ABSTRACT
The practice of reciting the mourner's kaddish seems to have begun in the years just after the Crusades, when a superabundance of mourners led to the tradition of linking personal grief with the collective grief of the Jewish people. The founding myth of the kaddish is the medieval story of Rabbi Akiva found in Mahzor Vitry. Take, for example, the question of whether a woman maysay kaddish, a question whose true import is felt, Wieseltier shrewdly observes, as soon as we substitute the word "daughter" for "woman". Leon Wieseltier himself is a mourner for whom death is oblivion; what he believes in is not immortality, but posterity, "the version of immortality that reason can accept, that tradition can count on". But in Wieseltier's case the tribute is magnified by the year of concentrated study of the kaddish that he was reciting, study that sometimes competed with the recitation itself.
