During these last weeks of confinement, I spent a lot of time on ZOOM in my office, next to my library. The books I love are companions for work and meditation. One of them, published recently, has just taken a special place, and for a long time I think. Vivre avec nos morts (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 and death, the news of COVID, as we know, is harsh. It highlights the fragility of each of our existences and of the human condition, in all social environments, in all latitudes, today in a horrifying way in India.
In her book, Delphine Horvilleur also mentions our dead, the people close to us who have passed away and left their mark on our lives.
This universal experience of limit and death is inherent in life. Because we are always in the process of becoming, we die to what we have been, to be born to what we are not yet.
We are each a little 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 be continued"; the story does not end there, it always continues, we are humanly united with each other, "there is a possibility of becoming One" as all of Jacob's relatives sing, gathered around his deathbed.
"Living with our dead" and its 222 pages tell a thousand and one anecdotes, and moving and sometimes dramatic encounters, always in a fair way, and often with humor. "Living with ... ", living with the break even in the ordeal and death is the exploration of Jewish thought undertaken by the female rabbi, resorting neither to certainties nor to dogmas. Delphine Horvilleur understood that she was a " secular Rabbi " as she was told, in front of 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 through experience of what French secularism is. In his words, this is "the defense of a land that is never full, the awareness that there is always room 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 an affiliation from saturating the entire space. In this, in its own way, secularism is a transcendence. It affirms that there always exists within it a territory larger than my belief, which can accommodate that of another who has come to breathe there. "
In such words flows a source of life.
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