The Skeptic's KaddishPapa’s fingerprints
The journey
- Raised to not belong
- What kind of Jew?
- A bigger Jewish world
- The life I didn’t plan
- Between two worlds
- Papa’s fingerprints
Papa died
A few months after my returning from working as a Jewish educator in Lithuania in 2018, my father died.
At the conclusion of my previous blog post, I described my journey to Lithuania as a kind of ending. For years, I had imagined a future for myself in Jewish education. That dream had carried me through Pardes1, through years of study, through countless conversations, classes, source sheets, and educational projects. By the time I returned from Lithuania, however, I had finally accepted that this was no longer the path I was pursuing.
Then Papa died.
Looking back, it is difficult for me to separate my father’s death from everything that followed. I returned to synagogue attendance after a troubled three-year absence. I committed myself to reciting kaddish2 daily. I immersed myself in Jewish mourning practices that I knew surprisingly little about. Most importantly, I began writing The Skeptic’s Kaddish for the Atheist, a weekly series at the Times of Israel reflecting on mourning, Jewish practice, and the uneasy relationship between skepticism and tradition.
The project began simply enough. I was in shock. I was grieving. I needed a way to process what had happened.
Ordinary life felt strangely unchanged after Papa’s death. I returned home to Israel from New Jersey after the funeral and shiva3. I went back to work. I paid bills. I bought groceries. I played with my daughter. Shabbat arrived and departed. The calendar continued advancing. The world had suffered a catastrophe, and yet the rhythms of daily life continued almost untouched. Writing became my way of insisting that something enormous had happened.
At first, I understood the project as a form of mourning. I wanted to honor Papa, understand the tradition I was participating in, and make sense of my own thoughts and feelings. I wanted my outward life to reflect my inward reality. What I did not understand was that the Kaddish project would become much more than a year of mourning.
The fifty-one posts that followed were ostensibly about grief, faith, tradition, prayer, memory, and loss. At the time, I understood them primarily as part of the mourning process. Only later would I recognize how much else was unfolding beneath the surface.
The Kaddish year as a convergence point
At the time, I experienced The Skeptic’s Kaddish for the Atheist primarily as a mourning project. Looking back, however, I can see that it became the meeting place for several different strands of my life.
Pardes had given me years of immersion in Jewish texts and traditions. I had learned to build source sheets, trace ideas across centuries, and place different voices into conversation with one another. More importantly, I had learned to sit with ambiguity. The questions that interested me most were rarely susceptible to simple answers.
At Hiddush4, I had gained experience writing for a public audience. Although producing content was not formally part of my role, I found myself repeatedly drawn toward blogging and public-facing writing. I enjoyed translating complicated ideas into accessible language and connecting abstract concepts to lived experience.
Then there was the Polis Institute5.
When I began studying spoken Arabic at the Polis Institute in 2016, I thought I would simply be learning a language. In retrospect, the experience had a much broader impact. Most of my classmates were Europeans working in NGOs, embassies, government agencies, and international organizations, while my teachers were Arabs. Through the simple act of studying together, people who might once have existed in my mind primarily as categories gradually became individuals.
Polis also reinforced something that had long been true of my intellectual life: I learn best through immersion. Rather than absorbing ideas in isolation, I tend to connect them to other ideas, experiences, books, conversations, and observations.
The Kaddish project became an ideal outlet for this tendency.
As I immersed myself in Jewish mourning practices, I found myself constantly drawing connections. A Talmudic passage would remind me of a contemporary memoir. A halakhic6 discussion would bring to mind a conversation from years earlier. A reflection on grief would resonate with a novel, an essay, a poem, or an unexpected memory of Papa. The project became a framework into which seemingly unrelated experiences continually flowed.
The realization
Only much later did I realize that the Kaddish project was changing me in another way as well.
