Review: After One-Hundred-And-Twenty - The Jewish Chronicle

After One-Hundred-And-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition

By Hillel Halkin
Princeton University Press, £19.95

Hillel Halkin's book is a popular history and a personal memoir, an unusual combination. Written for the general reader, it is not an academic book in any sense. For example, he had wanted the book to have no reference notes at all, but only agreed to them --- at the editor's insistence --- if there was no mention of them in the text itself.

The book is an indivisible blend of two strands. The first, which I much admired, is a very user-friendly historical account of Jewish ideas about death, including what happens after death, and how those ideas change, from biblical times, through the talmudic period, into the Middle Ages, and finally into our own era (there is material on Yom HaZikaron).

It also covers the history of traditions about burial and mourning customs. There is a detailed, albeit chilling, description of what the chevra kadisha does to the body before burial, which I have never seen elsewhere.

Halkin has mastered a great deal of rabbinic and scholarly literature, as well as contemporary material, but he wears this knowledge extremely lightly. He is a master at "popularisation" in the best sense of that term, bringing to a non-academic audience what are, in essence, some very complicated ideas.

Although Halkin manages to convey a great deal of historical information in few pages, the book is never dull. For example, the section on the poems of Shmuel HaNagid (died, 1056) on the death of his brother is an emotionally engaging account that is bound to move the reader as it has obviously moved the author. The modern material on alleged evidence of life after death from near-death experiences will also be of interest.

In short, the book does what it says on the tin.

Its other strand is made up of Halkin's own, personal reflections (for that is in the subtitle of the book) on death, both his observations about the ideas he discusses but also his recounting of how he has dealt with the death of his parents and how he is dealing with his own and his wife's eventual demises. As he says: "I am an inmate, after all, in a prison. Every day, the guards come, select some of my fellow prisoners, and march them off to execution. When I look for a logic in their selection, I cannot find any…"

Although always wittily written and often peppered with telling observations, I found it hard to like this strand of the book as much as I did the first. I did not really want or need to know why he could not bring himself to say Kaddish for his father, or why he is haunted by the fact that, as his mother lay dying in hospital, he "uncovered her nakedness" and saw "a dark blotch spread over flabby flesh". These musings are perhaps better kept to oneself and not shared.

And, in spite of not being a scholarly work, the book could have usefully included an index at least of the historical names and books mentioned in the text.