Everything struck hard. The door slamming behind me in the black
car. The shovel stabbing the mound of soil. The wooden box hitting
the floor of the pit. Beside his father's grave, a diligent but
doubting son begins the mourner's kaddish, and realizes he
needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So
begins Leon Wieseltier's highly acclaimend Kaddish, the
spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a
prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by the ardor of
inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man's urgent
exploration of Jewish lituragy and law, from the 10th-century
legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars
on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the
Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner's unmannered response to
the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death's
wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, wieseltier's Kaddish
is a narrative suffused with love: a son's embracing the
tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring
the beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer's revealing
it, proudly unadorned, to the reader.
