Lifestyle
My Dad’s Death Taught Me How to Pray
As part of “Believing,” The New York Times asked several writers to explore a significant moment in their religious or spiritual lives.
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I was many weeks into reciting kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning, for my father when I realized I did not know how to pray.
Oh, I knew the words and the melodies for the daily services I was attending — my father made sure of that, bringing me and my sisters to synagogue every Shabbat of our childhoods. I even knew what they meant, thanks to seven years at a Hebrew-speaking summer camp and four serving as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. I knew the choreography: when to sit, stand, bow, touch my fingers to my forehead or open my palms skyward.
I knew it all well enough to occasionally take my rightful place, as a mourner, leading the little group at my local Conservative synagogue some Sunday mornings.
What I was clueless about was God. How to talk to God, how to think about God, whether I believed in God, what he — my father — had believed. I knew what the words of the ancient texts meant in English, but not what they meant to me.
I decided maybe a year before Dad died that when the time came, I would take on the obligation of saying the Mourner’s Kaddish daily for 11 months, as outlined in Jewish law.
I had always found Jewish mourning rituals to be the most powerful part of our tradition. The communal aspect spoke to me: Kaddish is one of the prayers that require a quorum of 10 Jews, known as a minyan, and I appreciated both that I had to show up in public to fulfill this commandment and that strangers had to show up to make it possible. The daily commitment was daunting, but also appealing; a challenge, an opportunity, a statement to myself, to everyone around me and to my dead father that he and our tradition mattered to me.
Kaddish was also something I associated with Dad, whose booming voice whenever he was reciting the prayer on the anniversary of a loved one’s death still echoed in my head.
In the days following his death at 82, some of the loveliest memories people shared with us revolved around this ritual. How Dad made sure that prayer leaders did not go too fast for newbies or drown out women. Or how Dad had reconciled with his own father after decades of distance so he could say kaddish for him with less baggage.
I was excited, as a feminist and mostly Reform Jew, to take on an obligation that historically was the province of Orthodox men. The pandemic had made kaddish much more accessible and diverse: There was a Zoom minyan somewhere to dial into most hours of the day, some rooted in the traditional morning service, others involving meditation, study or song.
Everything made sense except the prayer part.
Kaddish may be the most famous Jewish prayer, infused into the broader culture — Sylvester Stallone recited it in “Rocky III,” and one of Allen Ginsberg’s most famous poems shares its title. It dates back to the first century B.C., and its Aramaic text does not mention death. Rather, it is a paean to God’s strength and sovereignty.
May your great name be blessed for ever and ever, is the central line. Blessed are you, whose glory transcends all praises, songs and blessings voiced in the world.
Scholars interpret this prayer being used for mourning as a declaration of acceptance that death is part of God’s plan. That works if you believe there is such a plan; if you believe in God; if you know what you believe.
Most mourners say kaddish in the same place most days, but my Reform synagogue only has services on Shabbat, so I stitched together a mosaic of minyans. (I’d decided to say kaddish once daily, not the traditional three times, usually at a morning service.)
On Sundays, I went to the Conservative shul in my town, and on Fridays, the Reconstructionist one. The other days, I’d video call into congregations across the United States, sometimes joining the ones where my sisters were saying kaddish, in Washington and Chicago. I said kaddish at a joint Passover-Ramadan breakfast, aboard New Jersey Transit commuter trains and outside a refugee center in Tbilisi, Georgia. I was good at focusing on Dad during the kaddish itself. But during the rest of the half-hour service — listening to the other prayers, reading memorial messages posted in the virtual chat on the side of the screen — my mind often wandered. Sometimes I checked Slack or email. I worried that I really wasn’t doing it right.
Back in religious school, I’d learned the mystical concept of keva and kavanah, Hebrew words that translate to “routine” and “intention.” The idea is that if you chant the same words every day, eventually, moments of connection will come. Kavanah is also translated as “sincere feeling” or “direction of the heart.”
I remembered asking, as a kid, how we would know when we got to kavanah. I don’t remember getting a good answer. Decades later, I was stuck in rote recitation — keva, keva, keva.
