Kaddish

ISBN: 0375703624

Author: Wieseltier, Leon

Condition: Used

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 fathers grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourners kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltiers 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 mans 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 mourners unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in deaths wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltiers Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a sons embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholars savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writers revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader.