Paris (AFP)

Talking about death, telling stories to the living, consoling: Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur explores in her latest book, very personal and certainly not morbid, how "to live with our dead".

"Life and death hold hands, we are wrong to speak of them as unrelated universes, as we do so often in Western thought," said in an interview with AFP this figure in France of Judaism liberal (progressive), while "Living with the dead" (Grasset) appears this week.

She tells 11 stories of life, relatives or personalities, and as many bereavements that she has experienced or accompanied in her duties.

"I start the book in 2015, year of the terrorist attacks, year + inconsolable +", she says.

"We have been in mourning. The years of terrorism, violence and now the pandemic. This forces us to recognize that death is everywhere around us, in our families," she explains.

For the one who is so often found in cemeteries and burial chambers, it is first of all a question of "finding the words" and "gestures".

But also, in the light of the texts of the Jewish tradition, to "tell" the stories of the life of the people, stories which "create bridges between the times and the generations", she writes.

The opportunity to question its function.

"What is it to be a rabbi?"

It is at the same time, she answers a "storyteller" and a "seamstress".

Both "do a little the same thing: they take back what is fabricated and a little threadbare and add points. They bind and reread. My job is to bind and reread".

And also be a "lay rabbi", as Elsa Cayat's sister liked to baptize her at the Charlie Hebdo psychoanalyst's funeral?

Yes, replies Delphine Horvilleur, "these two words are in no way opposed".

"I am in love with this secularism" which "always leaves a place for a belief which is not ours" and which "prevents a faith from saturating all the space".

- "Death of our dreams" -

Weaving, connecting, giving meaning, this is what this 46-year-old rabbi woman tried to do despite the pandemic that had shaken up funeral rites.

And to quote "these whispered words" for the first time "by phone from my apartment", at the very beginning of the pandemic, for a family alone in the cemetery who did not dare to bring anyone for fear of contamination.

"We suddenly introduced technology in a rather extreme way into our cult and religious lives! We never imagined doing it", notes Delphine Horvilleur.

In this tale, the rabbi also wants to "honor the people who mattered" to her.

Thus Simone Veil, "a figure for our generation and beyond", which she compares to a "fairy who made a promise on her cradle".

But also of his companion of deportation, the screenwriter Marceline Loridan-Ivens, "who embodied freedom".

The death of Prime Minister Itzak Rabin (assassinated by a Jewish extremist opposed to the peace process) on that evening of November 1995 in Israel, where she was then, also sounds like mourning.

The end of an ideal, of a "promise".

"Living with our dead" is also "living with our own personal deaths when they arise, the death of our dreams, our stories, sometimes our ideas," she confides.

However, summoning here and there some jokes of rabbis - Delphine Horvilleur tries above all to bring consolations.

To "tell death that it will not have the last word, if we are able to tell life differently".

© 2021 AFP