Kaddish is the mourner's prayer in Judaism, a prayer which glorifies and sanctifies God's name and makes no mention of death. Yet, for any Jew, however disaffected from the Jewish community, a death in the family - and particularly of a parent - evokes a desire to say Kaddish, often for the full year after the death. So, when Leon Wieseltier's father died, Wieseltier, the highly intellectual literary editor of the New Republic, in some ways a disaffected, or unbelonging, Jew, decided to go back to tradition and to say kaddish for his father.
Morning and evening, for a year, he went to a synagogue (he calls it shul, the Yiddish name for the house of scholarship and prayer) in Washington. This volume is an account of that year. His father had reached America from Europe, where most of his family was slaughtered by the Nazis. In amongst the musings in this extraordinary volume, there are passages that recall that pain with desperate urgency and intensity; the pain of the father, not of the son, as if the son is bearing it now for his departed father.
But Wieseltier has written something far larger than a personal record. This is a mixture of Jewish scholarship, on the history and meaning of kaddish as a prayer, with many diverse rabbinic interpretations on it, and Wieseltier's own reflections on death through performing the ritual - saying kaddish for his father because he wanted to do it.
Some parts of this account seem too particularist, too wholly of traditional Jewish scholarship, to have much to say to a wider non-Jewish audience. But elsewhere, what Wieseltier achieves, in an almost anthological work, is to give a flavour of Jewish spirituality around death. Wieseltier thought abandoning the traditional Jewish practice with which he had grown up in Brooklyn would liberate him in some way, allowing him to roam widely through the cultural and religious identities of others, reading across, one might say. Yet this volume suggests that the richness he was looking for elsewhere, he found within Judaism when his father died. Consciously, he followed the old rituals, but with exploration and thought. Indeed, he almost punishes himself when he finds himself saying kaddish purely as ritual, without thought. As a good Jew should, he requires "kavvanah" of himself - devotion, not rote - and understanding, which for the ultra-intellectual questing Wieseltier means both Jewish and wider scholarship.
Yet an ineffable sadness pervades this volume. Wieseltier is saying kaddish. The prayer is in itself a strange one, with a chequered history. But, underneath all this, there is a personal sense of loss beyond his father's death. The ritual gives shape to his life, but he uses the volume to remind us of those Jews, during the Holocaust, who said kaddish for themselves because there might be no one left to say kaddish for them. He uses the volume to remind us of the vanished world his father left behind, "in 1943, when every day was a martyrdom. In 1943, when my grandparents and my uncle were gunned down in a ravine called Bronica, where wild flowers grow".
Wieseltier knows, at one level, that this is a self-indulgent volume. He describes the period of mourning and grief as narcissistic, and this book is in some ways intensely self-regarding. He does little to introduce the non-Jew to its technicalities. He makes no allowances for those less fascinated with the texts than he is. And yet, within it, there are flashes of such brilliance, flashes of spiritual reality which he achieved from the position of the erstwhile outsider, that it becomes a spiritual journal of note.
He says himself: "I was a pariah until I became a mourner". The outsider, with great scholarship, is somewhat born again. A tough critic would have asked him to take longer after the end of the year of mourning, to examine his account from a distance, to remove what is too personal, to explain the obscure, and perhaps to be more generous with his personal reflections. For the scholarly details pall for some, whilst Wieseltier at his best inspires Jew and non-Jew alike, and challenges us to think differently about death and mourning.
Julia Neuberger is a rabbi and Chief Executive of the King's Fund, London