וקראתי שם הספר קב הישרA Kav of 102

va-karati shem ha-sefer Kav ha-YasharIn Gamatria ↗

One hundred and two chapters, sifted clean, to straighten a heart.

Kaidanover begins with numbers. Moses prayed 515 prayers to enter the land, the value of va'etḥanan, and the author's own Yiddish name, Hirsh, also counts 515, so he pours out his prayer in the same measure. He names the book Kav HaYashar for two reasons. First, it holds 102 chapters, the value of his holy name Tzvi, which equals kav; and ha-yashar is Hirsh with its letters turned around. Second, the book is a kav that is clean, like flour sifted through thirteen sieves, meant to straighten a crooked heart: open rebuke and hidden love, with proofs from the Zohar and the Sages. He wrote it after enemies stripped him of everything and he left his homeland for his father-in-law's house in Frankfurt, holding nothing but this book.

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