kADDISH

kaddish

 

 

I have finished reading Leon Wieseltier's book Kaddish (Vintage Books 1998). Wieseltier (pronounced WEE-sel-teer) is the literary editor of The New Republic.

A kaddish (pronounced KAH-dish) is a short Jewish praising God; it is said at each service. A form of this prayer is known as the Mourner's Kaddish. It is said at the end of the service for and by mourners. This book is about the author's year of mourning his father's death. In Jewish tradition the mourner is required to go to the three daily services and say the kaddish for eleven months. It is then said each year on the anniversary of the death.

The author writes a kind of memoir of those eleven months. His personal experience is interwoven with long commentaries from mostly medieval writings about the origin and meaning of the mourner's kaddish. It's a fascinating learning experience to read this extended meditation on life, death, faith, doubt, tradition, and family. I felt like I was on the journey with him. The author is not a 'religious Jew.' He is a 'secular Jew.' That is, he follows the Jewish tradition and rituals, but he is really a skeptic. He wrestles with faith and doubt. He comes close to the edge of faith. Being a Jewish scholar he understands the ins and outs of centuries of Jewish debate about minute questions. I sense some kind of 'faith' at work in his ruminations. Through his obedience to the required ritual of kaddish he seems to me to be submitting himself to some large Wisdom.

The kaddish serves as a vehicle for dealing with grief, sadness and memory. Religious ritual does that. Forms of Christianity that try to deny the place of ritual really do not succeed in doing so. Even my fundamentalist Southern Baptist upbringing which swore off ritual had its own form of ritual. The spontaneous prayer that we heard every Sunday and Wednesday night were as ritualistic as anything I've heard in a Catholic Church. You could expect the same intonation and the same wording every week. The 'invitation' at the end of worship every Sunday was a ritual par excellence—almost like a sacrament.

I found a great deal of insight in Wieseltier's book. He says, "If God could be seen, we would do nothing but look. We would squander our lives on the contemplation of God." (p. 420) After trying to understand a text by Ovadiah, he sends it to a scholar in Jerusalem who writes back and says, "I don't know." The author then says, "When a learned man says that he does not know, you have learned something."

I like this passage: "I was walking in the park, along the creek. The light was silver. A goldfinch hovered above my path a few yards ahead. The pages of a broken book drifted along the surface of the water. I was pierced—by what, I cannot say. I would like to say, but I cannot say. And I do not mind that I am lacking in words. The unsayable is precious to me. I do not wish to be only a creature of language, one of those 'articulate' people to whom the world is always transparent, who can always tell you what is really going on. Sometimes I do not know what is really going on, and the clumsiness of my expression must vouch for the exertion of my mind. Anyway, I cannot conceive of the transparency of the world." (p. 328)

After reading this book I feel more human. That is, more spiritual. When someone writes an honest, authentic book, the reader has the opportunity to see into a soul. And that kind of vision takes one into the heart of God. Perhaps God treasures honest skepticism more than pious phrases that are mouthed by bigoted 'Christians.'