Writing had been present in my life for years before Papa died. As a Pardes student in 2009–10, I wrote prolifically for the student blog. Nobody was paying me to do so. I simply enjoyed writing. Later, while working at Pardes, I continued writing even though that was not formally part of my job description. The same pattern repeated itself at Hiddush. Time and again, I found myself gravitating toward blogging, public-facing writing, and the challenge of communicating ideas clearly.
Yet I never thought of writing as central to my identity.
The Kaddish project forced me to take writing more seriously. Every week required a new post. Every post demanded research, reflection, drafting, revision, and editing. I would spend days thinking about a topic before writing a single paragraph. Once published, I often found myself rereading my own work repeatedly, trying to understand what I had actually been feeling when I wrote it. The project became both a record of my mourning and a mechanism for processing it.
Over time, three realizations emerged.
First, I was good at writing. This took me a surprisingly long time to recognize. Writing had always existed on the periphery of my professional identity. The Kaddish series was the first sustained project that required me to write consistently, publicly, and at length. By the end, I could no longer dismiss it as a secondary skill.
Second, I genuinely enjoyed it. Even when individual posts were emotionally draining, I found satisfaction in the process itself: following an idea wherever it led, tracking down sources, refining language, and shaping disparate observations into a coherent narrative. The work felt meaningful in a way that surprised me.
The third realization took longest: writing deserved a larger place in my life than I had ever allowed it.
At the time, however, I could not yet see where this realization would lead. I only knew that something important had shifted. Writing was no longer simply something I did. It demanded to be taken seriously.
Changing relationship to authority
As I immersed myself in Jewish texts and traditions, I also found myself becoming increasingly skeptical of religious authority. In truth, this process had begun years earlier. At Pardes, I had learned how source sheets are assembled and how divrei Torah7 are constructed. The more I studied, the more apparent it became that the same texts could support very different conclusions depending upon which sources were emphasized, which were omitted, and how they were interpreted.
My Kaddish series accelerated that realization. Week after week, I explored Jewish mourning practices, the history of kaddish, and traditional beliefs about death and the afterlife. Again and again, I encountered competing interpretations presented with equal confidence. The deeper I went, the harder it became to regard any single reading as the obvious or inevitable one.
Paradoxically, this did not diminish my appreciation for Jewish learning. If anything, it increased it. I became less interested in definitive answers and more interested in the centuries-long conversation itself. The richness of the tradition lay not in unanimity but in the diversity of voices participating within it.
At the same time, I grew more willing to trust my own judgment. If Jewish tradition was an ongoing conversation, then my responsibility was not merely to repeat what others had said. It was to engage honestly with the questions before me and arrive at conclusions that I could sincerely defend.
This may have been one of the most important changes produced by the Kaddish year. It taught me not only to study tradition but to engage it on my own terms.
Leaving the minyan8
The changes brought about by the Kaddish year did not end when I recited my final kaddish.
The Kaddish year left me more knowledgeable about Jewish practice and more engaged with Jewish learning. Yet it did not lead to greater synagogue involvement. If anything, the opposite occurred.
Some of the reasons were practical. Shortly after the Kaddish year ended, our family moved apartments. The synagogue where I had recited most of my kaddishes was no longer within convenient walking distance. More importantly, the daily obligation that had drawn me there was gone. During the Kaddish year, every visit to synagogue served an immediate purpose. Once that obligation disappeared, attendance became a choice rather than a necessity. Without the structure of kaddish, I found it increasingly difficult to justify the time and effort required to attend regularly.
Others were intellectual. The skepticism that had deepened during the Kaddish project did not disappear when the series ended. If anything, I found myself increasingly willing to evaluate religious practices on their own merits rather than simply accepting them because they were traditional.
When COVID arrived, it accelerated trends that were already underway. Like so many people, I experienced the pandemic as a disruption of routines and communities. Public gatherings became complicated. Synagogue attendance became irregular. Habits that had already begun to weaken were interrupted altogether, and many of them never fully returned.
Looking back, I do not see a single dramatic break with religious observance. There was no decisive moment when I rejected synagogue life or consciously abandoned a particular worldview. Instead, a series of small changes accumulated over time. The Kaddish obligation ended. We moved. The pandemic disrupted communal life. My intellectual outlook continued evolving.
