After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition

 

Hillel Halkin’s After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition (Library of Jewish Ideas Book 9) is a decent exploration of Jewish conceptions of life after death from the Bible to the present.  Halkin is one of the great Jewish thinkers and writers of this time, so this is a good book.  However, I would have liked this book to have been a more intellectual treatment of Jewish eschatology, and less about Halkin’s personal experiences related to death and dying.  As it is, there is not nearly enough written on the topic – and even Jews very well versed in the books and traditions of the faith find this subject confusing and opaque.