December 9, 2011
Kaddish
Judaismadminby Leon Wieseltier Leon Wieseltier, the Literary Editor of The New Republic, has written an intensely personal, intensely intellectual, and very readable memoir of his year saying kaddish for his father. Wieseltier was raised in an Orthodox home, but left the active practice of Judaism in his twenties. When he returned to shul to say kaddish, he found himself virtually ignorant about the ritual. So he spent the year studying the original rabbinic sources, from Talmudic to modern. Far from wallowing in sorrow, he used his father’s death as a […]