddish—suggest that Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” was equally influential in Kushner’s writing process.

Like Ginsberg’s poem, Kushner’s play revolves around mental illness, death, and loss, and correspondingly opens with the commemoration of the death of a Jewish immigrant matriarch. Kushner similarly uses untranslated Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish texts, and specifically the Kaddish, to touch on the turmoil afflicting the protagonists, Louis “Lou” Ironson and Prior Walter, after Prior is diagnosed with AIDS. Louis is a Jewish–American gay man, and Kushner’s obvious alter-ego, whose names echo those Ginsberg interchangeably evokes in “Kaddish” in reference to his father (Ginsberg [1961] 2010, pp. 15, 17, 24). This choice potentially marks Kushner’s similar engagement with intergenerational dynamics in Jewish–American society, with Louis biographically representing the next generation after Ginsberg, but also echoing the older generation preceding him.

Conversely, Prior comes from a long-standing Christian-American lineage that goes back “to the Mayflower and beyond,” as Louis tells Prior’s nurse early in the play (Kushner 1995, p. 57). As many scholars have noted, Prior’s name symbolically echoes that lineage (Kilner-Johnson 2019, p. 217), as do the former Priors who visit him in his hallucinations (Kushner 1995, pp. 91–95). Kushner deliberately contrasts the supernatural apparition of Prior’s British-accented ancestors with the painfully real representation of Louis’s precarious heritage. The Jewish immigrant matriarch whose funeral opens the play is Louis’s grandmother, celebrated as an archetype of Jewish immigration, or “a metaphorical immigrant Jew,” as James Fisher puts it (Fisher 2006, p. 84). In a speech by an old Rabbi with a heavy Eastern European accent, she is described as a representative of “the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought […] to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania” (Kushner 1995, p. 16). Upon addressing the family, the Rabbi declares:

Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America […]. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl […] and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home. […] In you that journey is”

(Kushner 1995, pp. 16–17).

Kushner’s choice to represent this quintessentially Jewish–American oxymoronic inheritance, of an ancient culture and an inherently migratory existence, in a speech by an old and heavy-accented Rabbi foreshadows the way he represents it throughout the play in speech acts involving old, untranslated texts.

Many of these texts appear within hallucinatory episodes of a syncretistic nature that Prior experiences as his physical and mental health deteriorate. These hallucinations combine Mormon and other Christian myths with Jewish texts, delivered by an obscure angelic figure who addresses him as “the prophet,” within a book that carries the first Hebrew letter in fire on its cover. The Jewish texts include the Hebrew prayer for the dead “el male’ rahamim” (“God full of Mercy”), recited by a hospital nurse in mid-sentence (Kushner 1995, p. 104), and a chant of Hebrew Kabbalistic terms by Prior’s ghostly ancestors (Kushner 1995, p. 94).8 In a similar manner to Ginsberg’s poem, these untranslated Hebrew texts symbolize Prior’s mental deterioration. In Prior’s case these traditional Jewish texts also conjure the absence of his Jewish partner, Louis, who abandons him and fails to support him through these disorienting experiences. However, later in the play, Kushner significantly complexifies this aspect by using another Jewish prayer of mourning—the Aramaic Kaddish and Ginsberg’s centerpiece—to capture Louis’s own detachment from Jewish tradition.

Analogously to Allan’s stroll from Greenwich Village toward the Lower East Side, in advance of chanting the Kaddish, Kushner’s alter-ego points out the irony behind the fact that the Lower East Side, where he lives, has become a gay hub in the 1980s. “This is where the Jews lived when they first arrived,” he tells his new Mormon lover, “and now, a hundred years later, the place to which their […] grandchildren repair. This is progress?” (Kushner 1995, p. 162). This geographical continuity also echoes the opening words of the Rabbi about the intergenerational Gordian Knot between Jewish immigrants to America and their descendants. Yet the frustration in Louis’s sardonic rhetorical question reverberates a sense of fundamental detachment that subverts any sense of belonging, expressed most directly throughout the play in unintelligible, disorienting, esoteric languages. These words, like the Lower East Side apartments, often feel like emptied vessels that fail to deliver any sense of connection to the past.

