Kaddish

A friend of mine told me about this book, using wonderful words and thoughts which I will share with you. He said about "Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier":"In these times of war and cruelty, deep sentiment and spiritual introspection are indeed a balm to one's feeling on life, especially when you mediate about death and the immortality of love. This journal of the soul is a moving and beautiful work, generated by mourning a loss: the diligent and doubting son investigating the memory of death. I feel a better father and a better son now, and on closing this book I wish to thank Wieseltier for bringing me to discover my spiritual side in a more profound and fulfilling way. Like him and with him, I join his thought and quote: "I am in a mind to bless. Blessed be the book, the page, the verse, the word, the letter". And blessed be the author for sharing with us his path to illumination."I wish I could say it as he did, believe how he do. May the reading of "Kaddish" will teach my heart and sole. Amen.

This "Gentile reader" (as compared to the 19th century "gentle reader") loved this oh-so-Jewish work. Mr. Wieseltier's book is meditative and beautiful, more like bedside reading (dip in a bit at a time) than a strict narrative. I have read with some bemusement the reviewers here who didn't like it. They seem threatened by an intellectual man who uses his full intellect to consider his faith, or lack of it. Personally, I found this book elegant, engaging, and full of warmth and even occasional humor. My own father is dying, and it helped me ponder his circumstances while thinking about my eventual response to his impending death. Magnificent work.

The author brings about a union of Western philosophy and Jewish Talmudic work in what can only be described as a masterpiece. In Jewish popular culture, the emotional is emphasized, but the author shows his readers that the Jewish intellectual tradition has a lot of strength and power to comfort the afflicted while uplifting the mind. I love Kaddish, and I hope to see many more books like it from Jewish authors in the future.

It's impossible to categorize this book, because it simply doesn't fit into any conventional category. I'll have to explain exactly what it is: a journal kept by the author in the year after his father's death, in which he researches, ruminates, and comments on Judaism. The book is so intense that I got the impression that he spent the entire year (a) saying kaddish and (b) sitting in a tea room poring over ancient manuscripts. It's a privelege to get a chance to peek into the results of an entire year of study -- not to mention the mind of the author, who at times is brilliant. He is not trying to apologize for anything or to prove anything: he is simply, and honestly, thinking. This is not a book to be read in one sitting; I found myself reading a few pages at a time and then thinking about them. But the book is so well-written that I was in no rush to finish.

This is one of those books that you put down at times in bafflement and irritation and pick up again twenty minutes later because, dammit, it's under your skin and you can't leave it alone. Not quite like anything else I've come across but that's part of its charm. A lot of erudition, a little navel-gazing, some painfully personal revelations, some zippy one-liners. As a non-Jew, I found some of the author's assumptions about my baseline knowledge of Judaism a little over-optimistic but what else was he to do ? This is a personal book, written, I suspect, because it had to be written exactly as it is and not tailored to appeal to some hypothetical market target. And the reward for struggling through some of the more obscure passages where there are few familiar landmarks for the goyim to recognize is the humanity and wry humor of the author's examination of himself, trying to work out why he's embarked on this self-imposed devotional task and how to make sense of an world cluttered with medieval scholars and rabbis, and twentieth century atrocities, but also CD-Roms and contemporary DC, a thousand and one contradictions and very little certainty. So in the end he can't make sense of it all ? Who could ? Who can? It's still worth reading.