Renovating the Soul
SINGER, DAVID
Renovating the Soul Kaddish By Leon Wieseltier Knopf. 591 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by David Singer Editor. "American Jewish Year Book" Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish has been lavishly praised by...
...Whatever the case, it is clear that in today's context saying kaddish centers around the business of getting to the synagogue three times a day...
...No,' I reply, 'the dunces are the ones who don't try...
...Can a woman say kaddish at all...
...His book, written in a crisp, epigrammatic style, is the published version of that journal...
...He smiles at me, with pity in his eyes...
...According to rabbinic law, a convert is regarded as newborn and thus without ties to his biological parents...
...It also led him to a "homecoming" encounter with the riches of Jewish tradition...
...The Jewish way of mourning has turned an absence into a presence...
...After the last kaddish has been said, Wieseltier can only manage, "I kept my promise...
...In exploring these matters, he draws on sources ranging from Nachmanides' The Law of Man in the 13 th century to the responsa (legal rulings) of Rabbi Moses Feinstein in the 20th...
...A workman is standing outside the building...
...The brothers rise with me...
...Even though the convert is no longer related to his father—for a person that has converted is like a child that has been bom —it is nonetheless proper, since his father sired him and brought him into this world and thereby caused him to arrive at the recognition of the truth and to come to abide in the inheritance of the Lord...
...Night shift, huh?' Well yes...
...Another 20th century figure cited by Wieseltier, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, is the spiritual mentor of the Shas Party in Israel...
...Tonight the fulfillment of my obligation does not oppress me, it refreshes me...
...His answer is straightforward and compelling: "Because it is my duty to my father...
...The close bonds that develop among mourners in a given synagogue are effectively captured in Kaddish too...
...When kaddish is over, he will be gone...
...As a personal account of the experience of saying kaddish, Wieseltier's book is very powerful...
...He reveals, for instance, that saying kaddish is a relatively late practice, dating back no further than the 12th century...
...Why, a friend asked, did he choose to say kaddish...
...They have come to say kaddish, but they are not familiar with the words and the customs of the prayer...
...But the bulk of Kaddish is rather differently oriented, since he was also preoccupied with examining the origins and meaning of the mourner's prayer as revealed in rabbinic sources —ancient, medieval and modern...
...He declares impatiently, "this mourner wants to drive his chariot wildly...
...Still, as his period of saying kaddish enters the final stretch, he is filled with dread at the prospect of finishing...
...The trick, as Wiesel tier quickly learned, is staying on the treadmill...
...Still, Yosef, in what Wieseltier labels "one of the great statements of tolerance in modern Judaism," permits the kaddish to be said...
...I was faced with a duty that I refused to shirk, and I was brought near," Wieseltier concludes...
...During a lifetime of attending Orthodox synagogues, I have never once heard a rabbi seriously assert that a mourner is delivering the soul of the deceased from punishment in the netherworld...
...American Jewish Year Book" Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish has been lavishly praised by reviewers, but it is a safe bet that most of them have no real sense of what "saying kaddish" is all about...
...The sounds that they uttered made no sense to them...
...In a personal journal, Wieseltier was free to indulge his scholarly proclivities to the full...
...Yosef deals with the case of a convert to Judaism from Islam who asked if he could say kaddish for his non-Jewish father...
...Does this speak to a process of secularization...
...Wieseltier is forever on the run between the offices of the New Republic and the synagogue, not only because he is saying kaddish but because there are other mourners to whom he feels obligated...
...The issues related to mourning that Feinstein considers include saying kaddish for a father who was a religious denier (he endorses it) and hiring a standin to say the kaddish in one's place (he denounces it...
...They are brothers and they buried their father this morning...
...Newcomers who appear on the scene are warmly welcomed, whatever their background: "The rabbi introduces me to two men...
...As someone "bred to bookishness," Wieseltier delights in his research enterprise, experiencing a sense that "the rabbis [are] passing me down...
...I would despise myself...
...inpublished form, though, his pedantry proves crippling...
...The sheer weight of the material presented, I think, makes the work too long and too dense...
...In classic theological terms, he demonstrates, the kaddish is a form of "rescue' activity: It seeks to shrink the duration and severity of the soul's punishment after the death...
...Or a change in the way the metaphysical realm is pictured...
...A vignette captures the same sense of grateful participation: "Home after the morning prayer, a little before eight...
...Unphilosophically, unreligiously, wildly...
...We're the dunces,' one of them says...
...Feinstem's respons a, Wieseltier tells us, are "legends," a "record of decades of believing Jews, in Russia and then in America, coming to this sophisticated and compassionate and indefatigable rabbi with their problems, and of his solving them...
...The kaddish, in other words, as Wieseltier nicely puts it, represents "spiritual action in a spiritual emergency...
...they are all expedients of love...
