Book by Delphine Horvilleur

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During these last weeks of confinement, I spent a lot of time in ZOOM in my office, next to my library. The books I like are companions for work and meditation. One of them, which appeared a short time ago, has just taken pride of place, and for a long time, I think. Living with our dead (ed. Grasset, 2021) is a book written by a female rabbi, Delphine Horvilleur. The first word is actually the one I remember from reading it: LIVE.

Matters of life or death, the news of the COVID, as we know, is tough. This highlights the fragility of each of our lives and of the human condition, in all social environments, in all latitudes, today in an appalling way in India.

In her book, Delphine Horvilleur also evokes our dead, the close people who died and marked our lives.

This universal experience of limit and death is inherent in life. Because we are always becoming, we will die to what we have been, to be born to what we are not yet.

We are each a bit like Jacob. In the story of Genesis, comments the rabbi, Jacob is the one who limps, he is between two states, he never stops becoming, he accepts being wobbly, that is to say "almost himself" . Jacob has a future, as shown by his Hebrew name in the future tense. Jacob-Yaakov means "to follow"; the story does not end there, it always continues, we are humanly united to each other, “there is a possibility of making One” as all those close to Jacob sing, gathered around his deathbed.

"Living with our dead" and its 222 pages tell a thousand and one anecdotes, and upsetting and sometimes dramatic encounters, always in a fair way, and often with humor. . "To live with ... ", ", living with fracture even in trial and death is the exploration of Jewish thought that the woman rabbi undertakes, having recourse neither to certainties nor to dogmas. Delphine Horvilleur understood that she was a "Lay rabbi"as he was told, facing the survivors of Charlie Hebdo, by the sister of Elsa Cayat, the shrink of "Charlie" murdered on January 7, 2015. Because Delphine Horvilleur offers in her book not only a life lesson, but also a teaching by experience of what French secularism is. In his words, this is "" the defense of an earth that is never full, the awareness that there is always a place for a belief that is not ours. Secularism says that the space of our lives is never saturated with convictions, and it always guarantees a place left empty of certainties. It prevents a faith or a membership from saturating all the space. In this, in its own way, secularism is a transcendence. She affirms that there always exists in her a territory larger than my belief, which can accommodate that of another come to breathe there."

In such words flows a source of life.

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