Living a Year of Kaddish: A Memoir [Paperback]

This exploration of the emotional and spiritual aspects of spending a year in mourning will resonate with anyone who has lost a loved one—from the author of The Search for God at Harvard.

His candid, searching book ... breaks our heart.  —The New York Times Book Review

Ari Goldman describes how his year in mourning for his father affected him as a son, husband, father, and member of his community. Through the daily recitation of kaddish, Goldman discovered that he could connect with and honor his father and his mother in a way that he could not always do during their lifetimes. And in his daily synagogue attendance, he found his fellow worshipers to be an unexpected source of strength, wisdom, and comfort.ARI L. GOLDMAN is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and was a reporter for The New York Times from 1973 to 1993. He lives in New York City with his wife and children.Chapter 1

The last time I saw my father was in August 1999, one month before he died. I was in Israel on university business, mapping out a trip to the Holy Land as part of a spring seminar that I teach at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. At that point, I hadn’t seen my dad in a year and I could tell immediately that his health had deteriorated.

My father was a vigorous man who, curiously, became more relaxed and more adventurous with age, especially after he moved to Jerusalem in 1992. Six days a week he went to a daf yomi class in the Orthodox neighborhood of Geulah, a short drive from his home. Daf yomi is a system of study in which a folio page of Talmud is studied each day; at that rate, the entire Talmud (all 2,711 pages) is covered in a little over seven years. For my dad, daf yomi was part intellectual, part devotional (the stulÃ#