What do you think?
Rate this book
After One-Hundred-And-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition
A deeply personal look at death, mourning, and the afterlife in Jewish tradition
After One-Hundred-and-Twenty provides a richly nuanced and deeply personal look at Jewish attitudes and practices regarding death, mourning, and the afterlife as they have existed and evolved from biblical times to today. Taking its title from the Hebrew and Yiddish blessing to live to a ripe old age--Moses is said to have been 120 years old when he died--the book explores how the Bible's original reticence about an afterlife gave way to views about personal judgment and reward after death, the resurrection of the body, and even reincarnation. It examines Talmudic perspectives on grief, burial, and the afterlife, shows how Jewish approaches to death changed in the Middle Ages with thinkers like Maimonides and in the mystical writings of the Zohar, and delves into such things as the origins of the custom of reciting Kaddish for the deceased and beliefs about encountering the dead in visions and dreams.
After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is also Hillel Halkin's eloquent and disarmingly candid reflection on his own mortality, the deaths of those he has known and loved, and the comfort he has and has not derived from Jewish tradition.
After One-Hundred-and-Twenty provides a richly nuanced and deeply personal look at Jewish attitudes and practices regarding death, mourning, and the afterlife as they have existed and evolved from biblical times to today. Taking its title from the Hebrew and Yiddish blessing to live to a ripe old age--Moses is said to have been 120 years old when he died--the book explores how the Bible's original reticence about an afterlife gave way to views about personal judgment and reward after death, the resurrection of the body, and even reincarnation. It examines Talmudic perspectives on grief, burial, and the afterlife, shows how Jewish approaches to death changed in the Middle Ages with thinkers like Maimonides and in the mystical writings of the Zohar, and delves into such things as the origins of the custom of reciting Kaddish for the deceased and beliefs about encountering the dead in visions and dreams.
After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is also Hillel Halkin's eloquent and disarmingly candid reflection on his own mortality, the deaths of those he has known and loved, and the comfort he has and has not derived from Jewish tradition.
232 pages, ebook
Published May 3, 2016
10 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
Hillel Halkin
57 books27 followersHillel Halkin (born 1939) is an American-born Israeli translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 25, 2019
History
The Torah makes no mention of an afterlife. The Adam & Eve story describes mortality itself as being the punishment for eating the apple. Genesis 6:3 states that the lifespan of a human is 120 years. Moses died when he was 120 years old, and Moses was never able to enter the promised land. Life after death is really not part of the Torah.
There are some references to people going to “Sheol” after they die as well as necromancy, but overall, the impression from the Torah is that our ancestors have gone to sleep forever, and we shouldn’t attempt to disturb them. (May they rest in peace.) The book of Samuel contains a story about the Witch of Endor, a woman Saul consulted to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel for advice.
Old Testament books written in the 4th-3rd Century B.C. introduce the concept of life after death. This was part of the Hellenization of Judaism taking place at that historical time period. Elijah the prophet introduces the concept of resurrection, and Elijah is a precursor of the Messiah.
By the time Judaism entered the rabbinic age after the Second Temple’s destruction (the year 70), the idea of Sheol and being gathered to the fathers was largely replaced by a heavenly afterlife, earthly resurrection and a grand messianic transformation of reality. The Life of Adam and Eve, The Apocalypse of Abraham, the Book of Enoch, Josephus, and Philo of Alexandria, are Jewish sources that reference heaven and the Messiah.
The Talmud introduced new concepts about death. Evel Rabbati (aka Semachot) is a tractate that contains rules about burial and mourning. Gehenna is the place the wicked go after death. Sinners must serve a sentence in Gehenna before they can go to heaven. The vision of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 promises resurrection and hope. There is a tradition for Jews to be buried in Israel: after the ingathering of the exiled diaspora, the Messiah will come and the tzadikim (righteous ones) will be resurrected.
From The American Metropolis - From Knickerbocker Times to the Year 1900, which I found on the interwebs, describing a scene on the Lower East Side of New York City in the late Nineteenth Century: "On the day of the burial the body is curiously clothed. Be it of man or woman, the grave clothes are alike, a single garment of white. It is really nothing more than a great sack, with two holes for the arms, pulled on over the head and tied at the feet, completely incasing the body. Over each arm a smaller sack is slipped and tied below the finger-tips. The corpse is then placed in a coffin made of six plain boards, unpainted, unlined, without a single ornament. Under the head a pillow of earth is laid. Just before the coffin is closed there comes the ceremony of breaking a plate, three of the pieces of which are laid with reverence on that part of the sack that covers the head, two just over the eyes, the third over the mouth.
