KADDISH. By Leon Wieseltier. Knopf. 588 pp. $27.50

The death of a parent is supposed to bring you face to face, as nothing else can, with the realities of time. When Leon Wieseltier’s father died, the event, though not unexpected, plunged him backward in time and into the mysteries of his own tradition. Determined to honor his father with a proper Kaddish, the ritual Jewish observance of a year of daily mourning, Wieseltier found himself in synagogue two or three times a day, immersed in customs and laws from which he had long kept his distance. Why was he doing it? What could be the legal or theological basis for this enigmatic custom, in which the name of God is obsessively "magnified and sanctified," and death, mourning, and sorrow are never mentioned?

Torn between these questions and the certainty that he was doing the right, the only, thing, Wieseltier turned to the tradition itself for help. The result is a reader’s diary of his journey down the byways of Jewish law, of Talmudic and rabbinic commentary and arcana, the "sea" of Jewish tradition about which the rabbis say, "Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it." This is no mere narrative of the sort that has become familiar: the secular Jew returning to the fold, or the untrained Jew becoming entranced late in life with the richness of Torah, Talmud, and ritual observance. Wieseltier was trained rigorously in all those things as a youth and gave them up only later to become a journalist and public intellectual (he is literary editor of the New Republic). Unlike the many who "return," the author starts with the tools to read and navigate the sources.

Perhaps more striking, he has a feel for the meandering, spiraling form of these voluminous sources, in which rabbis jump from century to century and from topic to topic, multiplying distinctions and piling cases upon cases. This cadence Wieseltier manages, rather remarkably, to reproduce, letting his reading and the calendar pull him from medieval folktale to Enlightenment response, from philosophical aperçu to ritual prescription to outright flight of fancy. Wondering why mourners all say the Kaddish in unison rather than following a leader, Wieseltier finds a 19th-century Moravian rabbi citing a 16th-century Egyptian rabbi’s account of an incident in which one mourner, vying for the leadership role, punched another in the face. Dipping into the mystics, he stumbles on an enchanting line of commentary that says the Kaddish is intended by the mourners to console God himself for the delay of redemption—and that it is said partly in Aramaic to keep it private from the angels, who do not understand that tongue!

The result comes as close to the feel of studying Talmud as the modern layperson without extensive Jewish education is likely to get. It’s a lovely excursion, threaded through with the mysterious beauty of the Kaddish itself, a prayer that another writer, Allen Hoffman, once described as "the building-blocks of the universe rumbling against one another as their names are called."

—Amy E. Schwartz