Leon Wieseltier

Kaddish

"Against Identity" is a collection of 74 poetic aphorisms confronting the question of identity, subject formation and consequences of decentering subjectivity.

Against Identity

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Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics is a quarterly of essays and poetry from some of the world's most celebrated independent thinkers, leading artists, and up-and-coming literary voices.

Volume I, Issue 1

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his father’s grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner’s kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier’s National Jewish Book Award–winning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man’s urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner’s unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death’s wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier’s Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son’s embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar’s savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer’s revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader. Winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award "An astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile." —The New York Times Book Review

Gustave Courbet

Sarah Faunce

When Leon Wieseltier’s father died in March 1996, he began to observe the rituals of the traditional year of mourning, going daily to the synagogue to recite the Kaddish. Between his prayers and his everyday responsibilities, he sought out ancient, medieval and modern Jewish tests in pursuit of the Kaddish’s history and meaning. And every day he studied, translated and wrote his own reflections on the obscure texts that he found, punctuating his journal with stories about life in his synagogue and his family’s progress through grief. In reflecting upon the fate of his father and of his people, he wrestles with problems of loss and faith, the meaning of tradition, freedom and determinism, and the perplexity of rational religion. ‘Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish, a poignant book prompted by his year of mourning for a particular death, the death of his father, is a contradictory but illuminating journey . . . a profound quest for the origins of the Kaddish prayer’ Daily Telegraph ‘Much more than a personal memoir . . . he speaks wisely about the most important things: about meaning and loss; about death and life; about the nature of ritual and tradition . . . Submitting oneself to [Kaddish’s] process, one discovers that, like the best novels and poems, it illuminates the world’ Times Literary Supplement

Leon Wieseltier

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