Judaism & Judaica, Jewish - Biography, Fiction Subjects

Kaddish

Name: Kaddish
Author: Leon Wieseltier
ISBN: 9780375703621

by Leon Wieseltier, Dawidowicz

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Overview

Winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award

"An astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile." --The New York Times Book Review

Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Leon Wieseltier, a diligent but doubting son, recites the Jewish prayer of mourning at his father's grave, and then embarks on the traditional year of saying the kaddish daily.

Wieseltier's highly acclaimed Kaddish is the spiritual and thoughtful journal of one of America's most brilliant intellectuals. Driven to explore th origins of the kaddish, from the ancient legend of a wayeard ghost to a 17th-century Ukranian pogrom, he offers as well a mourner's response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred up in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Kaddish is suffused with love: a son's embracing of the traditon bequethed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring of its beauty, and a writer's revealing it, proudly unadorned, to the reader.

Synopsis

This is New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier's powerful, luminous, and thought-provoking account of the year following his father's death and the life-altering effects it wrought. Informed by Wieseltier's intellectual rigor and passion for learning, this wide-ranging spiritual autobiography explores the history and philosophy of the Jewish rituals surrounding death as it charts the course of the author's journey through grief. This is a wise and beautiful book about mourning and metaphysics, about fathers and sons, and about what it means to be Jewish.

The New Yorker - Edward Hirsch

A brilliant book...Wieseltier has an aphoristic intelligence, and in a sense he is taking his place in a line of philosophers which runs from Pascal to Nietzche and on to E.M. Cioran. As this 'diligent and doubting son' repeats phrases from the kaddish like a mantra, an ancient magnificence stirs in the text and his brokenheartedness is balanced by his exhiliration. 'He taught me to be here,' he writes of his father,' 'and here I am.'

About the Author, Leon Wieseltier

Leon Wieseltier lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

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Editorials

Amy E. Schwartz

...[A]s close to the feel of studying Talmud as the modern layperson without extensive Jewish education is likely to get. —WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

David Stern

...[A]stonishing...meticulously learned yet intensely personal...As he pursues [the book's] questions, Mr. Wieseltier's search for the meaning of the Kaddish becomes a meditation on tradition itself. —The New York Times

Susan Jacoby

Kaddish inspires a sense of awe at the sheer magnitude, depth and wisdom of a tradition that attempts to provide both a practical framework and a moral explanation for the deepest and most ungovernable human impulses. —Newsday

Jacob Neusner

I cannot point to another piece of writing in the English language that accomplishes within -- and for -- Judaism what Wieseltier has here achieved. His book is simply a masterpiece. -- National Review

Eugene Goodheart

Kaddish is...the extended spiritual exercise of a prodigal son. 'Years ago, when I stopped praying, the disappearance of the religious structure seemed to bring with it the promise of possibility...the adventure of self-creation.' -- The Washington Post

Nessa Rapoport

Groundbreaking in American letters...This is a narrative suffused with love: a man's love for the tradition bequeathed him by his father and shared with his mother and sister, a man's savoring of the beauty he was taught to uncover and his revealing it proudly, unadorned, to us.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

Edward Hirsch

Publishers Weekly

When his father died in 1996, Wieseltier began to observe the Jewish rituals of the traditional year of mourning, going three times daily to synagogue to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Between the prayers and his daily work as literary editor of the New Republic, he sought out ancient, medieval and modern Jewish texts in an effort to understand the history and meaning of Kaddish. He discovered that early texts dictated that the mourner's kaddish be recited only on Saturday nights, but the prayers were prolonged so that the souls of the sinners of Israel released from Gehenna would not hurry back to hell. Wieseltier reports that through his study and practice of Kaddish he realized that the past is at the mercy of the present. "The present can condemn the past to oblivion or obscurity," he notes. "Whatever happens to the past will happen to it posthumously. And so the saga of the family is also the saga of the tradition." Wieseltier provides a work of history, philosophy and spiritual memoir where he deals with the meaning of freedom and the perplexity of tradition. His book demonstrates how the practice of religion meets the needs of a troubled soul.

Library Journal

Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, has written a meditation on and history of the Jewish prayer for the dead. After his father's death, Wieseltier recited the Kaddish in the prescribed manner and studied its development and use. Moving from the 12th century onward, using Nahmanides, Rashi, Maimonides, the Vilna Gaon, and other rabbis, he explores various thinkers' views on mourning, Kaddish on holidays, Akiba stories, and the drinking of water during the Sabbath. Parts of the endless ocean of the Talmud, midrash, and responsum are all discussed by Wieseltier with the same love and respect Jacob Neusner brings to the task. Wieseltier writes about grief, the nature of death, and the meanings of life. -- Gene Shaw, New York Public Library

Amy E. Schwartz

...[A]s close to the feel of studying Talmud as the modern layperson without extensive Jewish education is likely to get. -- WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

Nessa Rapoport

David Stern

Edward Hirsch

Harold Bloom

Wieseltier's Kaddish is an astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile, who seek access to rabbinical tradition. . .I am certain I will read this book again. -- The New York Times Book Review

Susan Jacoby

Kirkus Reviews

A fervent and illuminating philosophical journal from the literary editor of the New Republic. Written during the year following the death of his father, when Wieseltier said the traditional prayer of kaddish, the volume begins as an inquiry into the origins of the custom of saying that prayer for the dead. This leads early on into the arcana of Jewish law (one town says kaddish on the new moon; another doesn't). But the philosopher who persists will be rewarded, for the discussion of Jewish law becomes an entry point into important questions of all kinds: freedom and predetermination, life and death, ethics and metaphysics. The largest part of the journal coheres around questions of paternity and identity, stemming from the particular requirement for a son to say kaddish for a parent. How much of who he is, Wieseltier wonders, is the result of what he learned from his father, and how much is original with himself? To what extent does the parent live on in the child? This question is incarnated in the very act of saying kaddish, for Wieseltier has rejected much of religious tradition yet is determined to honor his father, an onerous duty that requires attending prayer services three times a day. The philosophical exploration, which also touches on questions of community, history, the role of Jewish women, and Jewish suffering (his father was a Holocaust survivor), is rambling rather than rigorous, but therein lies its charm. Wieseltier allows his curiosity to move from text to text, and he shifts from intense study to humorous contemplation of the men (and women) with whom he prays; he honestly relates his not always successful attempts to pray with conviction. A fascinatingexcursion into Jewish law and history, and into questions of one's responsibility to one's parents, to the past, and to the future.