...As the end of the kaddish nears," he states openly, "I am scared," and goes on to explain why: "For as long as I have been organizing my life around the kaddish, I have been organizing my life around my father...
...At first, though, the "diligent and doubting son" bridles at the rigid structure of his task...
...Soon it is time to recite the kaddish...
...This striking fact highlights the point that its true importance is not as a verbal formula but as a ritual of mourning...
...The crux of Yosef's argument, as quoted by Wieseltier, makes the conversion itself the basis of a renewed relationship between father and son: "It appears that after the death of a convert's father, and similarly after the death of his mother, it is proper that he say kaddish for the elevation of their souls...
...Nor have I ever encountered an Orthodox mourner who saw himself as engaged in such rescue work...
...He adds: "The pathos of kaddish lies in the magnitude of the helplessness of the dead, in the magnitude of their dependence upon the living.' Rabbinic literature is strongly focused on specifics, and Wieseltier gives them their proper due...
...Can one say kaddish for a stranger...
...Among the individual issues that he deals with are the following: Can a minor say kaddish for a parent...
...This demanding routine wreaks havoc with one's daily schedule, yet it is precisely the effort involved in saying every last kaddish that speaks of love and respect for the person who has died...
...The crucial distinction here is between words and deeds...
...plus such oddities as a convert to Judaism saying kaddish for his non-Jewish parent, and a father ordering his son not to say kaddish for him...
...While kaddish is the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, it makes no mention of death...
...All in all, for Wieseltier it was 11 months well spent...
...Saying kaddish served as a vehicle for expressing his love and respect for his father...
...It occurs to me that delinquency is such a waste of time: all those years spent extenuating, thinking, rethinking, apologizing, refusing to apologize, feeling guilt, hating the feeling of guilt...
...They read a transliteration of the prayer...
...What actually counts in saying kaddish is the discipline of going to the synagogue three times a day for 11 months to recite the prayer...
...That is unfortunate, for he is mining a very rich vein and often uncovers intriguing material...
...Soon, however, Wieseltier finds that "the shul is losing its strangeness forme," that he is becoming a full-fledged member of the kaddish-say ing fraternity...
...Need kaddish be said for a religious martyr...
...But there was so much fidelity, so much humility, in their gibberish...
...His "unexpected fidelity" to this "obscure and arduous practice," the literary editor of the New Republic informs us, turned a "season of sorrow [into] a season of soul-renovation...
...I have lived in a state of suspension, shielded from a fatherless world by a fatherful practice...
...Each additional kaddish said for the deceased, according to this scheme, further elevates the soul from the netherworld, in a process that continues for a period of a year...
...Can kaddish be said for a heretic or a convert...
...Eleven months is a long time, and there are days when Wieseltier can barely muster the energy to go to the synagogue...
...The rabbi asks me to help...
...Ashkenazic-Sephardic differences relating to the kaddish...
...Similarly, there is always someone else at the synagogue ready to make phone calls to gather a minyan, so that Wieseltier can say kaddish...
...In fact, there is a complete disconnect between the two, even in Orthodox circles...
...You can squander a lot of your soul not doing your duty...
...rabbinic resistance to women saying kaddish...
...In a journal that he kept throughout this period, he recorded his experiences as a mourner and his study notes on the history and meaning of the kaddish...
...When his father died in 1996, Wieseltier determined to say "the mourner's kaddish three times daily during the morning service, the afternoon service and the evening service in [an Orthodox] synagogue in Washington and, when I was away from home, in synagogues elsewhere...
...My strict observance of the year of mourning has had the consequence of delaying the return of a normal life...
...Wieseltier's approach to the rabbinic tradition is fully open-ended, leading to a consideration of topics both large and small: the role of the Crusades in precipitating the development of the kaddish...
...Of the 20th century figures who deal with the kaddish, his favorite is Rabbi Feinstein, who arrived on New York's Lower East Side in 1937 and died there in 1986...
...As I watched the brothers struggle with the transliterated prayer, I admired them...
...Because it is my duty to my religion...
...Raised in a traditional Jewish home, Wieseltier moved away from religious observance as an adult...
...In Feinstein's responsa, he observes, "time is erased...
...Wieseltier cites Feinstein's argumentation at length, noting that "all these casuistic turns...
...About one matter Wieseltier is strangely silent: that rescue theology no longer plays a role in saying kaddish...
...One evening after services he muses: "I am delighted to have done my duty...
...the melodrama of modernity is nowhere to be found, and there is a glimpse of Judaism living and working as it lived and worked, without interruption...
...Kaddish is so overstuffed with scholarly minutiae that readers lacking a strong interest in rabbinic literature are almost certain to set it aside...
...Because it would be harder for me not to say kaddish...
...Because the fulfillment of my duty leaves my thoughts about my father unimpeded by regret and undistorted by guilt...
Vol. 81 • December 1998 • No. 14