As online writing communities expanded and in-person gatherings became part of my life, new rhythms began to form around writing itself. Conversations continued across days, including times when I would once have been offline. The boundaries between writing, participation, and rest gradually became less clear.
None of this happened suddenly. It emerged through a series of small decisions about when to respond, when to read, and when to engage. What had once been a sharply defined rhythm of religious observance became something more fluid, shaped increasingly by creative work and literary community rather than formal religious structure.
The Kaddish series had ended.
Poetry
When I stopped writing The Skeptic’s Kaddish for the Atheist, I did not intend to continue writing in any sustained way.
For a period of time, I largely succeeded. But the impulse to write did not disappear. It simply changed form.
I did not return first to essays or reflections, and I did not immediately resume the kind of structured, source-driven writing that had defined the Kaddish series. Instead, I found myself drawn back to a more fragmented and expressive form of writing: poetry.
At first, this felt almost incidental. After a year spent moving through Jewish texts, halakhic discussions, memoir, and theological questions, poetry offered something different. I did not need to construct an argument or resolve competing ideas. I could simply follow an image, a form, or an association wherever it led.
I had not written poetry seriously since high school, and even then it had never become a sustained practice. Yet after the Kaddish series, I found myself returning to it with an intensity that surprised me.
The Kaddish series had been intensely relational, anchored in tradition, memory, text, and obligation. Poetry felt more solitary and more open-ended. It allowed me to move away from explanation and toward expression while continuing to process experience through writing.
What began as occasional experimentation gradually became a regular practice. I started publishing poems online, participating in writing communities, and exploring forms that I had never encountered before. The experience was more immediate and informal than anything I had known during the Kaddish series, but no less meaningful.
Slowly, without planning it, I had begun building a new creative life. At the time, I saw it as a continuation of writing. I did not yet realize it would become a community as well.
Poets of Babel
WordPress did not only change how I wrote. It changed who I wrote with.
Over time, certain relationships began to extend beyond comment threads and blog posts. Conversations became more sustained, and writing became something shared across time rather than confined to individual publication moments. It was in this context that I first encountered Shoshana, who ran a multilingual poetry group in Jerusalem called Poets of Babel.
The connection itself was unexpected. I had come across her through her WordPress blog, without realizing at first that she lived only a short distance from me. What began as an online exchange gradually expanded beyond the screen and into the physical world.
Poets of Babel met only a few times a year, but it exposed me to a different kind of writing environment than anything I had previously experienced. Poets gathered in person, often working across multiple languages, reading drafts aloud, discussing poems face-to-face, and responding to one another in real time. The contrast with both the Kaddish series and my early WordPress experience was striking. Writing was no longer solitary, and it was no longer asynchronous. It had become immediate, conversational, and embodied.
For someone who had spent years writing largely on his own, this was a significant shift. The people whose names I knew from comment sections now had voices, personalities, and stories. Writing was becoming connected not only to publication but also to friendship, conversation, and shared experience.
Poets of Babel met only a few times each year, but it showed me that writing could create community beyond the page.
W3
Poets of Babel introduced me to a more immediate and embodied form of literary community, but it remained episodic. Meetings took place only a few times each year, and between them, most of my writing life continued to unfold online.
Around this time, I created a different kind of space: a grassroots online poetry community called W3.
W3 was not an institution in any formal sense. It functioned as an ongoing exchange of prompts, responses, experiments, and conversations. Unlike many online poetry communities, where a small number of organizers supplied prompts for everyone else to answer, W3 was designed to be more participatory. Members were encouraged not only to respond to prompts but also to create them.
This mattered because many of the writers who participated did not have large audiences or established platforms. W3 created a space where they could help shape the community rather than simply contribute to it. The distinction may seem subtle, but this changed the character of the group. Participation was not limited to writing poems. It extended to setting creative directions, proposing challenges, and inviting others into conversation.