Shortly after voicing this sense of detachment from his ancestors’ culture and dreams, Louis is summoned to say the Kaddish by Belize, a mutual friend of his and Prior’s, and the caretaker of Conservative attorney Roy Cohn. Kushner uses the historical detail of Cohn secretly dying of AIDS in an oncology ward in a private room equipped with expensive AIDS medication. He adds to it the fictional nurse, Belize, who is determined to steal the medication to benefit sick friends once Cohn dies. Although he despises Cohn for his bigotry and resents Louis for abandoning Prior, upon Cohn’s death, Belize feels compelled to invite “the first Jew to come to [his] mind” (Kushner 1995, p. 255) to say the Jewish mourners’ prayer to thank Cohn. Appalled by the idea of praying for Cohn, claiming his “New Deal Pinko Parents” would never forgive him (Kushner 1995, p. 255), Louis also confesses not to know the Kaddish. “It’s Hebrew,” he mistakenly tells Belize before conceding, “who knows what it’s asking? […] I know probably less of the Kaddish than you do, Belize, I’m an intensely secular Jew” (Kushner 1995, p. 256). This sense of extreme detachment from Jewish tradition proves true when non-Jewish, African-American Belize accurately suggests that the Kaddish is a prayer for peace, and when reluctant Louis erroneously switches from the Kaddish to the Kiddush, to the Shema prayer.9 When he eventually succeeds in completing the task, he does so with help from an unexpected source: the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish–American Russian immigrant whom Cohn helped to convict and execute for Russian espionage in 1953. She haunts Cohn throughout the play, and after singing him a Yiddish lullaby, she recites the Kaddish with Louis, who fittingly dons a Kleenex on his head as an impromptu skullcap:

LOUIS: Yisgadal ve’yiskadash sh’mey rabo, sh’mey de kidshoh, uh… Boray pre hagoffen. No, that’s the Kiddush, not the….Um, shema Yisroel adonai….This is silly, Belize, I can’t…

ETHEL (Standing, softly): B’olmo deevro chiroosey ve’yamlich malchusey…

LOUIS: B’olmo deevro chiroosey ve’yamlich malchusey…

ETHEL: Bechayeychon uv’yomechechon uvchayey d’chol beys Yisroel…

LOUIS: Bechayeychon uv’yomechechon uvchayey d’chol beys Yisroel…

ETHEL: Ba’agolo uvizman koriv…

LOUIS: Ve’imroo omain.

ETHEL: Yehey sh’mey rabo m’vorach…

LOUIS AND ETHEL: L’olam ulolmey olmayoh. Yisborach ve’yishtabach ve’yispoar ve’yisroman ve’yisnasey ve’yis’hadar ve’yisalleh ve’yishallol sh’mey dekudsho…

ETHEL: Berich hoo le’eylo min kol birchoso veshiroso…

LOUIS AND ETHEL: Tushb’choso venechemoso, daameeron b’olmo ve’imroo omain. Y’he sh’lomo rabbo min sh’mayo v’chayim olenu v’al kol Yisroel, v’imru omain…

ETHEL: Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya-aseh sholom olenu v’al col Yisroel…

LOUIS: Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya-aseh sholom olenu v’al col Yisroel…

ETHEL: V’imru omain.

LOUIS: V’imru omain.

ETHEL: You sonofabitch.

LOUIS: You sonofabitch.

(Kushner 1995, p. 256–7)

Louis and Ethel recite the Kaddish in the same Ashkenazi pronunciation used in Ginsberg’s text (albeit with the addition of a profanity at the end). Yet if in Ginsberg’s poem the words of the Kaddish are the ghostly presence within his lament for his mother, in Kushner’s play, the ghostly words also take the form of an actual specter of a Jewish immigrant woman. Like the archetype described by the Rabbi in the play’s opening scene, and the textual silhouette of Ginsberg’s mother in “Kaddish,” Ethel Rosenberg represents a Jewish woman who immigrated to America yet had strong ties to the “Old Country.” That Ethel is the one to bring about what Louis himself describes as a “miraculous” episode, where “an intensely secular Jew” recites the entire Kaddish, carries a special symbolism within Kushner’s project. In a sense, this scene suggests that Ethel Rosenberg haunts not only Roy Cohn but the entire Jewish–American community, as a representative of the “Old Country” and a symbol of its abandonment by large parts of the community.

As Allan Kilner-Johnson notes, few critics have “engaged meaningfully” with the play’s “mystical theology… upon which all else relies.” The widespread identification of the play as a visionary work, he posits, does not aptly acknowledge that this is also “a piece of dramatic writing dazzled by visions, apparitions, auras, conjuration, astral projection, and prophecy” (Kilner-Johnson 2019, p. 210). In his own analysis of the play, Kilner-Johnson identifies a link Kushner establishes between esoteric beliefs—and specifically the Kabbalistic interest in the unspeakable Hebrew name of God—and gay culture, or what he refers to as “esoteric camp.”

