This book proposes an interpretative-cultural analysis of written literary works and personal-documentary narratives of dying people and their families. Its purpose is to understand the phenomenology of dying and death by seeking to read these documentary and literary materials in juxtaposition to philosophical materials from Jewish thought and theology. Although these are the major focuses of discussion in the book, its multi-disciplinary approach also brings together spiritual, physical, linguistic, therapeutic, and medical perspectives that seek to perceive the unpersieveable, namely death and inexistence.
The book aims to read the approach to death in modern time in general and within various spheres of discourse among Jewish-Israelis of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in particular. One of the contributions of this book lies in its attempt to present a simultaneous reading of Jewish philosophical segments alongside living testimonies in order to better understand the human experience of coping with the crisis of dying and the mystery of death. This attempt wishes, on the one hand, to make present or seek the presence of dialogical worldviews in popular culture and documentary works, and, on the other, to chart the broad progression of the relationship to death in Jewish and Israeli culture.
This cultural progression opens with a wealth of symbolic references to death in the Jewish tradition, dwindling into scarce references to death in secularized Jewish culture since the start of the modern era, and ending with contemporary reality in Israel, as expressed in the cases I studied. My readings of these death cases attest to the need to identify them as a corpus that contains (and often melds) the regions of past and present, and as a space in which Israeliness is based on the symbols, archetypes and modes of reference to its Jewish roots. Not only does this book try to understand the dialogue with death, but it also investigates , as reflected in its title , our dialogue with life, as Jews and Israelis and as human beings who forgive and ask for forgiveness, and who thank, yearn, love and in the end die.
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Danacode: 110-20339 ISBN: 978-965-226-620-0 Language: Hebrew Pages: 536 Weight: 840 gr Publication Date: 09/2022 Publisher: Bar-Ilan University Press
Contents
Foreword | Two Memories of Death and Home 11
Introduction | The Eternal Life of Death – Rationale, Literature Review, and Methodological and Ethical Issues 15
a. Research on Death and the Dying from Social, Medical and Legal Perspectives 17; b. Dying, Death and the Perception of Death: Philosophical and Socio-Cultural Approaches 20; c. On Death in the Jewish Tradition 28; d. On Death in Folk and Documentary Literature 38; e. A Story Foretold: A Literary-Cultural Reading of Personal Narrative 40; f. The Population 43; g. Methodological Issues 44; h. Ethical Issues and the Question of My Positioning within the Field of Research 48
Part One
On the Brink of Death: Emotions, Gestures and Messages of the Dying
Chapter 1 | A Glorious Death and Belated Apology as the End Draws Near 55
a. Depictions of the Deaths of Jacob, Moses and King David 58; b. David’s (Belated?) Apology 66
Chapter 2 | Between the Memory of the Body and the Transcendence of the Spirit: Gratitude as a Linguistic Occurrence in Conversations with the Dying 82
a. “Stories that Grab You”: Gratitude, Positive Memories and a “Physical” Language in Maurice’s Story 84; b. “To Become Equal to the Creator”: Gratitude and a “Spiritual” Language in Naima’s story 98
Chapter 3 | “The Longing Makes the Story”: The Mysticism of Yearning on the Brink of Death 110
a. Moses’ Yearning to Enter the Land of Israel 114; b. The Heart’s Yearning for the Wellspring in a tale of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, in relationship to Albert Camus’ Concept of the Absurd 115; c. “A Life of Longing”: The Yearnings of Moses and Rabbi Nachman in an Interview with Rabbi Froman before His Death 123; d. An Interim Comment on the Identification of the Mysticism of Yearning in the Coping of the Dying 131; e. From the Missed Opportunity a Yearning Emerges: Marcel’s story 134; f. “My Mother’s Dream was to Be a Bus Driver”: Doris’s Dream 141; g. When Reality Meets Poetry: On Loneliness, Yearning and Pining in Talks with Tova and in Her Poetry 149
Chapter 4 | Unconditional Love – Between Otherness and Unification in the Narrative of the Dying 162
a. Love Is as Strong as Death: The Link between Love and Death in the Works of Buber, Rosenzweig, Rabbi Soloveitchik and Levinas 163; b. Your Love Was More Wonderful: Love on the Brink of Death in the Poetic and Documentary Works of Yona Wallach 170; c. His Wife as His Body: Benny and Tsila’s Love 178; d. And They Became One Flesh: When Zvia Ben-Yosef Ginor’s Ark Set Forward Towards Death 186; e. Between “One Flesh” and “One God” in Jewish Literature and in “Cancer Zone of No Return” by Ilana Hammerman and Jurgen Nieraad 194; f. “In and Within Her”: Passion, Love, and Death in “I won’t Be Here Tomorrow” by Nina Pinto-Abecasis 204; g. Conclusion: The Return Home 211
Part Two
Facing Death: Place, Time and Approaches towards Death and Dying
Chapter 5 | To Die at Home: The Significance of Bringing Death Back to the Home Environment 217
a. The Institutionalized Environment of Modern Sequestered Death in the Works of Women Accompanying Their Parents to Their Death 219; b. An Interim Comment on Structuralistic Reading in a Post-Structuralistic Era 231; c. “You See What’s Going On”: On Being-At-Home in the Book “Being-in-the-World” by Boaz Neumann and in Conversation with David 232; d. Home-like Thinking and Domesticated Thinking about Death 235; e. Death in the Home Environment 251
Chapter 6 | The Space of the Infinite, the Eternity of Time: On the Temporal World of the Dying 269
a. “The House of Time” or “The Prison of Time” 271; b. Four Modes of Shaping the Horizontal Axis of Time and Infinite Consciousness 275; c. An Interim Comment: Two Clocks, Two Present Times and How They Shape Life in Old Age 298; d. The Vertical Axis and Eternal Consciousness in the Interview with Boaz Neumann Before his Death: Suspension, Touch and the Intergenerational Relationship 301
Chapter 7 | “Look Death in the Eye [or] Lower Your Gaze”: Three Approaches to Facing Death 318
a. Resisting Death 319; b. Overcoming Death 327; c. Accepting Death 345
Chapter 8 | Three Ways of Coping With Death 378
a. Perceiving Death as an Opportunity for Transmitting and Bequeathing Values 378; b. Self-Commemoration / Perpetuation through Writing or Documentation 396; c. “The Dead Don’t Fart”: Humor and Laughter in the Presence of the Dead Body and Death 413
Part Three
Epilogue – The Dialogical Death
Chapter 9 | Life, Death and Dialogue in the Documentary Works of Franz Rosenzweig and Morrie (Morris) Schwartz 431
Conclusion | Reflections on the Dialogical Method in Research on Death 449
a. Below the Death Threshold: On Dialectics and Dialogue, Language and Body 451; b. On the Dialogical Method in Research 459; c. Me and Death: On My Place within the Field of Research 462