This is the tradition which explains the custom: The Polish Jews believe that someday in the ages to come all the sons of Israel, dead and alive, will be summoned to Jerusalem to refound the city and to live there in eternal bliss. The dead will travel, so the tradition runs, through the earth in a straight line from their graves. Some of them will have been buried for thousands of years, their bodies will have long since become dust, and yet it is part of the Promise that they shall appear at Jerusalem the New as they were on earth. The bits of broken plate are to indicate their features and to aid the God of Israel in recreating their bodies."
Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe had superstitious beliefs of all kinds that they brought over to America on the boat with them, much to the chagrin of German Jews who had arrived a generation earlier. (Sephardic Jews also have different traditions.) The author of this book also talks about plate smashing, and he imagines what it would be like when the Messiah comes if the traditional Ashkenazi beliefs were literally true.
Sa’adia Ga’on, head of the great Babylonian yeshiva of Sura, wrote The Book of Beliefs and Opinions in 933. Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed. Here, we have the idea that the culmination of the world-to-come lay in the bodiless soul’s immortality. This is a very abstract, eggheaded notion that is unlikely to affect the average person's behavior.
The Zohar is the text of Kabbalah. In this text is the idea that the souls of sinners require the purgation of Gehenna. Tikkun involved “repairing” the spiritual fractures by the soul’s atoning so that it could become complete after the misdeeds or omissions of the previous life. The soul had three faculties: (1) the vital soul, responsible for basic biological functions; (2) the passional soul, the seat of emotions; and (3) the intellectual soul, with mental and spiritual faculties.
In the Middle Ages, there was a transition to a belief in heaven and hell. Christianity and Islam were the dominant religions, and the heaven and hell in those religions influenced Judaism. The medieval Masekhet Gehinnnom, “The Tractate of Gehenna,” was an account of a visit to hell. Men and women hung from their feet, hands, noses, tongues, and breasts, forced to swallow hot coals and eat their own flesh, and hurled from fire into snow and back again. Yosef Karo thought he was visited by a “maggid,” a celestial informant who cultivates relationships with deserving individuals on earth and reveals heavenly secrets to them. In the 1300s, Immanuel of Rome was the Jewish "Dante," and the last chapter of his book of poems provides a detailed description of heaven and hell. Was Immanuel’s book satire, making fun of the Christian idea of hell? Perhaps, based on the way it is written.
Ritual
Samuel HaNagid, who lived in Cordoba in the 900s, wrote a poem about his brother’s death. The poem follows the tractate of Semachot, which is the basis for Jewish mourning practice: after death, the first 7 days are shiva; until 30 days, return to work but avoid parties and public entertainment; mourning lasts for 1 year, and then there’s an unveiling of the grave.
The mourner’s kaddish is similar to the “Lord’s Prayer” in Christianity. In the Middle Ages, some Jews believed that not saying kaddish was abandoning the dead to the sufferings of Gehenna.
Tahara is a practice of preparing a body for burial where individuals of the same sex as the deceased say: “Master of the Universe, have mercy on this dead person… May … You rescue him [or her] from… the sentence of Gehenna.”
The funeral procession can have a transcendent meaning. The stretcher bearers (or pallbearers if there is a coffin) are like the Levites who carried the Holy Ark when the Tabernacle was disassembled and moved in the desert.
Keriah is the ritual rending or tearing of a garment during mourning.
The custom in Israel is to be laid in the ground in only shrouds without a coffin. Contact with the soil of the Land of Israel is meritorious. Some Jews in the diaspora keep a cloth pouch of earth from Israel to be put in the grave with them when they die. People who attend the burial shovel earth in the grave. Jews are buried with all of their body parts (not cremated) in a way that allows their body to naturally decompose, such as on a pillow of dirt.
After a massacre of Jews in the Ukraine in the 1600s, Moravian rabbi Yom Tov Lippman Heller wrote el Maleh Rahamim, which is recited after the mourner’s kaddish: Grant perfect peace on the wings of Thy presence to the soul of the deceased, who has gone to another world. May she rest in peace.
Jews put a pebble or small rock on a grave. Flowers are not part of the funeral or burial ritual.
