Shortly before Rosh Hashanah I was attending a legal symposium at Temple University in Philadelphia when I received a message that one of my closest cousins had died. My cousin, Janette Weil, had been like a big sister to me, celebrating the good times and guiding me through some of the worst. Although I knew her health was rapidly declining, the news was still a blow and I left the auditorium seeking refuge in the ladies room.

After composing myself, I returned to the auditorium where the program had switched from a panel discussion on terrorist trials to a performance by the Temple Gospel Ministries of a song called “God is Great and Greatly to be Praised.”

Strangely enough, as I sat in this room filled with lawyers, most of whom I didn’t know, listening to a Christian gospel group, I felt comforted. As I looked around the room it seemed that everyone was enraptured by the music and singing along with the chorus. I may not have known many people there, but I felt like I was part of a community brought together by the recognition there is something far greater than ourselves.

The title of the song apparently comes from the fourth line of Psalm 96: “For the Lord is great, and greatly to be praised.” It made me think that what was happening in the room was a lot like saying Kaddish. After all, most versions of the Kaddish begin “Exalted and hallowed be God’s greatness.” And Kaddish can only be said when there is a minyan.

Actually, the situation reminded me of saying Kaddish for my mother, who died several winters ago. A few days before she passed away, my friend Paula Lemerman gave me a book called “Saying Kaddish” by Anita Diamant, author of “The Red Tent.” It was the best gift she could have given me at the time. The book is a guide to Jewish practices from the end of life through the year that follows a death.

“Kaddish is a mystery,” Diamant writes. “It sounds like comfort and feels like a transcendent embrace, and yet the prayer that is synonymous with Jewish mourning does not mention death or consolation.”

Instead the prayer is a listing of God’s holy attributes, or as Diamant points out, “a love song to God.” Although it might be difficult to praise God at a time when a loved one has been taken from us, it’s still a prayer to which many of us cling. There is just something that compels us to want to say it. Many of us say it when we aren’t observing a yahrzeit. And even if we don’t stand and say it out loud, there are those of us who say the words softly from our seats.

A minyan is required so that death doesn’t separate mourners from God and the community, according to some explanations. The minyan also provides an opportunity for a group to provide comfort to mourners.

“The requirement of a minyan for Kaddish also turns the prayer into a communalizing force, keeping the mourner among the living – both literally and metaphorically,” Diamant writes. “Indeed, the power of Kaddish comes, in large measure, from the consolation of being in a group that recognizes and embraces the bereaved.”

I discovered that power shortly after I returned to St. Louis after sitting shiva for my mother in Memphis. Actually, during my first days back, I wasn’t sure how I would get to minyan as frequently as I wanted given my work schedule at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where I had been a reporter at the time.

But the answer came in the form of an accident. I fell down a flight of outdoor stairs in an ice storm breaking my right arm and hand. Wearing a hard plaster cast from my armpit to my fingertips, I couldn’t work, I couldn’t drive and I could barely feed myself. What would I do? I lived alone and my mother had been my only family member here.

But the accident turned out to be a blessing and this is why.

There’s a woman I sit next to on Saturday mornings at Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel because her spirituality helps me pray. After learning of my accident, my shul friend, Betty Tannenbaum, decided she would pick me up twice a day to take me to minyan. Since Betty lives very close to BSKI, this meant two round trips, a total of about 20 miles daily. It also meant that she had to trudge out in the cold January temperatures twice a day, including the first run arriving at my apartment around 6:30 a.m. Betty also took me to get my hair washed, she fed me, and she cheered me up during what was one of the bleakest times in my life. Those trips happened every day except for Shabbos when Paula and her husband Stewart Shilcrat filled in.

I became part of the rhythm of the small group of regular minyan goers who scarcely knew me, but accepted me into their fold. I would stand up and chant Kaddish, with my broken heart and my broken arm, in this special community of which I had become a member and in the infinite continuum of which I was now a part. It was there I found comfort. It was there I found peace.

And this is why I felt consolation this past September in a room filled with strangers singing along with a gospel choir praising God. There is great wisdom in the call for a minyan to say Kaddish. There is power in a community coming together to acknowledge that we’re part of something bigger and that none of us is alone. Indeed the Lord is great and greatly to be praised.

Gail Appleson is a writer for Armstrong Teasdale LLP and freelancer who lives in St. Louis.

• “Dor to Dor,” is an intermittent Jewish Light series looking at various aspects of “grown-up” life and generational connections through the lens of Jewish writers living in the St. Louis area. If you are interested in contributing to Dor to Dor, please email [email protected].