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 highly acclaimed 'Kaddish,' the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by the 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.
