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PAUL SHAVIV:
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Mourning every morning

As the baby-boomers slide inexorably into middle age, so their literature changes. In Jewish terms, the Jewish "how-to‘ books of the 1970s and 1980s have given way to the ’how-it-felt-to" genre, illustrating both the readiness of the current generation to observe Jewish ritual, and in a very American way, their equal readiness to describe their feelings about it in great detail.

Given the demographic involved, it is no surprise that the rituals of death and mourning figure high on the list of preoccupations and practices.

Ari Goldman was for 20 years a reporter onfor the New York Times, specializing for much of that period in religion. He is now a professor of journalism at Columbia. In this slim volume, built around the year of mourning he observed after his father died in 1999 (the day after Ari turned 50), there are really several narratives intertwined.

The first is his account of his father and his family. His parents divorced when he was a child, and both subsequently remarried. We are guided through all of the difficult emotions that bubble to the surface when a son suffers the loss of a father — the affection, the loss, the guilt, the memories. As a child of divorced parents, we hear too of issues of distance, of divided loyalty and of tension. The nuclear Jewish family here portrayed — nowadays certainly not untypical — involves parents, step-parents and siblings all over North America and Israel.

Goldman’s commitment to saying kaddish for his father leads him to close involvement with the minyan at Ramath Orah synagogue near the Columbia campus in Upper Manhattan. Ramath Orah, housed in a former church, was founded during the Second World War by refugees from Luxembourg, of which its name is an approximate Hebrew translation.

The second narrative is a painstaking account of how the precarious minyan — and with it the Jewish institutional presence in the neighborhood — depends so much on the small but determined good deeds of a group of individuals. It is a day-by-day, almost blow-by-blow, phone-call-by-phone-call account of how the minyan is kept up, and the special camaraderie of the group involved.

IN THE third narrative, Ari Goldman is aware that he is a spokesman and chronicler of an endangered species — Jews of traditional background and of traditional sympathies who have been left behind by the currents of contemporary Orthodoxy. Out of Manhattan, seeking a minyan to say kaddish while on holiday, he is ostracized at an Orthodox bungalow colony in the Catskills, when the worshipers identify him as a Yeshiva University graduate and a New York Times correspondent and author. It is not clear which they found more threatening.

On the other hand, at a Satmar community a couple of kilometers down the road he found a warm, hospitable welcome and even a soulmate of sorts. Yet even there, he is aware of the ever-widening(my phrase) gap between the "old" Orthodoxy and the new.

"Ever since my Sabbath-observant great-grandfather opened a store in downtown Hartford in 1898,‘ he writes, ’we have been a family destined to struggle with the outside world and not cocoon ourselves in isolated communities."

Living a Year of Kaddish is a carefully-documented series of cameos — which, I have the feeling,. This reviewer had the feeling that an enterprising editor, perhaps with an eye on the success of Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish, had encouraged the author to expand from what could have been a long essay into a short book. It does not always flow, and some of his very brief descriptive chapters could have been edited out.

Some parts of the text sit uncomfortably between reporting and reflection. Yet it explores and articulates many aspects of family, death, mourning and community, as many people will understand them. Jewish spiritual autobiography is unusual. Many recent examples have been slightly wide-eyed accounts by ba’alei teshuva, or returnees to the faith. This is exactly the opposite — it is a relaxed, urban, human and humanistic traditionalism, written out of love, and showing how observance of ritual and prayer, combined with community support, can be deeply engaging and rewarding.

This account of hisGoldman’s kaddish-saying is, in a way, an account of simple community rediscovered - good and decent warm, fuzzy feelings enjoyed around shared tradition, dating from a time before Orthodoxy discovered ritual militancy.

In an increasingly exclusionary Orthodoxy, Ari Goldman refuses to be excluded ("I’d be the bad boy of Orthodoxy, I figured, rather than the tzaddik of Conservative Judaism‘). His books, including this one, are honest, well-observed testimonies to that difficult ’struggle with the outside world," also showing — intentionally or not — that not every Orthodox journey has to end with the writer discovering the blissful truth of the haredi world.

— The writer is director of education at the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto.