Kaddish.

Leon Wieseltier, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. 588pp. $27.50 (cloth).

What is remarkable about Leon Wieseltier's Kaddish - both as a book and as a publishing phenomenon - is its mix of studiousness, irony, passion, and sheer randomness: it returns to a time when scholarship, love, and philosophical reflection were undivided. It is the product of "unsystematic study" - not the study we undertake to convince credential-granters and employers of our mastery, but the study we pursue through pure compulsion. In his forties, long lapsed from Jewish orthodoxy, Wieseltier returned to the synagogue (to the shul, in the homelier Yiddish word he prefers) to say the mourner's kaddish for his father, three times a day for eleven months; puzzled by this taxing cultural imperative, which is neither biblical nor talmudic, he undertook an open-ended search through Jewish literature to find the sources of the practice. The research, like the kaddish itself, was also a memorial to his father and a bulwark against grief; sometimes, too, it was the voice of his grief.

Like the thicket of texts through which he searched, the book is without index or organization; in another kind of society it would attract the same kind of eidetic-memoried fans as The Lord of the Rings, who could turn straight to the story of Rabbi Akiva and the woodcutter, or the tale that those who drink water on the afternoon of the Sabbath are stealing the water of the dead, or the news that "every kaddish freezes hell for an hour and a half." Wieseltier is fascinated by these "grotesqueries of conscience," the "rabbinical hallucinations" that attempt to make moral sense out of the senselessness of death; he is periodically sidetracked from the main investigation by the imaginative caprices of the texts. Yet not altogether sidetracked: each story adds something to the picture. The wicked in Gehenna (in a seventh- or eighth-century text, when the kaddish was simply a prayer said after study and had no connection to mourners) redeem themselves by saying amen to the kaddish said after God's study, ascending from torment by their own assent. In a much later text, the angels around God's throne - who understand only Hebrew - must be hoodwinked by mortals' recitation of the kaddish in Aramaic, so that they will not realize God's woundedness; for God too is a mourner ("every man's death diminishes God," Wieseltier says), and the opening words "magnified and sanctified" are meant to restore and console him. Another text says the soul mourns the body for seven days, for "it cannot quit what it loves"; spirit laments matter, and misses it. Wieseltier's sources are disparate in form and intention - rabbinic responsa, commentaries on commentaries, rhymed philosophical reflections in the manner of Pearl or Chaucer's House of Fame - yet each yields up some necessary knowledge.

Once the mourner's kaddish had taken on more or less its present liturgical usage, in the late Middle Ages, it served a purgatorial function: the deliverance of the father's soul by the son's Jewish learning and diligence. (Or, very occasionally, the daughter's, a debate which Wieseltier follows with interest and sympathy.) Contemporary Jewish sensibility, not strong on the afterlife, sees the kaddish as therapeutic for the living, a way of finding solace in the community and praising even when praise seems impossible; premodern Judaism was flatly supernatural about the purpose and effect of the prayer. Wieseltier both accepts and resists his role as his father's atonement, keeping up the practice with unbending fortitude but arguing with the theory every step of the way. "- He is guilty. - No, he is dead." "There is something remorseless about religion's obsession with remorse." His loyalties remain double: to his tradition and to critical reason.

What he discovers with new force, through both the theory and the practice, as the year of mourning goes on, is the essential incomprehension - the enmity - of classical Judaism for the romantic temperament, or even for the individual's possession of his own feelings. The comprehension of one's own grief is swallowed up in the preoccupation and physical exhaustion of performing the mitzvah (a labor far more demanding for Wieseltier, unaccustomed to attending services three times a day, than it would be for a fully observant Jewish man); one's resentment at the toll it takes is mingled with an increasing gratitude for the tradition - and, of course, with guilt at the thought of defecting from the tradition - and the personal desolation of mourning is overwhelmed (or postponed) by the obligation to get to yet another service and recite yet another kaddish. Though initially Wieseltier is grateful for the intensely structured practice and rather sorry for his sister, who must confront her grief without structure - three months after their father's death, she cannot yet listen to music - he later finds himself simply fatigued. He watches himself appreciate the "entropy" of dust motes in a beam of light, which "defy the teleology" of the Bible on his lap as he reads in shul: he responds to the appeal of this aimlessness, this repose, in the midst of a relentlessly directional system of thought. Watching dancers rehearse in a studio he ruminates that prayer is "practice" in the same sense - a stylized and repetitive action that must become second nature - but adds immediately that we can mistake our second nature for our first, can substitute the mere repetition of the acts for their transformation into a wider usefulness. "The highest object of study is not study. The highest object of movement is not movement. The highest object of Judaism is not Judaism."

But Wieseltier inherits not only the remorselessness of the tradition's demands, but the remorselessness of the history that shaped them. The mourner's kaddish, it turns out, took hold "in Ashkenaz" - in Germany - in the course of the persecutions that followed the Black Death and continued throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So much martyrdom demanded a new memorial practice. In the twentieth century Wieseltier's family puts on the father's headstone not only his name but the names of his brother and sister, who perished under Hitler and have no graves. Perhaps in the end the mourner's kaddish (the orphan's kaddish, as it is literally translated) does accommodate the feelings that arise from such a history, in an austere and hermetic way: it consists entirely of praise where praise is unwarranted. By doing so it insists that our nature, our resting state, is to love our surroundings - that even in times of loss and against our will we tend toward that state; like the blind who are still commanded to bless the new moon, the mourner "must bless what is wonderful even though he cannot see it." Also by consisting entirely of praise, the kaddish obliterates the dead as thoroughly as life has done by going on without them; it is that obliteration that we acknowledge and reinforce when we (still alive: why?) rise to recite their memorial. And perhaps this is as it should be: for as Wieseltier discovers early in his reading, Nahmanides said, "In the entire Torah there is no prohibition against mourning and there is no commandment to be consoled."

CATHERINE MADSEN