Kaddish

Rating:
Summary: Listening to friend may teach your heart
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A BLESSING FOR LIFE
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and challenging
Review: Having contemplated issues similar to the author's (but without the academic credentials to match), I was deeply touched by this work. The book not only presents a broad survey of the rich literature on Jewish mourning ; the author taps into both a personal tragedy and into his vast erudition in order to make painfully relevant observations about God, religious belief, historical realities and personal obligations. And he devotes 500+ pages to achieve the feat. The style is whimsical as the pages jump from legal responsa to personal anecdotes to customs literature to pithy proverbs and then back. The author respects and deeply loves his traditions, even as he cannot get himself to believe in many fundametal Jewish doctrines. This reader, though, didn't mind the challenge to religious faith. It is good to ask why one believes. I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: scholarly, pedantic,even, yet somehow emotional too
Review: I could not wait to read this book. And I could not put it down. I was filled with awe at the scholarship of Jewish people when the rest of Europe was illiterate and uncivilized. I was amazed by the compassionate (and occasionally not so compassionate) views the rabbis had towards mourners and mourning. I learned more than I had thought I could about this odd practice, which Wieseltier made odder still. I agree with all the comments about narcissism, pomposity and the like becuase the author epitomizes those traits and others like them but in my opinion the book transcends its author's limitations and was utterly fascinating in its breadth and depth. As it maddened me at times and lost me in its obscurity at others I was among those who couldn't put it down. By having slogged through this mighty tome, I felt that my kaddish for my own father was enriched.

And in the end, with all the pedantry and scholasticism and weight, the author ends in a spiritual and emotional way.

I imagined him having a relationship with his father in death, through the creation of this book, that he could not have during his father's life. And to that, amen.

Rating:
Summary: For lack of a minyan, the world
Review: In the second week of saying Kaddish for my mother, a dear friend mentioned something he learned from this book. So I started to read it. After 40 pages I concluded that this was the single worst book I had ever read. Other reviewers have invoked the author's pomposity, self-absorption and smugness that comes through in the text. As an erstwhile professor of Jewish studies, I found much more troubling the awful tasteless scholarship - a little bit of this - a little bit of that. Can I say I found the book revolting? The way W. tells the story of how the Kaddish came to be instituted in the 12th century made me want to stop saying the prayer and run out of the synagogue. Early on W. says he prefers not to call the Jewish house of worship a synagogue. Rather he wants to call it a shul. Huh? It was downhill from there, believe me. I prefer not to call this a book. I'd rather just call it a DOA. I'm saying Kaddish for this flop.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, thoughtful and deeply felt
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Remarkable Book, but Who is It For?
Review: Leon Wieseltier has created a singular work, exploring 2,000 years of Jewihs tradition and thought about death and mourning in the aftermath of his own father's death. The breadth of his knowlegde is amazing, and all the more so given that he is something of a non-believer. As a religious Jew, I found his discoveries and his re-examination of his own faith to be moving.

The work has two flaws. The first is its length. And while you can excuse its length as being a product of the vast amount of lore and law he sifted through, he occasionally rambles and jumps off the topic.

The other flaw is that I just can't iamgine too many people wanting to read this. If you're more devout than I, you might find his agnosticism offputing. If you're of a secular bent or not Jewish, why would you want to read this at all? That such a work got published is a sign that Jewish philosophy is part of the mainstream. But I wonder how many people are like myself and have the patience and curiosity to dive into this book. Maybe it should have been more accessible. Or maybe it's best that some books make the readers work to learn something, the way the author did in writing this.

If you are of the right patience and of the right religous bent, however, tead this and cherish its beauty.

Rating:
Summary: For lack of a minyan, the world
Review: Religion prescribes, the heart follows what it knows best. I put down this book after a few choice lines began to move me. Will I pick it up again. Yes.

It moved me to write a brief dirge of my own:

The dogma surrounding "proper" recital of the Kaddish mirrors the Kaddish itself. In the stern and meaningless dictum that one surround oneself with ten strangers (a "minyan"), that helpless submission to authority which the prayer itself articulates is acted out through a grim farce. Ten strangers bowing, muttering, departing. Why not a churchful of Christians singing hymns to what "surpasseth understanding"? That a solitary rewording of the most ancient prayer to the spirits of the departed should have no worth, while a group robotic recitation of guttural sounds in a language that does not flood up from the heart should, and for one stipulated year, rescue my dear dad's soul from what I helplessly fear, is ludicrous.

Ginsberg was right. The Kaddish is what you make it, how you say it, and the value of your particular Kaddish is not for the world to judge.

May I be the first to rate this review useless, but not the last to praise Wieseltier's fine book.

Rating:
Summary: Kaddish is an amazing philosphical meditation
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Moving and learned reflection at times
Review: The reactions to this book are extreme with many people deploring the author's pomposity and self- indulgence and others finding his reflections deep and moving. I read the book with a strong sense of its being a sincere effort to understand how to truly mourn for a parent. I did however sense what one reviewer on Amazon a Mr.Wexler pointed out, that the author says little about who his father really was, shows no great personal connection to him. I too in truth was bothered by the question of making use of a religious rite, or participating in it when one shows an absence of faith in the religion itself. And this raising the real question of what we actually are doing when we are saying Kaddish. If we are not trying to lift up the person's soul, if we do not believe that G-d is truly listening to us then what are we doing?
When I said Kaddish for my father it led me into deeper and deeper connection with the Jewish community , and I would even dare to say brought me closer to G-d. People are different and there is no reason the author of this book should necessarily have gone through a Teshuvah experience in saying Kaddish. But in a way that is what the Tradition truly demands. And that is one aspect of truly honoring and respecting the memory of a parent.
I appreciate the many deep meanings found in the author's explorations but I would have been more positive toward the work had I sensed it was in some way moving toward being a real religious example for others.