When you sit Shiva, you are not alone, people who knew the deceased and know you visit for one week.
After one year, there is an unveiling of the gravestone and a yahrtzeit candle is lit. A yahrtzeit candle is lit on every anniversary of the death.
Some Jews go on pilgrimages to the graves of rabbis. Every Rosh Hashana, there is a pilgrimage of ultraorthodox Jews to Uman in the Ukraine, the burial place of Rabbe Nachman of Breslov.
On the Jewish calendar, there are 4 times when a Yizkor service is done. During an Ashkenazi Yizkor for a parent, both men and women say: “May God remember the soul of my father and teacher who has gone to another world… may his soul be bound in the bond of life with the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, and of all the righteous men and women in paradise.” This prayer is traditionally recited by women as well as men and includes the Jewish matriarchs as well as the patriarchs. This differs from the generally sexist traditions of observant Jews, and this prayer is sometimes known as the woman's kaddish.
The second Yizkor prayer, for more distant relatives, is closer to the original words, which were apparently composed in memory of the 1000s of Jews killed by rampaging Crusaders in the Rhineland in 1096: “May God remember the souls of all my male and female relatives, both on my father’s side and on my mother’s side, who were killed, murdered, slaughtered, burned, drowned, and suffocated for the sanctification of the Name.” This prayer continued to resonate after the Holocaust.
In contemporary times, there are New Age Jews who believe in non-scientific stuff such as reincarnation, same as New Age non-Jews. Jewish Buddhists (JuBus) are into the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Among rank-and-file Jews, there is mostly silence about what, if anything, happens to the dead after dying. If you ask a Jew whether he thinks a belief in the world-to-come plays an important role in the religion, he might say: “It certainly doesn’t play a role in my religion. It’s not something that comes up in conversation. I’ve never encountered it as a serious proposition.” Even on the belief-in-the-afterlife end of the spectrum, Jews show no more than a very tenuous acknowledgment of the impact of such concepts on one’s actions in the present life, which is to say, the whole question doesn’t matter much to Jews as a rule.
After reading this, my overall impression is that a belief in life after death is not very Jewish. Jews do believe that a person has an individual being, or soul, that exists apart from the physical body. In the Torah, there is a place where the soul goes after a person dies, but the hope is that the soul will rest in peace. From Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur, Jews ask for forgiveness for their sins, and they pray that they will be inscribed in the book of life. But Jews do not believe that if you're bad, you will go to hell, and if you are good, you will go to heaven.
It seems like the concept of heaven and hell was introduced to Jews from Christians and Muslims. Even the Jewish "hell," Gehenna, is a place where the deceased serve a sentence for their sins before going to heaven. It is not a place where people must spend the rest of eternity. Some Jews do believe that the Messiah will some day come and that there will be peace on Earth. But I think most Jews simply believe that people have an ethical duty of tikkun olam, repairing a world that is broken. Most Jews do not literally believe that when the Messiah comes, all of the dead Jews will be resurrected and live in a heaven on Earth, although that is a Jewish belief. Going to "heaven" just means that a person is somehow (categorized) "with" the other righteous ones after death. Jewish prayer does contain an element of ancestor worship, but this seems to be in the context of honoring the traditions of Judaism that date back to Abraham. Jews don't believe that their ancestors still have some kind of consciousness.
And yet, Jews suspend their disbelief every year at Passover, when they pour a cup of wine for Elijah the Prophet, open the front door of their houses to allow Elijah to enter into their homes, and sing these doleful words: "Eliyahu Hanavie, Eliyahu Hatishbi, Elyahu Hagiladi, Bimherah Yavo Elenu Im Mashiach Ben David" (Elijah the Prophet, Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah the Giladite, May he soon come to us, with Mashiach the son of David). It's like the opposite of the song by John Lennon: Imagine there is a heaven, imagine all the people living for tikkun olam, and religion too. To the pious, Elijah is in many cases a guardian angel, for whom no place is too remote, and who leaves nothing undone to help them in their distress or to save them from misery. Jews the world over continue to hold a Seder every year when the sun sets and the full moon rises on the 15th of Nisan, and we all end our Seder the same way: "Next year in Jerusalem!"
This was an interesting book, in which the author relates many of the Jewish ideas to his own life, in particular after the death of his own parents. What happens "after 120"? It's basically a joke. After 120, I'll pay you back the money I owe you. What do you say to a person on their 120th birthday? Have a nice day!