One critic who addressed the mystical aspect of Kushner’s work early on was Harold Bloom. In his foreword to Kushner’s adaptation of the Yiddish play The Dybbuk, Bloom described Kushner as an author who is shrewdly “writing his own New Kabbalah”(Kushner 1998, p. 110).10 Following both Kilner-Johnson and Bloom, I suggest defining Kushner’s evocation of untranslated Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts, and specifically the Kaddish, as millin setimin—esoteric words that reveal painful truths about the characters’ experiences. Specifically, about the suffering and estrangement they endure, both on a personal and on a cultural and communal level, be it within the gay community, within the Jewish–American community, or both. As a gay character who deserts his partner in his hour of need and also epitomizes Kushner’s “metaphorical Jew” (Solomon 1997, p. 122; Fisher 2006, p. 81), Louis is the one to embody the meeting point of these two axes of estrangement. He is also tasked with delivering the most significant text among these millin setimin—the full recitation of the Kaddish—which he can only reluctantly perform through supernatural intervention.

At the same time, the millin setimin in the play also point to what connects these characters to each other, to their community, and to their culture, especially in Louis’s case. Ethel Rosenberg’s haunting presence evokes a painful episode from Jewish–American history, but by allotting her such a looming presence, Kushner also grants her a voice and a role. Significantly, once Ethel gets to say the Kaddish over the dead body of her adversary, her ghost disappears from the play, but not before she assists Louis in reconnecting with his Jewish culture and his gay community in one fell swoop. Embodying what Fisher describes as “Kushner’s singular brand of guarded optimism, tempered by an unblinking view of life’s darkest corners”(Fisher 2006, p. 90),11 the play bestows on Rosenberg the role of the missing link, capable of reestablishing communal solidarity and esoteric intergenerational dialogue. Kushner’s references to the Kaddish prayer alongside his homages to Ginsberg’s oeuvre establish a sense of cultural continuity and a newfound Jewish–American textual tradition.

4. Kaddish for Uncle Manny

Almost a decade before Kushner’s play was adapted for the small screen, the influences of his play and Ginsberg’s poem on American television were already palpable. In 1993, a year after the theatrical premiere of Angels, the then-popular CBS dramedy series Northern Exposure, created by Joshua Brand and John Falsey, aired an episode titled “Kaddish for Uncle Manny” (Lange 1993). Indeed, the show often addressed Jewish themes alongside other themes and American ethnic groups, especially North Pacific Native Americans, who comprise half of the show’s fictional town of Cicely, Alaska. However, unlike others, this episode was mainly dedicated to the attempts of the small Alaskan community to gather a minyan so that the contractually obligated Jewish town doctor, Joel Fleischman, could say Kaddish for his uncle who passed away in New York. Several choices in this episode point to influences of Ginsberg’s and Kushner’s texts, such as the choice to end the episode with an untranslated recitation of the Kaddish, and one central element connects it to the story behind Ginsberg’s poem.

With only one more Jew required, Joel dismisses the eight assembled Jewish men, not before quizzing one on the Shema prayer and seeing all eight as a Western-style horse-riding gang called “the minyan rangers” in a dream. Instead of praying in the company of random Alaskan Jews, including one Native American convert, he opts to recite the Kaddish among his community of non-Jewish friends at the town church. This bold choice echoes the events that led Ginsberg to write “Kaddish,” while positing an alternative ending to these events. As Joshua Pederson notes, when Ginsberg learned that no Kaddish had been said over his mother’s body “he tried to assemble a minyan […] on the opposite coast so that she would not pass away without it.” However, since he wanted his lover Peter Orlovsky and friend Jack Kerouac—both non-Jews—to participate, Ginsberg was unable to gather a minyan and instead set out to write the poem (Pederson 2009, p. 27). Unlike Ginsberg, Joel not only comes close to successfully assembling a minyan beyond the contiguous states (that is, even further than the “opposite coast”) but also dismisses it in favor of doing what Ginsberg hoped to do, namely, to say the Kaddish with a community of non-Jewish friends. With this choice, the creators pay homage to Ginsberg’s experiences, which is also an act of poetic justice, aptly syncretistic at heart.

