DAVID CRUMM Jewish mourning ritual finds strength in numbers

Holiday guests have gone home. People are turning up their collars against the cold and returning to school and work.
This is the somber season. And, if postholiday depression isn't enough, clergy are telling me about an annual rise in funerals.
"More people seem to die at this time of year," the Rev. Marsha Woolley, a United Methodist minister in Ann Arbor, Mich., told me recently. "Most people focus on the holidays at the end of the year, but I see the other side of the season, too."
I wondered: Is this true everywhere in the United States?
Yes, said a spokeswoman at the National Center for Health Statistics in Maryland, who sent me data on the rising death toll each December. The tide typically peaks in January, when as many as 240,000 Americans die. In February and March, more than 210,000 Americans die, compared with fewer than 190,000 in summer months.
Asked an expert
So, I called a nationally recognized expert on mourning, Rabbi Herbert Yoskowitz at Adat Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills, Mich., who has spent years researching Jewish grieving rituals.
He has collected his findings, along with memoirs from 20 mourners, in a new book named for a Jewish mourning ritual, "The Kaddish Minyan" (Eakin Press, $12.95). A minyan is a prayer group of at least 10 Jews. And kaddish is a short prayer mourners recite in a minyan three times a day for 11 months.
Think about those hundreds of visits to a synagogue. The scope of the commitment is stunning.
"This is very slow, hard work," Yoskowitz said. "And it's important that we do it within a community. While survivors are expressing their pain by reciting the mourner's kaddish, the community is surrounding them to protect them from excesses of grief."
Karen Hermelin, daughter of the late philanthropist and entrepreneur David Hermelin, writes in the rabbi's book about saying kaddish for her father after his death in 2000. For 11 months, she explored 20 Jewish congregations, and this form of daily prayer became a central part of her life.
"Tradition says that each time the kaddish is said, it helps the soul of the departed reach its final resting place sooner," she writes. "But I found that the Jewish mourning ritual is a gift -- not just for the dead, but for the living. ... What the kaddish gave me was sacred time to be a mourner."
What was amazing
The most amazing aspect of the mourner's kaddish is that it only briefly mentions mourning. The prayer really is a love song to God and an affirmation of life.
"It affirms that there is a plan in this world and that God is righteous," Yoskowitz said.
Although this ritual is uniquely Jewish, Yoskowitz believes there are lessons in it for everyone.
I recommend the rabbi's findings: In sad times, we need to surround ourselves with people. It helps to voice our grief, but we should spend as much time praising life's goodness.
Finally, there's a reason for the time limit of kaddish. It's an affirmation that, although a period of grief is long and hard, we can be sure that eventually this somber season, too, shall pass.
XDavid Crumm is a religion columnist for the Detroit Free Press.