I started Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier this week. It’s about his explorations into that mourning prayer following the death of his father. My brother gave it to me a few years ago.
I’m only starting out — about 70 pages into its 574, but much of it is sorta epigrammatic, so it’s not a long slog — and it’s helping me formulate questions about faith, prayer and language. It also yielded this wonderful paragraph during this morning’s reading:
I have read of people whose lives are transfigured in an instant. I do not believe that such a transformation can happen to me. For what changed those people was not only the instant, but also their subsequent fidelity to the instant. This is the paradox of revelation. It disrupts the order of things and then depends upon it.
Without tradition, a revelation is merely an epiphany. It can inspire nothing more than art.
That is lovely and makes me want to read the book…
One day you need to read the books of Aryeh Kaplan. They’re also epigrammatic. You can find them all at Tuvia’s place; none cost more than $10. “If you were God” is like the phenomenolgy of Judaism.