The decision not to translate the words of the Kaddish at the end of the episode marks them once again as millin setimin, possessing mystical power to reconnect Jewish–American individuals to the culture these words stem from, without understanding them. Moreover, they possess the power to connect outsiders to that culture, with Joel inviting the community to think of loved ones they have lost, thus also strengthening Joel’s affiliation with the community (Samuel 2021, p. 134). Unlike Louis and his makeshift Kleenex skullcap, Joel recites the Kaddish wearing his notably mint-conditioned bar mitzvah gear, including a skullcap and a tallit, as the actor adopts a distinctly childlike tone. This symbolic regression to an early point of direct contact with Jewish tradition supersedes Joel’s zero understanding of the words he recites.

Much like Kushner’s Louis, Joel Fleischman is presented as an “instantiation of Jewish–American communal identity” (Hecht et al. 2002, p. 855). On the one hand, throughout the episode (and the series) Joel alludes to words and texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic to define his Jewish–American identity. At the same time, he struggles “with multiple group memberships” and his identity is “invested in seeing himself as a member of both Jewish and local communities” (Hecht et al. 2002, p. 857). Unlike Louis, Joel does not express hesitation regarding his ability to recite the prayer, yet he conveys a similar ignorance about its content. In an interesting deleted scene, before Joel begins to recite the prayer, he erroneously declares it to be in Hebrew, and is quickly corrected by the town’s non-Jewish, self-taught erudite radio DJ Chris and his studious African-American half-brother Bernard. To Joel’s bafflement, the non-Jewish brothers are able to add that “although it is considered the mourners’ prayer, it’s hardly any ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ kind of number.” This more direct reference to Belize’s ability to explain the prayer’s content better than Louis was cut from the final version of the episode, but is included in the DVD extras. Nonetheless, the representation of a young Jewish New Yorker fumbling to explain his own culture while daringly mixing and matching it with other religious traditions marks the words of Ginsberg and Kushner as yet another layer in the ever-growing modern Jewish textual tradition. As such, they echo Eitan Fishbane’s suggestion that Kabbalah and Jewish literature are “intimately related, reflecting affinities in form and imagination” (Fishbane 2019, p. 1).

Northern Exposure was followed by many similar engagements with Jewish tongues as esoteric languages on the American screen, including in cinematic productions. In fact, this episode includes a foreshadowing reference to the artistic duo responsible for one of the most extensive cinematic examples of such engagement, when two “minyan rangers” are presented in Joel’s dream as “the Coen brothers—Joel and Ethan.” By 1993, when this episode was aired, the Jewish–American filmmaking duo Joel and Ethan Coen already had four successful films underneath their proverbial ranger-belts. However, their most direct engagement with their own Midwestern Jewish upbringing, which was also a tour de force of millin setimin, was yet to come.

5. From Kaddish to Shiva

The acclaimed and much-analyzed 2009 film A Serious Man showcases first and foremost the Coen Brothers’ unique fascination with language (Coen and Coen 2009). Specifically, it evokes their staple linguistic dynamic of contagious idioms, transmitted between characters while exponentially growing into variants in the form of synonyms, nomenclatures, and euphemisms. Yet in A Serious Man, this linguistic echo chamber is served with a distinctly Jewish–American twist and an abundance of millin setimin, including a confused echo of the Kaddish.

The film opens with a scene entirely in Yiddish of a couple’s run-in with a ghost in a 19th-century Eastern European shtetl, followed by a split scene that is half in Hebrew and half in English. One part shows the protagonist, Larry Gopnik, being examined by a friendly doctor, whose stethoscope nevertheless proves to be the smoking gun that marks a long line of mental, existential, legal, marital, and physical crises to come. The parallel part of the scene shows Larry’s son, Danny, at Hebrew school. While the Yiddish shtetl scene has subtitles, the 1967 Hebrew class scene leaves (many) viewers in the dark, much like the bored students. As Jefferey Shandler argues, in this scene, Hebrew is portrayed “as a farcical nonsense language” (Shandler 2011, p. 352).

The rest of the film is in plain English, but it is deliberately peppered with Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic “fragments of speech” (Shandler 2011, p. 352), and even non-existing quasi Hebrew expressions (e.g., “etz monim”). In the classic Coen Brothers dynamic with a Jewish twist, the members of the small Jewish community in Minneapolis—similar to the one where Joel and Ethan Coen were raised—pass these words around like confounding hot potatoes.12

