120? More! More! Peter Heinegg Hillel Halkin, After One‐Hundred‐and‐Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 226 pp. $27.95. There's a popular Yiddish wish or blessing, biz hundert un tsvantsik ([May you live] till a hundred and twenty). But Hillel Halkin, the eminent and prolific American‐born Israeli translator, journalist, biographer, and novelist, frames his book with another, less joyous Yiddish (and Hebrew) expression. “After one‐hundred‐and‐twenty” likewise refers to the lifespan of Moses, the supreme Jewish figure, but it's a euphemism, something like “once you're dead and gone.” The first saying hopes for a life as rich and satisfying as possible; the second looks to the finality of death. To elucidate it, Halkin focuses on the bitter end of Moses’ career, his being denied entry to the Promised Land, after forty years of back‐breaking, heart‐breaking labor for the Lord and the people of Israel. The Bible (Dt. 34.7) accents the positive by telling us that Moses’ “eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated,” that is, he escaped all the miseries of old age and left the world physically and mentally intact. But Halkin cites a powerful–playful midrash on Moses’ death from Yalkut Shim'oni, Devarim 31, that has him fighting tooth and nail against earthly extinction. (And why not: Moses’ lifespan was dwarfed by those of the antediluvian patriarchs.) Alarmed, God bolts the gates of heaven against Moses’ otherwise irresistible prayers. God and Moses then argue back and forth, with neither giving an inch, until Moses, while conceding that it's time to make room for Joshua, asks to be allowed to live on as Joshua's pupil. God agrees, but once the “reins of wisdom” have been handed to the Israelite generalissimo, Moses himself is unable to follow his teacher's lessons. In bitter humiliation, Moses tells God, “now You can have my life.” A witty touch, but the story isn't over. Who's going to fetch Moses’ soul? The archangels Gabriel and Michael beg off, so God has to send Samael, the Angel of Death, to do the job. Moses first outdebates Samael and then outduels him with his mighty staff (on which the name of God is inscribed). Finally, God himself has to come and take his soul. But Moses continues to protest, and even when God promises to lift him to the highest heaven, just beneath “My seat of glory,” that's not good enough, and Moses’ soul pleads to be allowed to stay in his body. Enough—God kisses Moses on the mouth (whence the Hebrew phrase mitat neshikah, a painless death) and carries off his soul—though the Lord wonders ruefully who will carry on his fight against the wicked, now that Moses is gone. Halkin's point is that, on the whole, Jewish tradition hasn't been all that interested in, or hopeful about, the afterlife. Nor, Halkin makes it clear, is he. But at 77, one might well want to put one's thanatological house in order. Halkin presents his case in a marvelous combination of memoir‐confession and sweeping survey of Jewish intellectual history, stressing the treatment of death in the Bible, Talmud, Midrash, and Kabalah, along with the writings of modern Orthodox writers like Franz Rosenzweig. Although Judaism never developed the elaborate structures and scenarios of the Beyond that Christianity and Islam did, it nonetheless left behind the straightforward mortalism of the Tanakh, where death means (at best) being “gathered to one's ancestors,” and the underworld, Sheol, is simply a silent warehouse for corpses. Psalm 115.17 flatly states: “The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence.” Ezekiel's vision in chapter 37 of the dry bones coming back to life is about national revival, not individual survival. Still, there's a famous exception to this bleak picture in the last‐written book of the Hebrew Bible, Daniel, where we read that “Many [but not all?] who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and...