Rosh Hashanah 5769
“Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die”
{sing} “b’Rosh Hashanah yikatevun, u’b’yom ztom kippur yihateimun”
Isn’t that a wonderful melody? It’s really very stirring? For me it triggers memories of sitting in shul with my parents and grandparents on the High Holy Days listening to the hazzan intone, in a beautiful tenor, the familiar words of the Makhzor.
Rabbi Harold Schulweis has a saying: “the nicer the melody, the more suspect the theology.” That is certainly true of the High Holy Day liturgy. When we take the time to really examine the prayers we say on RH and YK, we discover that they are quite provocative.
When I was a kid I was taught that RH was a happy holiday – apples and honey, birthday of the world – and that YK was about “atoning for our sins” (as though as a child I understood what that meant). The truth of the matter is that the theology of RH and YK goes far deeper than any of that.
In crafting the celebration of the High Holy Days, our sages put forward a decidedly Jewish theology of kingship. The theme of God’s kingship is found throughout our Makhzor. (Here’s a little game you can play if you get bored during services: count all the times the word Melech – king – appears in the book) And there is one prayer in particular that I think encapsulates the theology of Rosh Hashanah – the U’netane Tokef.
I have long struggled with U’netane Tokef. And, I’m not alone. Taken at face value, it is a deeply challenging prayer. What I would like to offer you this morning is perhaps a new way to think about the prayer and a new lens through which to look at the High Holy Day experience as a whole. If you’d like to follow along, I invite you to open your makhzorim to page 147.
Despite the legend told about its origins, we don’t know who wrote this poem. It was probably composed in the 10th or 11th century. It is appears in the makhzor just before the musaf kedushah. The Kedusha, which is part of every amidah, is about holiness; and the u’netane tokef functions here as an introductory mediation on God’s holiness and kingship. Now, in the kingship theology of the High Holy Day liturgy, “kedusha” is that aspect of God that is unknowable, distant, all-powerful… this is, God as frightening other. This is what the theologian Rudolf Otto called the “numinous”, the mystery of being before which we feel a sense of awe and our own “creatureliness.” This is the feeling you are meant to have standing in a great European cathedral whose towering columns and vaulted ceilings make you feel like a little ant on the floor.
The prayer starts: “unetaneh tokef…” Let us ascribe great power to this day, for it is awesome and frightening. On this day, Your Kingship [God] is uplifted and your throne is established with kindness. “v’teshev alav be’emet.” “You sit upon it in truth…” And what is this truth? Look at the next sentence: “emet ki ata hu dayan…” “The truth is that you are the Judge.” God is the king who sits in judgment. And now the prayer picks up on a midrash – a rabbinic parable – that imagines that when we die, we ascend to the heavenly court. When we arrive at the door of the court, we are presented with the book of our life in which is recorded all our deeds; and our sages imagined that this book reads itself out loud to us (like a book on tape… “this is your life, presented by Audible.com”… maybe I can get James Earl Jones to narrate mine).
When we’ve heard the story of our life, we are given one chance to review the book and make any corrections we want. But once we’ve agreed to the record, we must sign and seal the book. Then the doors of the court swing open and we stand before the Judge of the universe.
“u’b’shofar gadol” “And the great shofar is sounded and a still small voice is heard, and the angels are terrified and they are seized with trembling; and they declare, ‘behold, the Day of Judgment.’ Imagine. Even the angels – angels, who are free from temptation and sin – are terrified… how much the more so we are supposed to be afraid!
And then, the text goes on to describe how each of us passes before God – like sheep before the shepherd – to be judged. You’ve probably seen this in old western movies. This is the great round up when they bring all the sheep or cows into the corral and pass them through a narrow chute – just wide enough for one little cow. And the rancher sits on top with a clipboard and decides – who’s going back out to eat grass for another year… and who’s going to be sold to burger king. That more or less the image, right?