When explained, some of the millin setimin in the film—like agunah (anchored women), gett (ritual divorce), and shiva (seven-day vigil)—represent the source of some of Larry’s predicaments. Namely, an unfaithful wife, Judith, who requests a ritual divorce so she could marry his hostile university colleague, Sy Ableman, who dies in a car crash halfway into the film, yet continues to haunt Larry even after his death.13 However, the initial distress and confusion these words often instill also echo Larry’s inability to receive straight answers to his multilayered existential crisis from three different Rabbis, who are sometimes as perplexed as he is by these words. As Brian Ogren argues, “the apparent lack of classical Jewish literacy […] acts as an acerbic commentary on American Jewish learning” and the “limited liberal American Jewish literacy” (Ogren 2024, pp. 104–5). Like Ginsberg’s poem and Kushner’s play, the Coen Brothers’ film uses these millin setimin to symbolize the Jewish–American growing estrangement from Jewish tradition. They similarly present this alienation as a symptom of a deeper existential crisis. To paraphrase Shandler’s description of the shtetl in the film’s Yiddish prologue, these millin setimin are fragments from “a lost locus of a thoroughly Jewish way of life” (Shandler 2011, p. 349).

It comes as no surprise, then, that the Aramaic words of the Kaddish are somehow a part of this mystifying grammar, and even appear twice more in the film’s original script. In the script, the Kaddish is chanted at Sy’s shiva after Rabbi Nachtner explains the prayer, and when Larry dreams of being buried while hearing Sy Ableman’s voice, the script also includes a Kaddish chanting in the background (Coen and Coen 2007), pp. 92; 117). Tellingly, the directors opted to exclude such moments in which the Kaddish is chanted and even explained, and only kept a vague, distorted echo of the text.14

The echo of the Kaddish appears within one of two powerful visual manifestations of the hyperbole of millin setimin at the heart of this film, when Larry peeks into his brother’s notebook and encounters what Arthur calls “the Mentaculus.” Like the blackboard that appears later in Larry’s physics-class dream, Arthur’s compilation reveals alarming visions of spiraling textual cacophonies that include sporadic Hebrew letters and words, including a misquote of the words of the Kaddish. As Ogren suggests, the seemingly meaningless upside-down phrase “yisgadash Yisroel” is a possible mix-up of the words yisgadal veyiskadash, “will be magnified and sanctified,” which in the Kaddish are addressed to God and here to the people of Israel in the Yiddish pronunciation, Yisroel (Ogren 2024, p. 108). This upside-down mixture of Aramaic, Yiddish, and Hebrew, secretly planted among many other millin setimin, is a potent metonym for the characters’ desperate search for meaning within their textual heritage.

Unlike Kushner, the Coen Brothers are not celebrated for their optimism. Their dark tale of cultural and existential crises offers very little by way of answers or comfort, similar to the hollow guidance provided by the Rabbis in their film. As Steven Walker notes, in A Serious Man “the directors initiate a process of demythologization” by severing connections to the sacred (Walker 2020, p. 319).15 Like the Jewish mythologies they invoke, the millin setimin that are tossed around throughout the narrative induce more anxiety than reassurance within the protagonists. Indeed, the film ends on a gloomy note, with a menacing tornado approaching just as Larry receives an ominous phone call from his doctor. This locates the finale in the realm of what Walker defines as “métaphysique noire,” where things “seem destined to go from bad to worse—without justification” (Walker 2020, p. 319). More specifically, by threatening to blow away the students’ skullcaps and the American flag, the stormy ending evokes two emblems of Jewish–American existence and its fragility in the face of an existential crisis.

Yet in a narrative so abundant with millin setimin and direct references to the Zohar and Kabbalah (Ogren 2024, p. 113), there is bound to be at least one spark of comfort that the Coen Brothers left behind after breaking all vessels of meaning. That moment involves quite a few millin setimin that, in this instance, actually manage to offer some comfort and joy. It transpires during Danny’s Bar Mitzvah, when the members of Larry’s crumbling family are momentarily united both with each other and with their community, though it does not come easily.

For a few excruciating seconds, it is not clear if Danny, who is palpably high on marijuana, can actually read his Torah portion, which he studied by heart from a record, without guidance or mediation, as Jonathan Boyarin points out (Boyarin 2011; see also Ogren 2024, p. 104). Danny’s disoriented, psychedelic experience at the synagogue is undoubtedly the height of the film’s exploration of the Jewish–American detachment from tradition. And although no ghosts are involved, much like when Louis chants the Kaddish with Ethel Rosenberg’s help, Danny’s success feels more like a miracle than a young man ritually connecting with his Jewish heritage. The moment is also short-lived, as excited Judith whispers to Larry that Sy had so much respect for him and “wrote letters to the tenure committee,” revealing it was Sy who tried to sabotage Larry’s tenure process (Ogren 2024, p. 115).