The Torah makes no mention of an afterlife. The Adam & Eve story describes mortality itself as being the punishment for eating the apple. Genesis 6:3 states that the lifespan of a human is 120 years. Moses died when he was 120 years old, and Moses was never able to enter the promised land. Life after death is really not part of the Torah.
There are some references to people going to “Sheol” after they die as well as necromancy, but overall, the impression from the Torah is that our ancestors have gone to sleep forever, and we shouldn’t attempt to disturb them. (May they rest in peace.) The book of Samuel contains a story about the Witch of Endor, a woman Saul consulted to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel for advice.
Old Testament books written in the 4th-3rd Century B.C. introduce the concept of life after death. This was part of the Hellenization of Judaism taking place at that historical time period. Elijah the prophet introduces the concept of resurrection, and Elijah is a precursor of the Messiah.
By the time Judaism entered the rabbinic age after the Second Temple’s destruction (the year 70), the idea of Sheol and being gathered to the fathers was largely replaced by a heavenly afterlife, earthly resurrection and a grand messianic transformation of reality. The Life of Adam and Eve, The Apocalypse of Abraham, the Book of Enoch, Josephus, and Philo of Alexandria, are Jewish sources that reference heaven and the Messiah.
The Talmud introduced new concepts about death. Evel Rabbati (aka Semachot) is a tractate that contains rules about burial and mourning. Gehenna is the place the wicked go after death. Sinners must serve a sentence in Gehenna before they can go to heaven. The vision of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 promises resurrection and hope. There is a tradition for Jews to be buried in Israel: after the ingathering of the exiled diaspora, the Messiah will come and the tzadikim (righteous ones) will be resurrected.
From The American Metropolis - From Knickerbocker Times to the Year 1900, which I found on the interwebs, describing a scene on the Lower East Side of New York City in the late Nineteenth Century: "On the day of the burial the body is curiously clothed. Be it of man or woman, the grave clothes are alike, a single garment of white. It is really nothing more than a great sack, with two holes for the arms, pulled on over the head and tied at the feet, completely incasing the body. Over each arm a smaller sack is slipped and tied below the finger-tips. The corpse is then placed in a coffin made of six plain boards, unpainted, unlined, without a single ornament. Under the head a pillow of earth is laid. Just before the coffin is closed there comes the ceremony of breaking a plate, three of the pieces of which are laid with reverence on that part of the sack that covers the head, two just over the eyes, the third over the mouth.
This is the tradition which explains the custom: The Polish Jews believe that someday in the ages to come all the sons of Israel, dead and alive, will be summoned to Jerusalem to refound the city and to live there in eternal bliss. The dead will travel, so the tradition runs, through the earth in a straight line from their graves. Some of them will have been buried for thousands of years, their bodies will have long since become dust, and yet it is part of the Promise that they shall appear at Jerusalem the New as they were on earth. The bits of broken plate are to indicate their features and to aid the God of Israel in recreating their bodies."
Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe had superstitious beliefs of all kinds that they brought over to America on the boat with them, much to the chagrin of German Jews who had arrived a generation earlier. (Sephardic Jews also have different traditions.) The author of this book also talks about plate smashing, and he imagines what it would be like when the Messiah comes if the traditional Ashkenazi beliefs were literally true.
Sa’adia Ga’on, head of the great Babylonian yeshiva of Sura, wrote The Book of Beliefs and Opinions in 933. Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed. Here, we have the idea that the culmination of the world-to-come lay in the bodiless soul’s immortality. This is a very abstract, eggheaded notion that is unlikely to affect the average person's behavior.
The Zohar is the text of Kabbalah. In this text is the idea that the souls of sinners require the purgation of Gehenna. Tikkun involved “repairing” the spiritual fractures by the soul’s atoning so that it could become complete after the misdeeds or omissions of the previous life. The soul had three faculties: (1) the vital soul, responsible for basic biological functions; (2) the passional soul, the seat of emotions; and (3) the intellectual soul, with mental and spiritual faculties.
In the Middle Ages, there was a transition to a belief in heaven and hell. Christianity and Islam were the dominant religions, and the heaven and hell in those religions influenced Judaism. The medieval Masekhet Gehinnnom, “The Tractate of Gehenna,” was an account of a visit to hell. Men and women hung from their feet, hands, noses, tongues, and breasts, forced to swallow hot coals and eat their own flesh, and hurled from fire into snow and back again. Yosef Karo thought he was visited by a “maggid,” a celestial informant who cultivates relationships with deserving individuals on earth and reveals heavenly secrets to them. In the 1300s, Immanuel of Rome was the Jewish "Dante," and the last chapter of his book of poems provides a detailed description of heaven and hell. Was Immanuel’s book satire, making fun of the Christian idea of hell? Perhaps, based on the way it is written.