Until, as part of a Jewish study retreat in Maryland, I went on a walk in the woods with Rabbi Brent Chaim Spodek.
He called it a “soul stroll,” which sounded pretty hokey, but also as if it had a decent chance for kavanah. He led a little group on a light hike around a pond, stopping at beautiful spots to offer a few thoughts about the meaning of our familiar prayer book.
When we got to the central prayer, 19 blessings known as the Amidah, Rabbi Spodek summed it up as “Wow! Please? Thank you.” And that’s where it happened. I learned how to pray on my own terms.
“Wow” — shevach in Hebrew, or praiseworthiness — is about God’s awesomeness. Rabbi Spodek said he spends a minute or two pondering the miracle that is creation. That there is a (narrowing) climate in which humans can thrive. Plants and animals to nourish us.
“Please” — bakashot, or requests — is where we ask for things. Let my husband’s surgery succeed. Help my kid find his footing. Make me listen more. Big things, hard things, things we really need.
“Thank you” — hoda’ot — is like a gratitude journal. A yummy breakfast. A talk with an old friend. A walk in the woods.
It was hokey. But it worked. For the rest of my 11 months, whenever my mind wandered, I’d close my prayer book and close my eyes and try a little wow-please-thank you.
It did not instantly transform me into a believer. I still struggle, especially on the “wow” part, sometimes finding myself wow-ing God for making humans who figured out some technological, athletic or artistic miracle.
There are always plenty of pleases. And thanks, especially, for the nine other Jews who showed up so I could say kaddish for Dad, whatever he believed.
Jodi Rudoren is head of newsletters at The New York Times, where she previously spent 21 years as a reporter and editor. From September 2019 to April 2025, she was editor in chief of the Forward, the leading Jewish news organization in the United States.
Azar Nafisi on the set of Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran
Marie Gioanni/Greenwich Entertainment
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A new film version of Azar Nafisi’s critically-praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The film shows a group of women meeting clandestinely in Nafisi’s home in the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. They read classics of the West, like Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.
Education had become dangerous and even deadly during the Islamic Revolution, and reading forbidden books was Nafisi’s way to fight back.
The film, directed by Eran Riklis, begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. Nafisi told Scott Simon about the experience of seeing herself and her story depicted on the big screen, “I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children.”
The film is directed by Eran Riklis and won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival.
It stars Iranian actors Goldshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Mina Kavani. Like the author, some of the actors are exiled from Iran.
Actor Golshifteh Farahani stars as Azar Nafisi in Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran.
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Greenwich Entertainment
“These girls were very different, one from the other,” Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. Remembering them now, and seeing them depicted on the screen, Nafisi saw anew the power of great literature.
“Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn’t talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect,” she said.
Through the stories in the books, Nafisi said each woman could find more and become more herself. “It reached a sort of magic,” she said.
The magic was brutally broken by a government that was desperate to quiet the voices of dissenters. Nafisi’s homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized
“This wasn’t my land,” she told Simon. “This was a country ruled by a regime that stoned people to death.”
When the religious hardliners in the government banned women from appearing in public without a headscarf, the film shows Nafisi, played by Goldshifteh Farahani, agonizing in front of a mirror with a black headscarf.
“The expression on her face is fear, because by and by, she disappears into this garment,” Nafisi said. For some, the headscarf was a symbol of the place of women in society, but for Nafisi the stakes were even higher.
“This is not a political fight. This is an existential one,” she said. “Our identity as human beings, as women, has been taken away from us.”
When fighting against covering her hair became too dangerous, Nafisi found small ways to rebel. “I never wore my scarf properly. I would always show a few strands out of the scarf to tell them, ‘You don’t own me.’”
Nafisi’s book about fighting the Iranian Revolution through the simple act of reading was an international bestseller, won numerous literary awards, and was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times (London).
Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to make a passionate case for the role of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the beginning of Islamic Revolution. The new leaders tore down the statues of the king and the royal family and changed the names of streets. But when they tried to bring down the statue of Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi, and erase his place of honor within the culture, the people opposed it.
“I thought how fantastic that they can bring down the statue of the Shah, but they can’t touch the poet,” she said.
