Book Review: Choose Life: Torah's Radical Answer to Civilization's Oldest Obsession

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.

Beyo opens with two images separated by four millennia: the Great Pyramid of Giza and a twenty-three-year-old walking into a crowded marketplace wearing a suicide vest. The provocation is deliberate, and the book earns it. His thesis is that these are not unrelated pathologies but expressions of a single theology — the worship of death as the gateway to power, permanence, and glory — and that the Torah's war against avodah zarah and its insistence on the sanctity of life are one and the same campaign.

The book's first half is a tour of death-centered civilizations: Egypt, whose greatest architecture was funerary; Canaan and Babylon, with their child sacrifice and necromancy; Greece and Rome, where the beautiful death was the highest human achievement; and medieval Catholicism's cult of relics and martyrdom. The second half turns to the Torah's counter-architecture — v'chai bahem ("live by them," Leviticus 18:5), the human being as tzelem Elohim, the calendar's rhythm of life, the laws of burial, the prohibitions on consulting the dead and the stars. A closing chapter, "The Death Cult Today," brings the argument unflinchingly into the present.

What distinguishes the book is its intellectual spine. Beyo is a committed Maimonidean, and the RaMBaM's Moreh Nevuchim supplies the analytical engine: the distinction between ha-medameh, the imaginative faculty that fabricates gods and glorifies death, and the intellect, which the Torah recruits against fantasy. Drawing on José Faur's semiotics of paganism alongside the Talmud, Mishneh Torah, and a wide historical canvas, Beyo writes as a rationalist without apology — there is no mysticism here, no consolation literature, and no hedging.

Readers should know what the book is not. It is not a dispassionate comparative-religion study; it is advocacy, and specialists in Egyptology or medieval Christianity may object to the prosecutorial framing of their fields. The final chapter's treatment of contemporary jihadism will strike some readers as polemical. But Beyo never hides the nature of the enterprise, and the argument is documented throughout — the footnotes cite primary sources in Hebrew and Aramaic, presented bilingually with care unusual in a trade-length book.

At 144 pages, Choose Life moves fast and demands engagement. It will reward the general reader seeking a serious account of what Judaism actually affirms, and the scholar willing to argue with it. Few books make the case for life itself feel urgent. This one does.