The story behind Kaddish
Rabbi Akiva and the orphan.
The oldest story we have about why a child says Kaddish for a parent.
Rabbi Akiva was walking through a cemetery when he saw a man running past, blackened like coal, bent under a heavy load of wood, moving as fast as a horse.
He told him to stop, and asked what this terrible work was. If you are a slave with a cruel master, I'll free you, he said. If you are poor, I'll help you.
"Please don't hold me up," the man said. "The ones in charge of me will be angry." Then he explained: he was no longer alive. Every day he was sent to gather wood, and every night he was burned on it.
In his lifetime he had been a tax collector who went easy on the rich and was hard on the poor. Was there any way out? There was one, he had been told. If he had a son, and that son stood before a congregation and said Kaddish, and they answered "Amen, y'hei sh'mei rabba m'vorach," he would be released.
But he had no son that he knew of. His wife had been expecting when he died, and he had no friend left in the world to teach a child anything.
Rabbi Akiva asked his name. Ukba, he said. His wife was Shoshiva, and his town was Lanuka'a.
Rabbi Akiva went to that town. The people there cursed the man's memory, and his wife's. Yes, she had had a boy, they said, but no one had even given him a bris.
Rabbi Akiva gave the boy his bris and sat down to teach him. The boy couldn't learn. So Rabbi Akiva fasted for forty days, until a voice from heaven asked why. "Haven't I taken this child on myself?" he answered.
The boy's heart opened. Rabbi Akiva taught him to read, to say Shema, the Amidah and Grace After Meals. Then he stood him in front of the congregation. The boy said Barchu, and they answered. He said Kaddish, and they answered, "Amen, y'hei sh'mei rabba m'vorach."
That night the father came to Rabbi Akiva in a dream. "May your mind be at rest," he said. "You have saved me from the judgment of Gehinnom."
The story is recorded in early sources, among them Machzor Vitry (11th century), and later in Seder HaDoros.
Why it still matters
That boy didn't know his father. All he did was stand up and praise G-d, and let a minyan answer him. That is still what Kaddish is today, said for the soul of someone we love. Why Kaddish matters