Get ready to catch a whiff of stink. Not one, but two rare corpse flowers are set to bloom at the Huntington in the coming days, with one of them making its first-ever public bloom.
If both plants unfurl on the same day, it would be just the second time a double bloom has ever occurred at the Huntington.
For those unfamiliar with these funky flora, be warned. Corpse flowers bloom for just 24 to 48 hours, and once opened, they reek of gym socks, rotten eggs and decaying flesh … or, well, a corpse.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids for the Huntington, speaks to reporters in front of two corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Couple that with their tropical native climate of Sumatra, Indonesia, and you’re in for a sweaty, stinky viewing experience.
The stench is important for pollination, said Brandon Tam, the Huntington’s associate curator of orchids. It attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies, which lay their eggs on rotting animal carcasses.
At the Huntington, pollinators aren’t the only thing it entices. Since the garden exhibited its first corpse flower in 1999, thousands of people flock to its conservatory every summer, just to smell these putrid plants.
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It smells like rotting flesh, but thousands of people will be lining up to catch a whiff.
“The kids that first came in 1999 are now bringing their kids — their own kids — to experience this over 20 years later,” Tam said. “It’s amazing, this plant, the impact that it has had over many generations.”
Glendale resident Trinity Shi, 42, witnessed three blooms at the Huntington in 2022 and 2023 and compared the smell to rotten fish: pungent, but not unbearable. She was excited to feature such an unusual specimen on her Instagram plant blog, @cubehousejungle, and hopes to make it to this year’s bloom too.
“It feels really prehistoric to look at this plant, because it is so giant,” Shi said of the corpse flower, which can grow over 12 feet tall. “It’s become kind of like a mascot for the Huntington.”
Thanks to cultivation techniques, the Huntington coaxes the plants to bloom every two to three years, not four to six like they do in their natural habitat, where they’re endangered.
Still, the blooms are notoriously unpredictable, Tam said. He guessed one of the plants will bloom in the coming days.
This upcoming bloom spotlights a plant nicknamed Odora, who last opened in 2024, and Odorysseus, a rookie public bloomer. Visitors offered name suggestions for Odorysseus on the Huntington’s Instagram page, where contenders included Stinkerbell, Gagatha and Count Flatula, among others.
It’s not unusual for the Huntington to have multiple soon-to-be bloomers on display. But only once, in 2018, did two plants actually unfurl on the same day.
A detailed view of a corpse flower as it prepares to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
For Odora and Odorysseus, siblings from a 2002 pollination, a double bloom is unlikely, Tam said. The plants are inclined to bloom out of sequence, “because they want to pollinate another plant that’s in the vicinity.” That can’t happen if they bloom simultaneously.
Though many refer to these plants as “flowers,” they are actually an “inflorescence,” a flowering structure containing hundreds of smaller blooms inside.
When it’s almost time for the plant to open, the spadix — a conic protrusion from inside the plant — emerges and accelerates in growth, climbing up to six inches per day. After a few days, its growth slows down.
“When it gets to about the one-inch range, we’ll know it’s about to bloom for us fairly soon,” Tam said.
When it does bloom, the spathe — leaflike structures encasing the plant — unfurl around 3 or 4 p.m., reaching maximum size in the early hours of the morning. The odor comes from the spadix, which heats up to about 98 degrees to strengthen the smell.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids at the Huntington, walks past the corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
From there, visitors have until about 3 to 5 p.m. to smell the plant before it closes back up and collapses, losing its odor. Eventually, the plant returns as a leaf or a flower, photosynthesizing energy in preparation for its next bloom.
Today, the Huntington houses 43 corpse flowers, making it one of the largest corpse flower collections in North America. The Huntington cultivates them on-site and has distributed many to botanic gardens and zoos across the country.
“It’s important when it comes to conservation that we make plants accessible,” Tam said. “If we’re able to share these plants with other organizations and other hobbyists, we’re able to decrease the amount of plant theft that occurs in the wild, where a lot of conservation work is much needed.”
