The title of Hillel Halkin's book, After One-Hundred-and-Twenty, recalls Jewish lore, but it is also a sly suggestion of the procrastination that often accompanies dealing with one's own mortality. Yet the book has appeared at a time when the public is paying fresh attention to death and dying and to its various forms of aftermath as evinced by a trove of recent books on most imaginable aspects of final things. In a large and abstract sense, some dialectic between mortality and immortality is imbedded in most serious poetry and narrative, but the explicit treatment that we have seen recently constitutes a kind of discursive requiem. “Right to die” initiatives in several states have added a particular ethical slant to the discourse. Work by Andrew Stark, Samuel Heilman, Neil Gilman, and Simcha Paull Raphael have added particular richness to my own thinking on the subject, and I wish Halkin had dealt more explicitly with their work, but that opinion does not detract from my appreciation for the richness of this volume and for an efficiency that likely forced him to avoid too much reference.
I suspect that it is personal narrative that makes one interested in this literature in the first place, and I date the burst of this literary activity in a personal way from the occurrence of a life-threatening close call in 1993 and the appearance of Sherwin Nuland's How We Die in 1994. At the time, I chose Nuland's book as the centerpiece of a course I was teaching because he combined clinical descriptions of dying with ruminations about the meaning of these things. I think Halkin has similarly combined scholarship with personal reactions to the literature he reviews and our lives as lived. Nothing I read after Nuland's book encouraged me to take seriously the idea of a literal physical immorality, in spite of the potential comfort of hanging around forever or “coming back” to a world in which my technologically dated self would somehow miraculously not be out of place. After One-Hundred-and-Twenty made me reconsider my skepticism.
Halkin treads carefully between skepticism and appreciation for people's aspirations for some kind of eternity. Distinct from Samuel Heilman, a religious man who embraces secular scholarship for understanding people's beliefs, Halkin proclaims his secularity while managing to respect those whose perspective on the subject tends to be literal.
Engaging philosophy and spirituality, Halkin's book is another look at this old meditation and the effort to explain what happens to us. He weaves classic Jewish notions from mainstream and kabbalistic sources in and around the ways in which non-Jewish ancient cultures have addressed the issue. But for the modern, what seems important is what Jews today actually believe about the subject, and Halkin manages to deal with that pragmatic question as well.
How much of the writing about the afterlife is imprinted on people's unconscious expectations in spite of their practical avoidance of the subject or their skepticism? And at what point in our history did the attention to immortality change from a kind of literal conviction to a more or less abstract philosophical way of talking about it? Even today, we live with all kinds of consoling bromides about our immortality that both prompted this book and that Halkin tries to attend to with respect.
Halkin agrees with most of Jewish scholarship that Maimonides was able to hold on to the principle of immortality within his inventory of essentials, even though he had moved away from a literalist sense of this scientific improbability. (Quoting Maimonides: “It is only as an intelligent being which knows about the things in existence everything that a perfectly developed person is capable of knowing that the soul survives after death.”) His skillful placement of philosophical and rabbinic material in the neighborhood of passages from the Odyssey, Islam, and other cultures gives this book a refreshing universality and freedom from the temptation to treat Jewish sources hermetically, or—at best—as points of comparison favorable to Judaism. But I wonder if Halkin could have made a clearer distinction between ancient Judaism's efforts to see the afterlife as a way of squaring the circle of fairness (i.e., the good who have suffered in our world might be rewarded in the world to come and vice versa), and what happens to Judaism's thinking on this subject after Saadiah and Maimonides, and certainly after Spinoza. Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve offers a larger canvas for understanding that shift, as Greenblatt argues that Lucretius's early naturalistic writing was revalued in the later Middle Ages. And Andrew Stark's The Consolations of Mortality offers a kind of neḥemta (consolation) for the fact that studying with the Ribono shel ‘Olam (master of the world) for eternity might be less comforting than being aware that our pleasures in this life are related to the boundaries set by our finitude.
What the sometimes whimsical and always skillful Hillel Halkin has done is take an idea that has been hardwired into Jewish tradition and make the case for continued attention to the subject. After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is an enriching reflection on the importance of the brevity of life and on how that brevity might combine historical understanding with the sweet scents that surround us. Halkin's book ends with a recall of gorgeous aggadah and a beautiful sentimental appreciation for the subjectivity we are all left with anyway. How lovely the morning in the foothills of the Carmel in sight of Zichron Ya‘akov, and how much more precious since we know that some day we will no longer see them.
This is what the poet Zelda seems to have meant in her seemingly religious poem that has to appeal to the secular mind as well. (From “the Invisible Carmel”—a selection with personal liberty from Marcia Falk's important translation):
