(This is the column I published in the most recent Jewish Reporter from the Jewish Federation of New Hampshire.)
On Rosh Hashanah it is
written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
Who shall live and who shall die….
For many people, this prayer is
one of the most powerful childhood memories of the services of Rosh Hashanah
and Yom Kippur. The words describe God, seated on a throne, surrounded by
angels, looking at a Book of Remembrances. In it is a record of each of our lives in the past year,
written in our own handwriting.
As children, many of us heard
this and wondered: Am I going to
live or die in the next year? Are
my grandparents going to live? Or,
more heartbreaking: Is God the
reason my grandma died last year?
But I don't mean to say that
these are childish questions. I've
lost count of the number of people who ask me: Rabbi, is this how God operates? Is this what happens — God decides during one week who will
live and die, and then that's what plays out in the coming year? Do we believe that's the explanation
for the tragedies of the world, all the murder and terror and war?
The first part of my answer
is: No. I don't believe that God is the one who pulls every string,
who determines which of us will live another moment or another year.
But my response goes on. For me,
prayer is sometimes like art. Art
is a way of highlighting or spotlighting something about our lives. Art magnifies and intensifies — and
sometimes art exaggerates, and experiments. Art does these things with our beliefs and our perceptions
and our worries. Art evokes in our
minds and emotions a world of as-if.
What if the world were really like
this? How would that affect me and
change me?
Piyyut — poetic prayer — is just like that.
The prayer of God on a throne of
judgment begins: Unetaneh Tokef
Kedushat Hayom. It means something like, "We acknowledge the power of
the holiness of this day."
Power! The words of the
prayer work on us with emotional power.
But the prayer asks us:
What if we treated this day as having actual power?
Unetaneh Tokef puts us, uncomfortably, face to face with
mortality. The last year may have
been a year when someone close to you died, or a year with pain in your life or
your family. But even if not, we
all know that life is uncertain.
No one can know who will live and who will die, who will have health and
who will suffer.
The prayer asks us: What if your life really depended on
your actions and your decisions?
What if everything is being weighed, and the decision is being made
today? What would you have to
do?
The prayer itself answers: Righting the wrongs we have done. Centering ourselves on God's truths and
teachings. Giving and
justice. U'teshuvah u'tefillah
u'tzedakah. These things change our lives and our destinies.
Even if I don't have many days
remaining to live.
The Unetaneh Tokef prayer could bring us to feel that these days have
true power. It's not just a
service to dress up for, and sit through for great lengths of time. Surrounded
by so many people, taking time from work and school, we can face together the
questions of life and death that we would rather turn away from.
The prayer beckons us to wake up,
and to tremble. We rarely do that,
until life forces us to. But the
prayer also invites us to imagine ourselves in a reality where our decisions
and our directions affect life and death, happiness and suffering, for me and
for others. In that reality, power
is truly in our hands.
This is the intensity and the
exaggeration that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur offer us. While the reality of the Unetaneh
Tokef may not describe the world, the
prayer helps us our own lives as we ourselves have written them. It acknowledges our fears and our
hopes, and challenges us: What
next?
May our whole community have a Shana
Tova Umetukah, a good and sweet New Year.
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