Ritual
Samuel HaNagid, who lived in Cordoba in the 900s, wrote a poem about his brother’s death. The poem follows the tractate of Semachot, which is the basis for Jewish mourning practice: after death, the first 7 days are shiva; until 30 days, return to work but avoid parties and public entertainment; mourning lasts for 1 year, and then there’s an unveiling of the grave.
The mourner’s kaddish is similar to the “Lord’s Prayer” in Christianity. In the Middle Ages, some Jews believed that not saying kaddish was abandoning the dead to the sufferings of Gehenna.
Tahara is a practice of preparing a body for burial where individuals of the same sex as the deceased say: “Master of the Universe, have mercy on this dead person… May … You rescue him [or her] from… the sentence of Gehenna.”
The funeral procession can have a transcendent meaning. The stretcher bearers (or pallbearers if there is a coffin) are like the Levites who carried the Holy Ark when the Tabernacle was disassembled and moved in the desert.
Keriah is the ritual rending or tearing of a garment during mourning.
The custom in Israel is to be laid in the ground in only shrouds without a coffin. Contact with the soil of the Land of Israel is meritorious. Some Jews in the diaspora keep a cloth pouch of earth from Israel to be put in the grave with them when they die. People who attend the burial shovel earth in the grave. Jews are buried with all of their body parts (not cremated) in a way that allows their body to naturally decompose, such as on a pillow of dirt.
After a massacre of Jews in the Ukraine in the 1600s, Moravian rabbi Yom Tov Lippman Heller wrote el Maleh Rahamim, which is recited after the mourner’s kaddish: Grant perfect peace on the wings of Thy presence to the soul of the deceased, who has gone to another world. May she rest in peace.
Jews put a pebble or small rock on a grave. Flowers are not part of the funeral or burial ritual.
When you sit Shiva, you are not alone, people who knew the deceased and know you visit for one week.
After one year, there is an unveiling of the gravestone and a yahrtzeit candle is lit. A yahrtzeit candle is lit on every anniversary of the death.
Some Jews go on pilgrimages to the graves of rabbis. Every Rosh Hashana, there is a pilgrimage of ultraorthodox Jews to Uman in the Ukraine, the burial place of Rabbe Nachman of Breslov.
On the Jewish calendar, there are 4 times when a Yizkor service is done. During an Ashkenazi Yizkor for a parent, both men and women say: “May God remember the soul of my father and teacher who has gone to another world… may his soul be bound in the bond of life with the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, and of all the righteous men and women in paradise.” This prayer is traditionally recited by women as well as men and includes the Jewish matriarchs as well as the patriarchs. This differs from the generally sexist traditions of observant Jews, and this prayer is sometimes known as the woman's kaddish.
The second Yizkor prayer, for more distant relatives, is closer to the original words, which were apparently composed in memory of the 1000s of Jews killed by rampaging Crusaders in the Rhineland in 1096: “May God remember the souls of all my male and female relatives, both on my father’s side and on my mother’s side, who were killed, murdered, slaughtered, burned, drowned, and suffocated for the sanctification of the Name.” This prayer continued to resonate after the Holocaust.
In contemporary times, there are New Age Jews who believe in non-scientific stuff such as reincarnation, same as New Age non-Jews. Jewish Buddhists (JuBus) are into the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Among rank-and-file Jews, there is mostly silence about what, if anything, happens to the dead after dying. If you ask a Jew whether he thinks a belief in the world-to-come plays an important role in the religion, he might say: “It certainly doesn’t play a role in my religion. It’s not something that comes up in conversation. I’ve never encountered it as a serious proposition.” Even on the belief-in-the-afterlife end of the spectrum, Jews show no more than a very tenuous acknowledgment of the impact of such concepts on one’s actions in the present life, which is to say, the whole question doesn’t matter much to Jews as a rule.