Eager sniffers can visit the Huntington from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Monday. Be sure to stay hydrated, cool and patient, as it’s humid inside the conservatory and lines can be long. For those who want to track the blooms’ progress from afar, catch the Huntington’s online livestream.
Library, art museum, botanical garden
The Huntington
Address: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino
Admission: $13-34; children 3 and under, free; “Museums for All” (SNAP EBT) program, $5.
Info: huntington.org
Entrepreneur David Huang tests out a VR headset while conducting demonstrations of the social dance lesson app Dance Guru at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., June 17, 2026.
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Wedding season is in full swing, bringing with it a familiar sense of dread for anyone who fears the dance floor.
But relief may finally be at hand with the help of a new app, Dance Guru, and a virtual reality (VR) headset.
The social dance instruction app transports users to a spacious, digital dance studio. Waiting inside is a computer-generated coach: a handsome, male avatar wearing a shirt open to his navel. He speaks with a slightly gravelly English accent.
“Watch me now,” he instructs at the start of a waltz lesson — which NPR tried out at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., an annual conference showcasing the latest developments in virtual and augmented reality.
The avatar then demonstrates a basic box step.
From there, the lesson becomes interactive. The coach tells the user to hold his hand while an electric pinging sound tracks the student’s foot placement.
“One, two, three, four, five, six,” the virtual teacher counts down.
When the user stumbles, he remains remarkably patient. “Do not worry, foundations take time. Let’s try that again. Work on grounding your steps more intentionally.”
Solving the beginner’s dilemma
Dance Guru creator David Huang said he came up with the idea for the app a couple of years ago out of frustration.
“I always wanted to learn to dance and I was always terrible at it,” Huang said. “And I always ended up stopping midway through the lessons.”
He soon realized that many beginners hit the exact same roadblocks.
“Private lessons are too expensive, and you feel like you’re always forgetting the dance steps,” Huang said. “You cannot find a partner to dance with. So I figured maybe I can create something like this.”
The Dance Guru platform currently offers tutorials in salsa, bachata, waltz, and cha-cha, in both lead and follow modes. To make the digital instruction feel authentic, Huang used motion-capture technology to record the movements of real-life dance teachers — with their permission.
Building on the legacy of online tutorials and video games
Dance Guru belongs to a small but growing wave of apps using VR to demystify social dance. At a nearby booth, conference attendee Victor Chen is testing out a competing app called Trip the Light. It currently offers salsa lessons, as well as freestyle options, where a user can dance with a partner without having to learn specific steps.
Trip the Light’s booth at the Augmented World Expo included posters of the app’s virtual instructors. Real-life performers, who gave Trip the Light permission to motion capture their movements, were used as a basis for these avatars.
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“A lot of times when you’re trying to learn a choreography, it’s watching a YouTube video and you have to pause it, rewind, and play it,” Chen said. “If you were to have a virtual avatar dancing in front of you and correcting for any parts that you missed, it might be a lot easier.”
Interactive video games like Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance, and YouTube tutorials have been helping people improve their skills in private for years. But those games are mostly aimed at solo players. Unlike the new generation of immersive VR apps, they cannot simulate the mechanics or confidence required for partner dancing on a live dance floor.
The reality check
But this kind of app won’t work for every dancer.
“Everyone learns a little bit differently. And so unless you have a game that has lots of different ways of teaching, you’re going to have things that work for some people and don’t work for others,” said Ariana Katana, a trained contemporary dancer and dance content creator who’s active on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms. “Also, it’s hard to dance with a headset on.”
And then there’s the issue of not being able to physically feel a virtual partner’s hand or shoulder while dancing with them. Patrick Ascolese, the creator of Trip the Light, said the experience could become more tactile in the future. “Haptic suits and wearables will be coming, but I think we’re a little away from that,” he said.
Ascolese said even with their limitations, immersive tools like Trip the Light have immense potential as judgment-free training grounds — giving reluctant dancers the baseline confidence they need to eventually step onto the dance floor with real partners in the real world, including at weddings.
“Just like anything else, practice makes perfect,” said Ascolese. “So the more time you spend in VR with a virtual partner, it works towards helping you get over that social hurdle. We are teaching you the moves that you have to do in order to go out and have fun.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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