One day, at the beginning of the first corona lockdown, French Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur's phone rang.

It was a family that stood unaccompanied at the father's grave and knew not a single prayer that is traditionally said.

So Horvilleur said the words, which the family on the other end of the line repeated aloud.

This was a life-changing experience for Horvilleur.

Accompanying mourners and conducting funerals is what she calls the "heart" of her work, and that's exactly where the rigorous contact restrictions in the pandemic hit.

This shock gave rise to a multi-faceted essay that, despite the topic, was almost cheerful in places, which became one of the best-selling titles on the French book market last year.

Horvilleur reports in eleven chapters on her encounters with dying and death, which are not only based on her practice as a rabbi, but also go back to her own childhood, and which take up her knowledge from an earlier medical degree as well as formative political events.

The Torah knows no resurrection

"Living with the dead" means in the original French the subtitle "a small treatise on consolation", but the book is the exact opposite of a little consolation book with ready-made sentences or wisdom.

As one of the few French rabbis, Horvilleur is a figurehead of liberal French Jewry who is clearly involved in social debates about anti-Semitism - for example in her "Reflections on the Question of Anti-Semitism", which was also a great success in Germany two years ago.

But she does not do this loudly, but equipped with a fine power of observation, with great art of formulation and as a profound expert on Jewish tradition and Talmudic tradition.

Last but not least, the essay is a reflection on Horvilleur's own role as a rabbi.

She clearly rejects the claim of believers that a rabbi must have certainties ready when it comes to questions about the last things: She doesn't have more answers ready than everyone else, at most more and different questions.

The Torah, she explains in an exegetical digression, knows no resurrection, no paradise and no hell.

Trace of violence reaches into the present

Notions of life after death emerged later, in the literature of the prophets and in Talmudic interpretations, at a time when the Israelites were living in exile and yearning for what Horvilleur calls a political resurrection.

Contradictory ideas about life after death developed from a multitude of eschatological influences that collided within Judaism in antiquity.

Horvilleur does not favor any of them: in her view, they are all layers of a tradition, existing on top of and next to each other.

The task can only consist in opening up these in new contexts again and again and thus connecting with the ties of tradition.

How precarious this connection can be becomes clear in the case of the survivors of the Shoah, the last of whom gradually die.

Horvilleur reports anonymously of a "Sarah" who certainly stands for many others whose families do not even know the correct date of birth and who were silent about what they experienced during the persecution.

But she also tells of the "Girls of Birkenau", Simone Veil and her unconventional friend, the filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens.

At Veil's funeral, Horvilleur recited the Kaddish with the French chief rabbi, which immediately outraged orthodox Jews.

Horvilleur is almost amused to see Veil's feminist gesture from beyond the grave, so to speak.

Personal experience and politics are never far apart at Horvilleur.

One of the most moving moments in her life was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 after a rally in Tel Aviv that she had attended.

Twenty years later, she was to conduct the funeral service for Elsa Cayat, the psychoanalyst best known for her column in Charlie Hebdo, who was assassinated in the assassination of the newspaper office.

The trace of violence extends to the immediate present.

The book closes with memories of Horvilleur's uncle Edgar, who is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Westhoffen, Alsace.

When graves were desecrated there a few years ago, she traveled to the place where part of her family comes from.

She uses the neologism solastalgia to describe what she feels at her uncle's grave:

Horvilleur, however, does not react with resignation.

She relates how she was once introduced by saying, “This is our rabbi.

But don't worry, a secular rabbi.” After a moment of surprise, she decides that the title actually suits her quite well.

Because being a secular rabbi means, she reflects, assuming a world in which God does not intervene and in which people are on their own.

As the poet Jacques Prévert once wrote, whom she quotes here: "Our Father, who art in heaven / Remain there / and we will remain on earth / Which is sometimes so glorious".

Delphine Horvilleur: "Living with the Dead".

Translated from the French by Nicola Denis.

Hanser Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2022. 192 p., hardcover, 22 euros.