Last week's recommendation.
Week 9 recommendation.
Week 8 recommendation.
Week 7 recommendation.
Week 6 recommendation.
Week 5 recommendation.
Week 4 recommendation.
Week 3 recommendation.
Week 2 recommendation.
Introduction to the series and first recommendation.
Kaddish, Leon Weiseltier.
An excerpt from Chapter One.
My contribution - this coming Thursday - to the blogospheric commemoration of the 9-11 terrorist attacks will be mostly New York Jewish stories from that day, some of which involve our rituals for the dead. In that spirit, this week's Pintele Yid pick is an idiosyncratic and intense exploration of those rituals - particularly the history and practice of reciting the Kaddish - the sanctification of God's name - for one's beloved deceased.
Kaddish was much reviewed and discussed when it was published, and some of the reviews address the matters of faith and doctrine raised by Wieseltier in the course of critiquing the book. They are worth reading in their entirety for that reason, so I am linking to more reviews than I usually would. I have also linked to several discourses on the Kaddish itself which tangentially mention Wieseltier's memoir.
People either love Kaddish or hate it - it will appeal most to those with a scholarly bent, and - although it is arranged chronologically, as a journal - I recommend keeping it by the bedside to dip into as the mood strikes you, rather than trying to read it straight through. Like several of the reviewers, I found it a comforting companion during the last month of my father's dying and my 11 months of saying kaddish afterwards. In any case, Weiseltier's irritable, sometimes amusing ruminations, his zigzagging pursuit of and dialogue with rabbinic sources (very talmudic!), as well as the texts he cites, are quintessentially Jewish.
Kaddish brings to life the way of the Talmud. It contains and compresses our grief, public and private, and our guilt, public and private. It fairly steams with personal emotion, private doubt, and 20th century, post-Holocaust doubt. It is not dry scholarship. It does not count the number of angels on a pin. It is, instead, a passionate portrait of a man in grief, an American Jewish man who has rejected his father's ways and yet not forgotten them. Wieseltier has created a major work that hooks the laws of the rabbis to the modern soul, that post-Freudian American, choices-abound, free-to-leave soul.A review from Commentary by Jon D. Levenson compares Kaddish to more of a "how-to" book on Jewish mourning, by Anita Diamant.
What is remarkable about Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish - both as a book and as a publishing phenomenon - is its mix of studiousness, irony, passion, and sheer randomness: it returns to a time when scholarship, love, and philosophical reflection were undivided. It is the product of "unsystematic study" - not the study we undertake to convince credential-granters and employers of our mastery, but the study we pursue through pure compulsion. In his forties, long lapsed from Jewish orthodoxy, Wieseltier returned to the synagogue (to the shul, in the homelier Yiddish word he prefers) to say the mourner's kaddish for his father, three times a day for eleven months; puzzled by this taxing cultural imperative, which is neither biblical nor talmudic, he undertook an open-ended search through Jewish literature to find the sources of the practice. The research, like the kaddish itself, was also a memorial to his father and a bulwark against grief; sometimes, too, it was the voice of his grief.
Wieseltier calls up an uncountable assemblage of rabbis from Akiva (who seems to be the source of the kaddish custom) through Maimonides, Rashi, Joseph Karo, Elaezar ben Judah of Worms - "the influential pietist and jurist of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries" known as "the Perfumer" - and on and on. Threaded through Wieseltier's mustering and quarreling with the rabbis, there are personal comments about the ups and downs of going to shul day after day, feelings generated by the ritual, the seasons of the year in Washington, D.C., the sadness of his mother whose parents were killed by the Nazis . . .
Out of his personal narrative of his year of mourning, he time after time leads us to a topic he wishes to consider, walks us through sages' discussions of the problem he has chosen, then takes us through his responses to those discussions, gradually winning our confidence not only in his learning but also, and especially, in his educated judgment. He enlists erudition in the service of the soul. What emerges is a dialogue at the depths of the human experience recorded, in their particular idiom, out of their distinctive perspective, by the Judaic saints of past and present. But what turns learning into literature is the narrative voice -- controlled, spare, restrained -- that Wieseltier has invented for himself.
Wieseltier, for all his secular culture, in his own way trusts in the Covenant, and while I greatly admire ''Kaddish,'' it frequently renders me uncomfortable or even fretful. The Sanctification of the Divine Name has had too many Jewish martyrs. Wieseltier, while fully cognizant of this history of atrocities, tends to be formidably at one with his enormous company of sages. I respond strongly to his wonderful zest for Jewish learning, but sometimes wonder why he is not more critical of the rabbis' refusal to hold their God accountable for His evasions of the Covenant.
The Jewish way is to perform the commandments even in the absence of understanding. Let the hands tend to the deeds; the heart and mind will follow. That is how the rabbis interpret the Israelites' response at Sinai: Na'aseh v'nishma—we will do, and we will hear: Action first, study and comprehension later. Wieseltier begins each day in shul, fulfilling his obligation to his father. Only then does he head for the teahouse to grapple with the scholars and dreamers of the Jewish ages.
Action first—why? Because behavior governs attitude. Wieseltier's daily prayers at an Orthodox synagogue do not transform him back into an Orthodox shul-goer, but the experience does not leave him unchanged. A year of mourning, it turns out, is a year of introspection, of a sharpened awareness and continued reevaluation of his own spiritual and moral state.
As for the aphorisms, they can at times be striking--"In religious life, habit is essential. In spiritual life, habit is shameful"--but the cryptic style and the overheated prose in which they are couched often leave the impression of mere posturing or a reaching for effect.A perceptive comparision of four contemporary religious memoirs: Wieseltier's Kaddish, Jonathan Rosen's Talmud and the Internet (which I recommended here), James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, and Garry Wills's Why I Am a Catholic:
Religion, since it isn't science, suffers from the perception that it must be spontaneous and antirationalist, which means that we often settle for rank emotionalism on the subject. Each of these authors, on the other hand, is that rare hybrid, the modern intellectual trained in old-fashioned religious argument. Wieseltier and Rosen practice the Talmudic method, more or less, and mostly avoid the faith question, since it isn't that big a feature of traditional Judaism. Carroll and Wills take it on, because it is important to Catholics. Wills, with his rigor, is especially moving on what Chesterton called ''the mystical minimum,'' a view of being as a divine mystery, ''a creative act by which God continually draws everything up out of the abyss of nothingness.'' God is still as tough a challenge to the mind as anything in the material world, and deserves the same precision.Here is an interesting interview with Wieseltier, also relevant to the purpose of this series, in that he makes a case for the centrality of facility in Hebrew to Jewish education.
This survey of the history of the Kaddish includes several examples of its use in 20th century music, particularly Paul Robeson's rendition in Yiddish of the Berdichever Rebbe's defiant Kaddish, at an Israel solidarity concert in Moscow in 1958 (you know, back in the Mezozoic Age when the Left supported Israel). This is a must read if only for the Berdichever's Kaddish, but it's also a good short primer on the Kaddish's development and use in the liturgy.
A kavannah before saying Kaddish.
Lastly, just for grins, my favorite translation of the Kaddish.
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