More than praise: a review of Living with Our Dead

The paradox of a thin book is that it can be compact. The weight of the words feels more important and heavier when there are fewer of them; every word and sentence has more work to do. If a book like this is successful, like Living with our dead that is, the length of the chapters bears no relation to the strength and depth of the writing.

Delphine Horvilleur is a French rabbi who leads a congregation in Paris. In this book she tells the stories of eleven people, most of whom she attended the funerals of. But it is more than just a collection of eulogies. Each chapter has a different theme, and as the book unfolds, readers encounter different aspects of Jewish history and learn about the diverse lives French Jews lead.

She writes about a ‘Birkenau girl’ who survived the concentration camp as a teenager and went on to become the first female President of the European Parliament, a beloved psychoanalyst and writer who was murdered in the Second World War. Charlie Hebdo a magazine shooting, and a young boy whose grieving brother asks inscrutable questions at the funeral. With both an accessible style and references to Jewish texts and Hebrew etymologies, this book should become an instant classic, sharing shelf space with that of Harold Kushner. When bad things happen to good people.

At the funeral of an elderly woman who survived Auschwitz, only one mourner is present: the woman’s son. Horvilleur’s job as rabbi at this point is “simply to talk about this woman to the same man who had told me everything I now knew about her.” Yet she gives as much care to this woman’s eulogy as she does to those whose funerals draw large crowds. Later, she reflects on what makes this particular tribute so meaningful:

What I did was translate his words into my own language so that he would hear them differently. . . . I don’t think I had ever understood my role as a celebrant in a cemetery so well: to guide the mourners, not to teach them something they don’t know yet, but to translate what they have told me so that they in turn can actually do it. to belong It.

One role of the rabbi, she notes, is to create a dialogue between the words the mourners say and their “ancestral tradition,” to serve as a kind of intermediary.

The chapter she writes on the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, entitled “Israel,” is both a reflection on Rabin’s assassination and a brief introduction to Zionism and the Hebrew language. She notes that her title as a female rabbi in French “rabbi”, which is a homonym for the Prime Minister’s name. This is not surprising, she says, because “Hebrew is always polyglot.” Even the Hebrew word for religion, thatis a Persian word. Israel, like the Hebrew language, brings together disparate people around a common heritage: “With the memory of the exile intact, this land will teach you to love an Other whom you will never fully understand or possess.” Horvilleur concludes the chapter by reflecting on the revival of Israel’s ancient language as she hears her son speak it, marveling at “the way what we think has almost disappeared can be reborn elsewhere. Blessed are you, O Lord, who brings the dead to life.”

A particularly moving chapter tells the story of Ariane, a friend whose children are the same age as Horvilleur’s, who is diagnosed with brain cancer in middle age. Horvilleur connects her friend’s life and death to that of the biblical patriarch Jacob, whose family had to prove to him that they would continue his legacy. As he was dying, according to Genesis Rabbah 98:4, Jacob’s children cried out, “Hear O Israel” (Deuteronomy 6:4), and he responded. She writes,

This is the solemn promise Jews make at the moment of death: to integrate something of the deceased’s life into their own, to unite with what they will become. They say to the dying: ‘Child of Israel, listen to what parts of you will continue to live in us, connected to us.
forever.”

Incorporating some of the values ​​of the dead into the lives of the living is a bold and reassuring assurance of a legacy, as Horvilleur shows in this chapter.

Horvilleur writes in the introduction that after carrying out a funeral she cannot go straight home from the cemetery. She first goes to a café or shop, or something else ‘elsewhere’. Why? “I create a symbolic airlock between death and my home. There is no question of bringing death home.” This raises a question: why write a book that focuses on the very element of human existence that it doesn’t want to get too close to?

In an interview with TabletHorvilleur says she wrote the book during the COVID pandemic, “the time when death was all around us.” (The French-language edition was published in 2021.) In it she writes about the effect of the pandemic on society: “Death reminded us that it had never really disappeared, that it had taken its rightful place, that our own power lay in in choosing the words and gestures we would say at the moment it wanted to show itself. By guiding us through the lexicon of those words and gestures, Horvilleur shows how they enable the living to move forward with hope and resilience.