But, by making this part of the Rosh HaShanah liturgy, our sages did something very interesting. The drama that we are playing out on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is a rehearsal for the day of our death. Think about that for a moment. What do we do on Yom Kippur? – we fast (which for Jews is like death). We wear simple white clothes reminiscent of a burial shroud. We don’t wear shoes – like a corpse. So, Yom Kippur is a rehearsal for death and RH is the penultimate review of your life. There’s a profound wisdom in this. Those of us in this room that have been faced with death understand this wisdom. If you’ve ever sat at the bedside of a loved one, you understand this wisdom. If you’ve ever survived a life-threatening illness, you understand this wisdom. If you have a child, you know how fragile life is… you understand this wisdom. The philosopher Franz Rosenzweig once said that “on Yom Kippur a Jew gets to see his life through the eyes of eternity”… and through the eyes of eternity you get to ask yourself, what really matters to you? Death is the ultimate confrontation with the meaning of our lives. But, we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives – Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur give us the opportunity to rehearse our mortality once a year.
And here is where we all join in {singing} “B’rosh Hashanah yikateivun, u’b’yom tzom kippur yehatemun.” “On Rosh Hashanah the decree is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. How many shall pass away, and how many will be created – who will live and who will die, who will come to a timely end, and who to an untimely end; who will perish by water, and who by fire; who by sword, and who by beast; who by hunger and who by thirst; who by earthquake and who by plague; who by strangling and who by stoning; who will have rest and who will wander about (“mi yanuach, u’mi yanu’ah); who will have serenity, and who will be confused; who will be tranquil and who will be tormented; who will be poor and who will be wealthy; who will be brought down low, and who will be uplifted.” And then the congregation joins together in declaring: “U’Teshuvah, u’teffilah, u’tzedakah, ma’avirin et ro’ah ha’gzeirah.” Our makzor translates this line as “But repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the severe decree.”
I don’t know about you, but, taken at face value, I find this to be a profoundly disturbing theology. Nonetheless, I think there’s a part of us, that deep down really wants to believe this. We want to believe that God is standing over us in judgment, deciding every year who shall live and who shall die. Somehow we find it comforting to see ourselves as the little sheep passing under the rod. But, I have a problem with this view of God because it doesn’t match my experience and I suspect it doesn’t match yours either.
The implication is that God decides our suffering. If that’s true, then we’re in a terrible bind, because it gives us one of two options: The first alternative is that our suffering is part of God’s mystery, which we are incapable of understanding. This is the theology of the book of Job… it is the answer that Isaiah gives the people when he says, “Ki lo makhsevotai makhshevoteichem, ve’lo darcheichem d’rachai” “[God’s] thoughts are not like your thoughts; [God’s] ways are not like your ways.” (Is. 55:8) – you just don’t get it. But, this is a theology I can’t accept. It places the universe in a big black box that I can never make sense of. Good people sometimes suffer and evil people sometimes prosper, and it makes no sense. If that’s so, then the universe has no morality and I might as well go to the movies today rather than be here in shul.
OR, the other theological option is that God is perfectly good and just; rather if a person suffers, they must have deserved it. And, I can’t believe that either. We all know good, wonderful, kind people who suffer… and we can’t say to them, “you deserved it.” Yet, I think there’s a part of us that really wants to believe that.
Many of you know that during rabbinical school, I trained as a chaplain. During my time at UCLA Medical Center, there was a 16 year-old Jewish girl in the hospital with a tumor deep in her brain. For months, her doctors tried to shrink the tumor, but it just kept growing. Over the course of the last few weeks of her life, I visited the family regularly. And, every time I would visit, I got a similar response from the girl’s mother: “Thanks for coming, Rabbi. We appreciate your visit, but, you know, we’re not religious. We don’t go to shul. In fact, I don’t believe in God.” One morning, I received a page: the girl had died. When I got to the room the mother turned and lashed out at me, “How! How, Rabbi, could God do this to me?!? Why did God take my baby! We’re good people, we try to help others, we try to do the right thing… what did I do to deserve this!” Can you understand this poor mother’s pain? I can’t imagine anything more painful. What do you say to her? Do you tell her, “well, you see, it’s all part of God’s mystery… we can’t understand… God’s ways are not like our ways…” Or, are you going to tell her she deserved it? “Well, you must have done something wrong…” But, now let’s reflect a moment and consider what she’s saying:
She is suffering because the God she doesn’t believe in is punishing her. First, she suffers because she believes God took her baby, and now her suffering is multiplied because she can’t figure out what she did to deserve it.
