Kaddish

by Leon Wieseltier

Overview

A National Jewish Book Award-winning autobiography that's "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." 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 National Jewish Book Award–winning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man’s urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy 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 they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer’s revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375703621
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/08/2000
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	608
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.27(d)

About the Author

LEON WIESELTIER was born in Brooklyn in 1952. He is the literary editor of The New Republic. He has published several books, including A Passion for Waiting, Jewish Historiography, and Kaddish, winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.

What People are Saying About This

Elie Wiesel

Read this extraordinary book and you will be both intellectually enriched and deeply moved. You will find in it Leon Wieseltier's passion for learning and remarkable sytle. His exploration of the Jewish laws of mourning, so thoughtful, so necessary, is the best I have ever read. His Kaddish is not only for his father; it is for all fathers for whom no kaddish has been said.

Cynthia Ozick

I have never read a book like this. No one has. It is something new in the world, and at the same time something very old. One feels this work -- in its depth, idiosyncrasy, moral intellect, and stupendous range -- to be an extension (dare I say it?) of the Talmud, and also of its modernist opposite. It seems hardly enough to say that Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish is beautiful, wise, amazing.

Editorial Reviews

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

"Extraordinary.... [Kaddish] is a fine book, no, more: It may well be destined to become an American Jewish classic." —Forward

"Read this extraordinary book and you will be both intellectually enriched and deeply moved.... [Wieseltier's] Kaddish is not only for his father; it is for all fathers for whom no kaddish has been said." —Elie Wiesel

"An extended meditation on life and death, faith and doubt, freedom and responsibility,  modernity and tradition, fathers and sons." —The Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher

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

Jacob Neusner

...[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

Amy E. Schwartz

...[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

David Stern

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

Susan Jacoby

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

Eugene Goodheart

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

Nessa Rapoport

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.'
— 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.' -- The New Yorker

Edward Hirsch

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

Harold Bloom

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.

Kirkus Reviews