About this item
Highlights
- From France's leading Jewish intellectual, an intimate yet universal meditation on October 7, its legacy, and the way forward Devastated by the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Delphine Horvilleur sees her world shatter.
- Author(s): Delphine Horvilleur
- 128 Pages
- Social Science, Jewish Studies
Description
Book Synopsis
From France's leading Jewish intellectual, an intimate yet universal meditation on October 7, its legacy, and the way forward
Devastated by the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Delphine Horvilleur sees her world shatter. As a rabbi dedicated to supporting and alleviating the suffering of others, she suddenly finds herself in a state of shock, feeling powerless and voiceless.
In this fevered state, she pens this small yet powerful treatise on survival, a slice of self-analysis that reconnects her with her existential foundations. The text unfolds through ten real or imagined conversations: with her pain, her grandparents, Jewish paranoia, her children, Israel, and more.
Horvilleur seamlessly moves between the intimate and the universal, intertwining exegesis of sacred texts with societal analysis. She skillfully balances acknowledging the gravity of her subject with defying it through humor. The result is a book that charts a path from trauma and distress to healing and recovery; from anxiety and doubt to reassurance and wisdom.
Review Quotes
Praise for Delphine Horvilleur
"Horvilleur shows how it is possible to find language even for that which seems indescribable. Her deep reflections on mortality remind us that 'in death a place can be left for the living.'"--Kirkus Reviews on Living with Our Dead
"Horvilleur so beautifully gives life to her dead that readers will feel they had known them personally...What better way to show the Hebrew relationship with death than to tell the stories and celebrate the lives of those who have passed?"--Library Journal on Living with Our Dead
"Fortunately, writes Delphine Horvilleur, 'we are not "just" what has happened to us... only what we make of it.' In How Isn't It Going? she traces a path out of suffering and despair and toward achiving, one day, a just society, giving this manual for survival a universal dimension."--Le Monde
"Horvilleur has written an elegantly slim and majestically poetic book...in writing about death, she writes about the will to life as well."--Religious News Service on Living with Our Dead
"Without a doubt, one of the most beautiful and impressive books not only of the last year but of recent years."--ABC (Spain) on Living with Our Dead
"A radiant book that, without sentimentality, invites us to celebrate life."--Le Monde on Living with Our Dead
"One of today's most original voices of contemporary European Judaism."--Avvenire (Italy)
"A hymn to the healing power of storytelling and the written word."--Le Figaro on Living with Our Dead
"Moving...Delphine Horvilleur finds the right words to describe our time and its ghosts."--ELLE Magazine (France) on Living with Our Dead