The result was a community that was both voluntary and collaborative. No editor assigned topics. No institution determined priorities. The structure existed because participants collectively created and sustained it.
That made it both fragile and, in its own way, resilient.
Looking back, W3 did not represent a dramatic turning point. Rather, it consolidated developments that had been underway since the Kaddish year. The habits of writing, responding, and sustained engagement that had emerged gradually over the previous years now became a regular part of everyday life.
The Jewish Agency for Israel
By the time I came to work at the Jewish Agency for Israel in 2022, writing had become important enough that I had decided to pursue it professionally.
Seen in that light, my work at the Jewish Agency for Israel was a return. Years earlier, I had encountered the organization through summer camps in Russia, long before I worked there full-time in Israel. It was one of my earliest experiences of large-scale Jewish communal life, and it had been where I met my wife.
When I applied for a writing position there, it felt less like a career change than a convergence of existing strands. The skills I had developed through blogging, educational writing, donor communications, and years of reflective practice were now being directed into a formal professional role. Writing was no longer only something I pursued in response to personal experience or communal engagement. It had become part of my job.
At the same time, professional writing did not replace the creative work that had emerged through WordPress and W3. The two continued in parallel. One was institutional and goal-oriented; the other was exploratory and communal. Both continued to develop alongside one another.
The organization did not make me a writer. It was where writing became part of what I was hired to do.
IDI
By 2026, when I joined the Israel Democracy Institute9, writing was no longer something I was discovering about myself. It was something I was refining.
The transition from the Jewish Agency for Israel to IDI did not feel like a rupture. It felt like a continuation along a narrower, more defined path. The underlying skillset remained the same: translating complex ideas into accessible language, shaping arguments, working with texts, and communicating institutional work to external audiences. What changed was the subject matter.
If the Jewish Agency for Israel represented the consolidation of writing as a professional identity, IDI represented its alignment with a set of questions that had occupied me for years.
Much of my earlier writing life had been exploratory. Through the Kaddish series, poetry, and blogging, I found myself examining tradition, identity, community, and personal experience. At IDI, the focus shifted toward public life: governance, democratic institutions, social cohesion, and the challenges facing Israeli society. The work became less inward-looking and more civic in orientation.
IDI feels less like a new beginning than a point of stabilization. The various strands of my previous life were no longer developing separately. They had begun to reinforce one another.
Papa’s fingerprints
Looking back across all of this, it is easy to describe the Kaddish year as a turning point. But that framing is also too simple. It suggests a clean break between what came before and what came after. In reality, what followed was not a departure but an accumulation.
The Kaddish series gave structure to something that might otherwise have remained diffuse. It turned a private process of grief into a sustained public practice of reflection. My way of engaging with the world was fundamentally textual: I encountered experience, and then I wrote it into meaning.
That habit did not end when the Kaddish series ended. The settings changed, but the underlying impulse remained the same.
In that sense, it is possible to see my father’s presence not only in the content of what I wrote during the Kaddish year, but in the trajectory that followed. Not because he directed it, but because his absence created a space in which certain patterns became visible and unavoidable.
He is present in the memory that initiated the Kaddish series.
He is present in the texts I turned to in order to make sense of that loss.
And he is present in the recognition that writing was never just something I used to describe my life.
It was one of the ways I continued to carry it.
Conclusion
There is no clean endpoint to any of this.
If there is a single thread that runs through all of this, it is not resolution but continuity. The same impulse appears in different settings: to take experience seriously, to work through it in language, and to use writing as a way of making sense of what has not yet settled into meaning.
Papa’s death set this process in motion, but it did not contain it.
What followed was not a conclusion.
It was a life that continued to write itself.
Footnotes
The journey
- Raised to not belong
- What kind of Jew?
- A bigger Jewish world
- The life I didn’t plan
- Between two worlds
- Papa’s fingerprints
Jean-Christophe Attias
kaggsy59
Chevra haChachamot
DGI e.V., Frankfurt am Main
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