The Social Lives of the Dead: Postmortal Sentience and Sociality in b.Berakhot 18b

What is the social life of a dead person? Who can they hear? To whom can they speak? And with whom can they be in community after death takes place? A legal discussion in the Babylonian Talmud about exemptions from liturgical obligations for individuals tending to the needs of the deceased prompts the sages to question whether the dead have any knowledge of what takes place in the realm of the living. The Talmud explores this question by recounting four stories of purportedly direct exchanges between the living and the dead. By analyzing this story cycle, this paper will argue that the rabbis imagine the dead to maintain the capacity for a robust existence–one with social, emotional, and perhaps even physical dimensions. This conclusion calls into question how we define life and death, and how starkly we define the boundary between the two.