Books on the Jewish view of death and afterlife tend to arrive in one of two registers: pastoral comfort or academic survey. Rabbi Michael Beyo's Choose Life belongs to neither. It is an argument — sustained, sharply constructed, and unfashionably confident — that the Torah's command in Deuteronomy 30:19, uvacharta bachayim, "choose life," is not a platitude but the organizing principle of an entire civilization's four-thousand-year dissent from the rest of human history. Bey