Micah Ackerman Hirsch: “As a Jew opposed to the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza, I struggled with how to commemorate Aaron Bushnell. Judaism has very little to say about concepts like martyrdom, theologically valuing existence and struggle in this world over seeking the next. So much do we focus on this Earthly life over Heaven that our prayer for the dead, the Kaddish Yatom, says nothing about death at all. Instead, it asks the mourners to praise God beyond all humanly conceptions of what it means to praise something, and expresses our longing for the day when the peace embodied by divinity exists permanently in our world. And so, following Father Daniel Berrigan’s poetry of protest and the long Jewish tradition of rewriting prayers to meet our contemporary trials, I wrote this Kaddish, a mourning prayer, a poem, for Aaron.”
