“How do you make it to Carnegie Hall?” That was the question Secretary Blinken asked the hundreds in attendance from the Perelman Stage at the redoubt of classical music on 57th Street. “Kaddish, Kaddish, Kaddish,” America’s erstwhile top diplomat explained. The edit of the classic gag was made to introduce a performance of Maestro Leonard Bernstein’s “Symphony No. 3 ‘Kaddish.’” The occasion was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The 71st secretary of state was in attendance because his stepfather, the lawyer Samuel Pisar, collaborated with Bernstein on “Kaddish.” Pisar’s wife, Judith, and their daughter, Leah, read aloud the words that he wrote to accompany Bernstein’s symphonic rendering of the ancient Aramaic prayer for the dead. Pisar, who died in 2015, had survived Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Dachau. Mr. Blinken noted that of 900 children in Pisar’s town, he was the only survivor.

“Kaddish” is dedicated to the memory of President Kennedy, who was killed at Dallas weeks before the work’s premier at Tel Aviv, with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The artistic director of Carnegie Hall, Sir Clive Gillinson, tells the Sun in a telephone interview that the man he still calls “Lenny” felt “incredibly strongly about his Jewish identity” and would “fly out to Israel when artists would fly in the other direction.”

Bernstein, though, was dissatisfied with his own text, and felt that, as Sir Clive explains, Pisar could write “with an understanding of ‘what this was about.’” Bernstein, an American success story of the most glittering variety, who was born in Massachusetts and died at the Dakota, shared with Sir Clive that he “hadn’t suffered in any way that was meaningful.” He reckoned that “Kaddish” required the gravitas of the grave.

“Kaddish” is divided into eight sections. It begins by calling Kennedy and Bernstein “beloved mentors and kindred souls,” bright lights in an “age of anxiety, marked by a century of hot and cold wars, which began with carnage and ended with terror.” The symphony’s performance mobilizes a large orchestra, a full choir, a boys’ choir, a soprano soloist, and a narrator — here Pisar’s widow Judith and his daughter Leah, reading alternatively.

Testimony comes in different forms, and Pisar’s toggles between a boy from Bialystok and the attorney who moved in the highest reaches of government and politics. He writes: “My first tears are for my family and my people.” The most electric portions of the text are when Pisar, like a good prosecutor, presses the case against an Almighty whose creation comprises gas chambers as well as goodness. He subjects the Divine to cross-examination.

Pisar, addressing the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, writes, “equally indifferent were You when I agonized in Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Dachau, where Eichmann and Mengele’s gruesome reality eclipsed even Dante’s vision of inferno.” That accusation throws into relief the Kaddish’s profession of faith — “Magnified and sanctified be His great name.” Pisar is forced to bow to the “unfathomable logic that reigns in Your realm.” 

As the “Kaddish” is scored for harps, violins, horns, and trumpets, and a medley of other instruments, Pisar’s text asks a double question: “Can You pardon my sins, Lord? Can I pardon Yours?” Even if Pisar’s voice admits theological doubt, he is clear-eyed to the threats Jews face. He reckons that the world has brought in a verdict of “Guilty, in the Promised Land, when we took up arms so we will never be slaughtered again.” 

Tradition mandates that Kaddish — a prayer murmured in synagogues by mourners — be said more than three times a day for 11 months after the death of a family member. Bernstein’s symphony turns the Kaddish into a deeply moving symphony. There is nothing minimalist about the conductor’s translation. Pisar’s voice, itself a prayer, proffers evidence that the story of Zion did not end at Auschwitz.