Yet the miracle does happen, and it is not the meaning but rather the sound of the words that makes Larry and Judith smile. The joy of a new generation supposedly carrying the Jewish tradition forward is paradoxically untarnished by the fact that almost no one in the room can decipher the words of that tradition, least of all Danny.16 Yet, unexplained, these words deliver a moment of reprieve. Thus, the same type of millin setimin that throughout the film instill mostly panic and frustration, also brings about a mystical sense of belonging and continuity, shaky and fleeting as it may be.17

Unlike the passing effect of the one moment of comfort in the film, the influence of A Serious Man, as well as Ginsberg’s and Kushner’s texts that inspired it, is still noticeable in the work of an emerging new generation of Jewish–American creators. An especially powerful example is found in the indie film Shiva Baby, written and directed by Emma Seligman in her feature directorial debut (Seligman 2020). The title aptly captures the tensions at the heart of the narrative about a young woman’s nightmarish visit to a shiva, where she is forced to face her lack of direction, her former girlfriend, and her “sugar daddy” with his wife and baby. At the same time, the oxymoronic title also conveys the centrality of millin setimin and loss in the film and thus, also the homage it pays to its ancestral narratives. Much like Larry, Danielle is under an incessant attack of Hebrew and Yiddish words thrown at her by relatives, family friends, and her mother and father (played by no other than Fred Melamed, who also portrayed Sy Ableman). At the same time, the only way Danielle succeeds in finding a few moments of relative peace and quiet is when attendees gather to say the Kaddish, recited fully, albeit in a Sephardic pronunciation and by a traditionally clad cantor. It is also the only partial break viewers get from the “symphony in the key of anxiety,” to use Helen Shaw’s description of the film, if not from the continuous sound of a crying infant. As Shaw notes, in addition to the proverbial baby, or the millennial struggling with the passage to adulthood, the presence of an actual, screaming baby adds an “air-raid siren” effect to the score which “jumps and screeches like a horror soundtrack” (Shaw 2021).

Shiva Baby offers an updated mirror image of A Serious Man, focusing on a young millennial female’s existential and spiritual crisis, with social media replacing archaic social gatherings like the “Hillel mixers” mentioned in the Coen Brothers’ film. At the same time, in its focus on the predicaments of gender identity, as well as in its shift of locus back to New York, it establishes equally meaningful connections to Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Kushner’s Angels. Especially poignant in this context is the choice to include the untranslated Kaddish in its entirety as a moment of both turmoil and temporary reprieve. Like these previous narratives, Shiva Baby takes ad absurdum the odd contextualization of this specific set of millin setimin, by depicting a clueless Danielle, who remains partially ignorant of the identity of the deceased at the shiva she is visiting. Nevertheless, the very chanting of these millin setimin, especially in the company of others, once again brings about a short and rare moment of belonging and comfort.

Shiva Baby is a clear brainchild—or baby—of prior Jewish–American narratives, from Ginsberg onwards, where the sense of Jewish cultural continuity often relates to pre-modern Jewish texts that offer a fleeting comfort, forever threatened by the winds of time. However, the references and connections to Ginsberg in these later works establish a new dimension of continuity. It transforms fleeting moments of comfort into a lasting chain of transmission between generations of Jewish–American creators who evoke Jewish tongues as symbols of a lost past and as millin setimin that aspire to mystically reconnect to it.

This duality reverberates the central Kabbalistic perception of language, and specifically Hebrew, as Moshe Idel has shown (Idel 1989, pp. 1–3). It equally reflects the paradox of esotericism, with its “dialectic of secrecy, concealment, and revelation” (Burns 2015, p. 17). As Elliot Wolfson describes it, “the kabbalists push the mind to its limit by using language that points beyond itself,” striving toward “the preservation of the secret through its disclosure” (Wolfson 2000, pp. 5, 9–38). In Jewish–American narratives, it is precisely the lost access to meaning that charges Jewish tongues with the potential to mystically restore some affinity to the concealed traditions they represent.

In his seminal book On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem describes the Lurianic Kabbalah as “a great myth of exile and redemption.” He suggests that it is precisely its bond with the experience of the Jewish people that gave the Lurianic Kabbalah “its enormous power and its enormous influence on the following generations of Jews” (Scholem 1969, p. 117). By evoking such an intrinsically Lurianic duality between cultural detachment and deep connection, I suggest that the narratives I explored here compose their own post-modern Jewish–American version of this “great myth of exile and redemption.”