After reading this, my overall impression is that a belief in life after death is not very Jewish. Jews do believe that a person has an individual being, or soul, that exists apart from the physical body. In the Torah, there is a place where the soul goes after a person dies, but the hope is that the soul will rest in peace. From Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur, Jews ask for forgiveness for their sins, and they pray that they will be inscribed in the book of life. But Jews do not believe that if you're bad, you will go to hell, and if you are good, you will go to heaven.
It seems like the concept of heaven and hell was introduced to Jews from Christians and Muslims. Even the Jewish "hell," Gehenna, is a place where the deceased serve a sentence for their sins before going to heaven. It is not a place where people must spend the rest of eternity. Some Jews do believe that the Messiah will some day come and that there will be peace on Earth. But I think most Jews simply believe that people have an ethical duty of tikkun olam, repairing a world that is broken. Most Jews do not literally believe that when the Messiah comes, all of the dead Jews will be resurrected and live in a heaven on Earth, although that is a Jewish belief. Going to "heaven" just means that a person is somehow (categorized) "with" the other righteous ones after death. Jewish prayer does contain an element of ancestor worship, but this seems to be in the context of honoring the traditions of Judaism that date back to Abraham. Jews don't believe that their ancestors still have some kind of consciousness.
And yet, Jews suspend their disbelief every year at Passover, when they pour a cup of wine for Elijah the Prophet, open the front door of their houses to allow Elijah to enter into their homes, and sing these doleful words: "Eliyahu Hanavie, Eliyahu Hatishbi, Elyahu Hagiladi, Bimherah Yavo Elenu Im Mashiach Ben David" (Elijah the Prophet, Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah the Giladite, May he soon come to us, with Mashiach the son of David). It's like the opposite of the song by John Lennon: Imagine there is a heaven, imagine all the people living for tikkun olam, and religion too. To the pious, Elijah is in many cases a guardian angel, for whom no place is too remote, and who leaves nothing undone to help them in their distress or to save them from misery. Jews the world over continue to hold a Seder every year when the sun sets and the full moon rises on the 15th of Nisan, and we all end our Seder the same way: "Next year in Jerusalem!"
This was an interesting book, in which the author relates many of the Jewish ideas to his own life, in particular after the death of his own parents. What happens "after 120"? It's basically a joke. After 120, I'll pay you back the money I owe you. What do you say to a person on their 120th birthday? Have a nice day!
September 26, 2018
As usual, Halkin writes a very readable, clear and concise, book. Most of it was a review of information I already knew, but there were some new insights for me, such as how and why "hell" changes from "Sheol" to "Gehinnon" as history progressed from Biblical times to Rabbinic times, and the meaning of that change, and the influence of outside culture on this Jewish thought. And of course there is no conclusion as to what really does happen after 120.
June 3, 2017
I really enjoyed reading this book. It helped me understand Jewish thought surrounding death throughout history and was written by a non-religious Jew, which is cool. The reason I gave it three instead of five stars is because, despite not being religious, Halkin is Zionist-as-all-getout
August 25, 2021
Rather dry, kind of interesting to see historical forces that shaped evolution of Jewish views of afterlife, strange pivot into personal grief and translation that did not square (to my mind) with more literature review approach of start of book
May 6, 2020
A very readable tracing of Jewish perspectives and practices on death and mourning throughout history, with a decent amount of personal reflection/musings woven in.
March 14, 2017
Some great stories on death in Judaism but the writing has a lack of fluidity.
January 29, 2017
The first half of the book was an exploration of the historic views gong back to ancient times of some non-Jewish and especially Jewish views of the afterlife and resurrection. It is rather dry. Fortunately in the second half, Hillel Halkin, a schoolmate of my own, gets personal and recounts more modern Jewish practices of death and mourning and some of his own feelings about death. This is much more interesting, not necessarily for the recounting of the traditions, but for the more personal aspects.
Read
June 22, 2016Review by Philip K. Jason for the Jewish Book Council.
November 6, 2016
See my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...
April 16, 2017
The first half of the book is rather esoteric and not meant for casual reading. It has to do with ancient traditions that, at least for me, not previously studied. It would be well suited for a course in which there was room for elaboration and interpretation by others. The focus is much more on the spiritual aspect of how death and the afterlife are viewed in traditional Judaism than in an explanation of the practices associated with mourning. Halkin's focus becomes much more personal later in the book, and this section had more impact on me. It deals with his reaction to the deaths of his parents and how he struggles with respecting their memories under his personal interpretation of his religion. For me, it was well worth plodding through the first half to get to the second.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews