Living with Our Dead

March 15, 2024
A collection of essays meditating on the relationship between life and death. As one of the only female rabbis in France, Horvilleur, the leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France, is accustomed to playing a part in the transition between life and death. "Yet as the years go by," she writes, "it increasingly seems to me that the profession closest to mine has a name: storyteller." In the 10 essays that make up her latest book, the author thrives in this role, interweaving biblical stories with those about the lives and deaths of ordinary people, including a woman who planned and attended her own funeral, and public figures such as Simone Veil. Though some of the pieces are fairly anemic, their loose ends getting lost in the complex combination of stories, they all aim to show how life and death are more closely related than we like to think. "Life makes its presence felt in the very moment that precedes our dying and until the end seems to be saying to death that there is a way of coexisting," writes Horvilleur, reflecting on the first time she saw a dead body. "Perhaps this cohabitation doesn't in fact need to wait for death. Throughout our existence, without our being aware of it, life and death continually hold hands and dance." Drawing from her experiences as a secular rabbi, the author shares significant wisdom, illuminating well-known biblical stories and translating even the most difficult experiences of loss--e.g., the death of a child. "Death escapes words, precisely because it signals the end of speech," Horvilleur writes. In these thought-provoking, occasionally disjointed essays, she shows how it is possible to find language even for that which seems indescribable. Horvilleur's deep reflections on mortality remind us that "in death a place can be left for the living."

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June 10, 2024

Horvilleur, a Parisian rabbi and self-proclaimed storyteller, recounts her experience in living and working with the dead. A former medical student, she had her first experience with the dead when she was studying anatomy in Jerusalem. Even then, Horvilleur contemplated the coexistence of life and death, and the stories that can be learned from the dead that accompany them. Her book tells 11 true stories of lives and periods of mourning that she has witnessed or lived through. Horvilleur so beautifully gives life to her dead that readers will feel they had known them personally. In Hebrew, the word for cemetery is "beit chaim," which translates as "the house of life" or "the house of the living." What better way to show the Hebrew relationship with death than to tell the stories and celebrate the lives of those who have passed? VERDICT This book will appeal to readers interested in contemplating the relationship between life and death from an academic or psychological point of view, and those who are interested in a Jewish perspective on death and loss.--Britt Fechtman

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