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Most of us tend to avoid talking or reading about death. So it was a surprise to me that a book of reflections on this uncomfortable subject by a French rabbi would become an international bestseller.
Delphine Horvilleur’s “Living with Our Dead” is a series of 11 short and deeply personal essays that draw both from her years of conducting funerals and from the wisdom of Jewish thought and practice. The book has been released in languages ranging from Romanian to Korean before emerging in English in May in a fine translation by Lisa Appignanesi.
Horvilleur is one of a handful of female rabbis in France and a leader in the country’s Liberal Jewish movement. Her book is not only emphatically Jewish but also written in a particularly French context, offering the American Jewish reader a balance of the familiar and unfamiliar.
One chapter is devoted to eulogizing Elsa Cayat, a Jewish psychologist killed in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, an event that looms large in French memory but has largely evaporated from the American consciousness. Another chapter focuses on the passing a year apart of French feminist political leader Simone Veil and writer and filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens, whose long friendship commenced when they were imprisoned in Birkenau.
A particularly powerful section focuses on Sarah, a Holocaust survivor whose son is the only person attending her funeral. Horvilleur connects Sarah’s experience to that of her own grandmother Sarah, also a survivor of Auschwitz and part of a vanishing generation that endured so much.
The book’s final segment brings Horvilleur to the Westhoffen Jewish cemetery in Alsace, where more than 100 gravestones were toppled or defaced with swastikas in 2019. It was only then that Horvilleur learned the desecrated cemetery was the eternal home of her ancestors. Upon visiting their graves for the first time, she shares memorable insights about an extinguished community — a different sort of dying.
That the book’s title begins with the word “living” reflects Horvilleur’s most fundamental message. Judaism places emphasis foremost on life, most famously captured in the injunction in Deuteronomy, “I have put before you life and death. … Choose life.”
Reflecting on the Hebrew euphemism “beit chaim” (“house of life” or “house of the living”) for a cemetery, she notes, “This isn’t an attempt to deny death or conjure it away by erasing it. On the contrary: it’s an attempt to send a clear message to death by placing it outside language. It’s a way of making death know that for all its obvious presence in this place, it is not victorious; even here it will not have the last word.”
We like to think that the walls are impenetrable, that life and death are hermetically separated, and that the living and the dead need never cross paths. Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur
But the ability to keep death at a distance, or to establish such firm dichotomies, is illusory. As she writes, “We like to think that the walls are impenetrable, that life and death are hermetically separated, and that the living and the dead need never cross paths. But what if, in reality, that’s all they ever do?”
At these crossroads, Horvilleur turns to stories to make meaning — both stories of the deceased that she has absorbed in her role as rabbinic officiant, and also the tales from within the Biblical and rabbinic traditions that resonate. She writes, “I stand by the side of women and men who, at turning points in their lives, need stories…These sacred stories open up a path between the living and the dead. The role of a storyteller is to stand by the gate to ensure that it stays open.”
I hear these words without the benefit of academic distance, and particularly as I write this, as this first week of July witnessed the deaths of two people in my life, as well as the first yahrzeit of my dear niece.
I’m certain that the vast majority of us live with a similarly intimate relationship to loss, even if we rarely speak of it. I look for solace where I can find it, and I find a degree of it in Horvilleur’s strong belief in the “power of stories that leave indelible traces in us, that offer a prolongation of the dead within the living.”
Consciousness of this prolonged presence finds expression in one of the book’s most affecting chapters, in which Horvilleur recounts the challenge of being both rabbi and companion to her close friend Ariane as she was dying of cancer. Horvilleur recalls friends gathered at Ariane’s deathbed reciting the Shema, as tradition asks of those who are in the presence of the dying to do. Horvilleur digs into the words interpretively, asserting that they “say to the dying, ‘Child of Israel, listen to what parts of you will carry on living within us, linked to us forever.’”
The book is a collection of related reflections rather than a systematic argument, and I appreciate the modesty of what it sets out to do. As Horvilleur recalls explaining to a boy who had lost his brother, “I owed him honesty. I needed to tell him that rabbis don’t have more answers than anyone else. Sometimes, they just have a few more questions.”