Kaddish.

Leon Wieseltier Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 588 pp.

Dennis O'Brien

On March 24, 1996 (Nisan 5, 5756), Leon Wieseltier's father died. "One of the most dreaded eventualities in a man's life has overtaken me," he writes, "and what do I do. I plunge into books! I can see that this is bizarre. It is also Jewish. Anyway, it is what I know how to do." Dining the succeeding year, the son steadfastly participated in the traditional mourner's kaddish owed to a father. But just how traditional is kaddish? And what does all this ritual amount to after all?

Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, "plunges into books" to answer these questions. The kaddish tradition, he discovers, is late, hardly biblical. What does it mean? According to the extensive, expansive, exhausting commentary of centuries of rabbis, kaddish "acquits" the soul of the father through the action of the son, delivering the father from the pains of Gehenna (hell) to various levels of heavenly reward. (The role of mothers and daughters is only glanced at in the rabbinical literature.) Wieseltier: "Do I really believe these stories about the souls of the dead descending and ascending, this pornography of reward and punishment?"

Kaddish is a lengthy - 588-pages worth - meditation on death and its meaning for the living. It is also extraordinary. The bulk of the text consists of Wieseltier's frantic search for rabbinical enlightenment. (In my thesaurus, "frantic" is paired with "excited," "transported," "desperate," "passionate," "ecstatic," "furious"; "search" is paired with "rummage." One might also have described the text as "ecstatic rummage.") Starting with Nahmanides, "the religious genius of Spanish Jewry in the thirteenth century," Wieseltier calls up an uncountable assemblage of rabbis from Akiva (who seems to be the source of the kaddish custom) through Maimonides, Rashi, Joseph Karo, Elaezar ben Judah of Worms - "the influential pietist and jurist of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries" known as "the Perfumer" - and on and on. Threaded through Wieseltier's mustering and quarreling with the rabbis, there are personal comments about the ups and downs of going to shul day after day, feelings generated by the ritual, the seasons of the year in Washington, D.C., the sadness of his mother whose parents were killed by the Nazis, so never properly interred or recollected in the customary prayers. Rather like Hammarskjold's Markings - for all its bulk, Kaddish is also a great work of and for meditation - Wieseltier rises above his scholastic excursus to offer pungent apothegms: "Who needs a realist in a prayer shawl? There is nothing less edifying than a godly man who knows the score."

But in the end Wieseltier is some sort of "realist," he really cannot "believe" the godly stories of the rabbis. Why, then, this determination to say kaddish? He sums it up in a profound paradox: "I believe because I know that I will die; I do not believe because I know that I will die: both propositions have sense, have dignity. Thoughts in a downpour...on the way to shul." One might say that Wieseltier's book is in every way a "downpour." There is the downpour of death itself, the drowning despair of the common lot; there is the downpour of humanity's prayers, prophecies, and musings about death - among which the rabbinical tradition is among the most significant. There is the downpour of Wieseltier's commentary, exegesis, meditation, anguish in a very, very long book.

Obviously, Wieseltier's volume is a deep excursus into Jewish thought; does it have any special relevance to Catholic readers? Many, but I would cite two which struck this reader in particular. Wieseltier is deeply Jewish in turning to the rabbis. Judaism is, when all is said and done, "rabbinical Judaism," for it is the rabbis who codified, preserved, and forwarded the experience of ancient Israel. It is worth comparing "rabbinical Judaism" with what seems to be present-day "pontifical Catholicism." Wieseltier's book is lengthy in part because the rabbis do not agree. While there is always deference to learned predecessors, there is often an edge of difference and complexity. Wieseltier on a commentary by Rabbi Moellin (sixteenth century) on the issue of whether locals or strangers have preference in saying kaddish: "[I]n this single text, I have been taught to appreciate inclusiveness for reasons of principle, exclusiveness for reasons of principle, inclusiveness for practical reasons, exclusiveness for practical reasons. Such is the rabbinical imagination. It must picture all the eventualities. To know the right answer, it must know the world." Wieseltier's commentary on tradition is an implicit critique of any tradition of pontifical certainty: "What is tradition without confusion? But I don't mind confusion. It is an existential excess, a measure of vitality. A tradition that is completely transparent, is a tradition that is over."

As noted, Wieseltier remains a "realist" when it comes to any of the "supernatural" stories which might justify kaddish. Kaddish is not a prayer for the soul of the dead as in the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. Rather, the fact that a son performs kaddish "acquits" the father's soul because the son's piety has been "caused" by the good instruction of the father. A son's kaddish is a father's good deed. Wieseltier regards the acquittal scenario as a "metaphysical absurdity." Kaddish has no transcendental effect, but it does signal loyalty to family and Jewish history; the strange stories of that history must, therefore, be encountered with some appreciation. "Why strain the mind, when you can strain the imagination."

"Demythologizing" the rabbinical stories often seems necessary and appropriate, but just how far can such a divergence from the plain text be taken? Wieseltier asks himself that question: "There is no point taking shelter in the multiplicity of meanings. For among the many meanings of these words is their literal meaning. What to do about the plain sense of the prayers?" In Catholic thought there is the principle, lex orandi, lex credendi: as we pray, so do we believe. Faith is the child of prayer, not the other way round as is often supposed. I remain uneasy, then, with saying kaddish with such determination and yet having no belief however vague and mysterious linking the actual living and the actual dead. In the Christian Easter story, whatever else Resurrection may mean, it would be empty if it meant nothing to the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Kaddish has been hailed by critics and rightly so. I did discover on the Internet a disgruntled reader: "This is a self-indulgent, long-winded waste of time. The man's father died: I am sorry for him. But does the death of a family member excuse any kind of self-indulgent, pseudophilosophical nonsense?" Kaddish is a very long, ruminative, digressive work. Self-indulgent? Claudius chides Hamlet: "Tis sweet and commendable on your nature, Hamlet,/To give these mourning duties to your father,/But you must know that your father lost a father,/That father lost, lost his.../But to persevere/In obstinate condolement is a course/Of impious stubbornness." Though kaddish for the individual mourner is strictly limited to a year, our religious traditions do not heed Claudius's common sense, but go on, and on, as in this magnificent meditation, puzzling and fretting and praying, seeking, like Hamlet, a moral story for death. Wieseltier: "What death really says is: think."

Dennis O'Brien is president emeritus of the University of Rochester. His most recent book is All the Half-Truths about Higher Education (University of Chicago).