Yom Kippur is literally a ritual reenactment of your death. The Jewish version of what it is to die. You don’t eat, you don’t have sex, you’re dead even if you’re living. If your life were going to end tomorrow, where do you stand?
10. 2. 14
THE FOCAL POINT of Yom Kippur is death? I thought it was All-Atonement-All-The-Time.
Your average Jew will tell you that Yom Kippur is the Day of Judgment, ten days after the new year, when we confess our sins in synagogue and feel somewhat pardoned because of it. Yet all you have to do is start talking to rabbis—or reading their books about preparing for Yom Kippur—and death takes center stage. Which upends my view of this holiday in a way that might finally make me more alert during the untold hours in synagogue.
When I say the rabbis focus on death, I don’t mean death in the sense of a morbid fixation (cue the ominous organ music): it’s death in the sense of a laser focus on life—how fragile it is, how unpredictable—which forces us to really ask ourselves, at any age: If you knew you might not get another year, who would you be today?
A friend tells me I absolutely have to read the 2003 dramatic book This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation, by the late rabbi Alan Lew, who had a pulpit in San Francisco and was often called “The Zen Rabbi” because he drew from both Buddhism and Judaism. I Google Rabbi Lew. It turns out that this pioneer of Jewish meditation died from a heart attack after—in tragic irony—a meditation session.
When I start reading his book, I’m surprised at how adamant and bleak he is about the stakes of the Ten Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He says our very breath is in the balance. You. Could. Die. So how are you going to live? This perspective clears the nasal passages. It rattles but intrigues me.
The Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them. But you don’t know which one. The ten days that follow are fraught with meaning and dread. . . . For the next twenty-four hours you rehearse your own death. . . . You summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments. . . . A fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly, until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime. You are a human being, guilty of every crime imaginable. . . . Then a chill grips you. The gate between heaven and earth has suddenly begun to close. . . . This is your last chance. Everyone has run out of time.
As I said: it’s intense. In previous years, I hadn’t grasped what Yom Kippur entailed, besides a lot of apologies. I’d put in my hours in synagogue, thinking: “This is sufficient. I’m here. I’m listening. I’m reciting. I’m starving. Dayenu.” But Lew’s writing grabs me and says: “That’s bush-league. You have to work much, much harder than that.”
“This is your last chance,” Lew insists. “Everyone has run out of time. Every heart has broken. The gate clangs shut. . . .”
I suddenly want to know if Lew is an outlier, even a little meshugenah (nuts). Do other rabbis view the holiday as starkly?
“You do not have forever,” writes Rabbi David Wolpe of Los Angeles in Who By Fire, Who By Water, a collection of essays edited by Lawrence Hoffman on the Unetaneh Tokef prayer (often referred to as “The Who Will Live, Who Will Die” prayer). “Repent now,” Wolpe continues. “Repair now the broken relationships of your life. . . . There is little time to craft a self in this world before life is taken.”
It’s odd to admit I’m energized by this outlook, which turns out to be shared by many rabbis. Their unanimity begins to have a strong cumulative effect. I turn to the archived Yom Kippur sermons of another West Coast rabbi I admire, Sharon Brous. “STOP. EVERYTHING. NOW,” she implores in her 2013 sermon. “And ask yourself: Who am I? Is this who you want to be in the world? I know how busy we all are, but High Holy Days come and say: ‘Hit pause. This is the only life that you are given. If your narrative is choking you, or even just inhibiting you, do something about it.’”
I’m not sure what my narrative is, let alone whether it’s choking me. But I do know what Brous is getting at: Worries that hold us back. Self-doubt that saps our courage. Self-involvement that obscures another person’s pain. Anger that muddies what’s actually worth getting mad about. Ask yourself, Brous demands, whether you want this one ephemeral life to be defined by what prevents you from being bold or being good.
As I listen to Brous on my headphones, I suddenly see that the Yom Kippur themes of death and atonement aren’t as mutually exclusive as I’d first thought; they’re intertwined. The threat of mortality moves us to atone: if we realized we might die in the coming year, we might act differently, see our blessings more clearly.
What I don’t like is the notion that God will write us out of the Book of Life if we don’t hit three marks: repentance, prayer, and charity. That quid pro quo is very explicit in the unsettling Unetane Tokef poem, which we also recite on Rosh Hashanah, and which is considered by many to be a peak of the service, though it appears nowhere in the Hebrew Bible or Talmud. It was added to the High Holy Day liturgy during the eleventh century and the author is unknown.
On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born,
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by fire and who by water,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague,
Who by strangulation and who by stoning. . . . [The scary litany continues a bit.]
But repentance, prayer, and charity avert the severe decree.
It’s hard to fathom that God, this week, is deciding who will die—depending on whether we’ve repented, prayed, or been sufficiently charitable. “I find that promise loathsome,” writes British Reform Rabbi Tony Bayfield, in an essay in the Who By Fire anthology. “God has decided who will live and who will die and how they will die as well,” he continues. “I may be scheduled for terminal cancer next November, and you may be scheduled for a car crash two weeks later. Do the right thing before the final gavel falls and neither the cancer nor the car crash will occur. All of my experience tells me that life doesn’t work like that.”
I’m on the fence. I refuse to believe God kills us if we sin, but I don’t think it hurts to fear that possibility. I love how plainly Bayfield refuses to accept “an all-powerful Manipulator who has a level of control over our lives that defies credulity and morality.” But I’d say a little anxiety about our fate can make us act more thoughtfully all year long.
As part of my atonement plunge, a few days before services, I attend a seminar about Yom Kippur given at Mechon Hadar, an independent learning institute cofounded by my Selichot guide, Rabbi Elie Kaunfer. Rabbi