NO! I can’t believe that theology. I don’t believe that God is an old man in the sky who decides our suffering. So, I’m left with a choice: I can be dismissive and say, “Unetane Tokef was written in the Middle Ages… that was just the primitive religion of my ancestors, but I don’t believe it.” But then why should I say the words in this book, if I don’t believe them! And, besides, do I think my ancestors were a bunch of morons?!? They didn’t understand suffering? They, who didn’t know about germs and antibiotics? They who lived through pogroms? – they didn’t know suffering? Of course, they understood. So, rather than not saying the prayers, I have to find some way of interpreting them that is meaningful to me.
Last year I was in a real crisis over this, until I studied U.T. with my teacher, Rabbi Ed Feinstein. Several decades ago there was a scholar named Daniel Goldschmidt who gathered up all the various medieval manuscripts of the makhzor he could find and he compared them. Goldschmidt found something very interesting in early manuscripts of “unetane tokef”: Many of the medieval versions read, “u’teshuvah, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah me’vatlin et ha’gzeirah.” “Repentance, prayer, and tzedakah annul the decree.” Now that’s the conventional understanding that we still have of the prayer – that’s the translation in our book. God sits in judgment and I have three ways of appealing the sentence between RH and YK… but that’s not the text we have. Our text doesn’t say, “… mevatlin et ha’gzeira.” Look again closely: Our version says “u’teshuvah, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah, ma’avirin et ro’a ha’gzeira.” What’s the difference? The verb is different… and The subject is the “ro’ah” – the severity, the pain. That is to say, there’s nothing I can do to annul the decree… but I can do something to mitigate the severity. There’s something I can do to withstand the pain and the suffering.
Now we have to ask, “so, what’s the decree?” If the decree can’t be changed, how do I understand the beginning of the prayer about God as judge? I want to suggest to you a different way of understanding the Unetane Tokef. Look again at the beginning: “On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed… who will live and who will die…” I think we read these words secretly believing that it’s talking about someone else. (“That’s not talking about me… that’s some other poor shlamazel who’s going to get it this year”)
Last Rosh HaShanah I was sitting in shul and I started reading the Makhzor (if you read the newspaper, the congregants get upset)… And I started reading the words of Unetane Tokef: “who will live and who will die?” The answer to that question is: ME! I’m going to live and someday I’m going to die. The difficult but enduring truth – the decree that’s been written and sealed from the very start – is the simplest and most difficult truth of life… that it’s not forever. “Who in his time and who before his time?” ME! Everyone dies when it’s his or her time; and for anyone who has anything meaningful in life, it’s always too early. That’s why people cry at funerals… no matter how old the person is who died.
“Who by water and who by fire?” Again, it’s talking about me. There are times in life when I’m drowning – like right before the High Holy Days. “Who by fire?” Again, me! Sometimes I’m consumed by my own passions and I burn up. “Sword and beast?” Me! There are times when I’m filled with violent rage. There are times when my inner beast threatens to overtake my better self – that part of us that is divine. “Who by hunger and who by thirst.” Definitely me… I eat too much – sometimes out of boredom or nervousness. I eat when I’m sad; I eat when I’m angry. “Who will wander and who will rest?” There are nights when I lie in bed awake and my mind wanders to scary places of worry and anxiety… and sometimes my head hits the pillow and I sleep like a baby. “Who will have peace and who will be tormented…?” Again, what I realized reading U.T. this way is that each of these is talking about me…. But it isn’t personal… it isn’t just about me. It’s about YOU too.
