I have had a very strict self-imposed rule to not enter books into my Book Journal unless I had read each and every page, but like all rules, this one was meant to be bent and perhaps even broken.

Such is the case with Leon Wielseltier’s “Kaddish” a somewhat opaque and challenging 540 page exploration of the Jewish prayer of mourning.  According to orthodox modern practice, the Kaddish is said by mourners three times a day during the first year after the death of a father, mother, sister, brother, or child.  It is also said each year on the anniversary of a death, a yahrtzeit.

Wielseltier’s father, an observant Jew, died in 1996 and Wielseltier, who had become lax in his observation of Jewish customs and prayer, dedicated himself to honoring his father’s memory by reciting the Kaddish in shul three times a day for one year.  That enormous commmitment led him to an even more enormous effort to understand the source and history of this prayer for the dead which strangely never mentions death, loss, or the person’s name.  Rather it repeatedly ‘magnifies and sanctifies’ God’s name.

The book is written with Wielseltier’s personal observations and comments interspersed with painfully detailed commentary about the rabbis’ views of Kaddish.  He concludes that the mourner’s kaddish was developed by Franco-German Jewry sometime in the 12th C, in the generations after Rashi, although the story of Rabbi Akiva in the 11th C may be credited with the origin of the prayer.  Akiva is said to have found the son of a damned man, converted him, and led him in the prayer that has become the Kaddish.

In between the author’s exploration of the origins of the Kaddish there are long sections in excruciating detail in which the rabbinic commentaries debate issues like ‘can you drink on the Sabbath’, and hence, my inability to stay the course with this book.

In summary, I found Wielseltier’s book, on this my third attempt to read it, unreadable.  However, I did get further into it than on the prior two tries, reaching page 140 before I gave up.  Interestingly, the review of the book in the 1998 LA Times and Edward Hirsch’s review in the September 28, 1998 New Yorker, (which I’ve been schlepping around for the last 28 years!) as well as my Rabbi’s comments when I asked if he had read the book, were all glowingly positive.  Perhaps I’m just losing my ability to attend to difficult subjects?  Hirsch wrote “It is a brilliant book—odd, dizzying, learned, racked.”  

At any rate, I recited the Kaddish every Shabbos for a year after my father died in 1995, and I continue to observe the Yahrtzeits of my parents, in-laws, and sister each year, so the prayer and its observance remain an important part of my life, even if I couldn’t finish Wieseltier’s book.