The truth of the decree – the terrifying truth of this day – is that these all describe what it means to be a human being. Unetane Tokef means to tell us that for all our pretensions of power and control, the truth is that we control very little. In the scope of the universe, our power is limited. That’s the terrifying truth that the prayer is talking about
But we don’t stop there… if we did, we would be fatalists. Instead, the prayer gives us an answer to the limits of human power because it tells us that God gives us three things we can do to mitigate the human condition.
“U-teshuvah, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah ma’avrin et ro’ah ha-gzeirah”
The first thing we can do is Teshuvah. What is teshuvah? It means repentance, but it really comes from the word meaning “to respond.” Teshuvah means we can respond. It is our ability to respond to our own shortcomings and it is also the ability to respond to the inevitable challenges of life. Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist from Vienna who was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, then Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. He lost his entire family in Auschwitz. While he was in the camps, Frankl treated his fellow prisoners for depression and tried to prevent Jewish suicides. After the war, he wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning and started a whole school of psychotherapy based on what he had learned from doing psychoanalysis in the camps.
In his book he observed that even if we human beings don’t have much control over the conditions of our lives, we do have the power to interpret those conditions and we have the power to respond. We have the power to make the time we have (even the most horrific moments) meaningful and purposeful. We have the power to be God’s partners in alleviating suffering. We have the power to pursue goodness. When I was confronted by that mother in the hospital, she wanted me to give her an answer – to act as God’s spokesman. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t explain why her child died any better than the doctors could. But, I could respond. So I did: I gave her a hug and I let her weep on my shoulder. We can’t always change the conditions of our existence, but we have the power to respond. We have the power to bring a little more kindness and compassion into this world.
Tefillah - prayer. Prayer is how we come together as a community to express our hopes and our joys; our sadness and our pain. Synagogue must be a place where we can bring our whole selves. The shul should be a place where we are free to laugh and where it is safe to cry. If you can’t come to shul and cry, we’ve failed. Prayer is an expression – in poetry, song, and symbols – of what it means to be a human being. Prayer is how we reach out to God and reach in to find that part of us that is created in the Divine image. Prayer is the spiritual work we do that prepares us to confront a world that isn’t perfect. It teaches us to live life with a posture of humility, with a sense of wonder and gratitude, and it teaches us to live in relationship to our Creator with a feeling of reverence. We don’t have too many places in our culture that teach reverence. The synagogue is a place of reverence. Tefillah means that we can bring a little more gentleness and humility into this world.
And, finally, Tzedkah. Tzedkah is from the word Tzedek – justice. Tzedakah means that we have the power to narrow the range of chaos in the world. We might be drawn the fatalism and cynicism that says the world can’t be better. It’s true that we can’t change the decree - life and death are part of the same process, joy and suffering are part of the process… but what it means to be created in the image of God is to have a mind and a soul to understand that there is a better way to live. We have the power to bend the moral arch of the universe a little further toward justice. Tzedakah means that in a world with so much suffering, each of us has the power to bring a little more Godliness to this world.
Our tradition takes the image of a king – powerful and distant – and turns Him into a Judge and a Shepherd. The gift of life comes with certain conditions – some of which we cannot change – but it also comes with choices. Every Rosh HaShanah we are faced with the limits of what it means to be human. Every Rosh HaShanah it is written, and every Yom Kippur it is sealed for another year, but we have the power to do teshuvah – to respond with kindness and compassion. We have the power of tefillah – to draw together as a community to share in the human experience. And we have the power to do tzedakah – to pursue justice and bring a little more Godliness into the world. And, we have a way of giving more meaning and purpose to our lives.
I wish you a sweet year; a year of joy; a year of meaning and purpose. May we all be inscribed in the book of life. L’Shanah Tovah
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