“On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed; how many shall pass away and how many shall be born. Who shall live and who shall die.”
The words of Unataneh Tokef confront us, demanding that we engage with their troubling themes. Each year on Yom Kippur, we read a list of the ancient ways that our people have confronted their mortality, and we reflect on the harrowing reality that not everyone in this room is going to survive another year; that is, after all, how life works. The result is a day that requires us to do the disconcerting work of contextualizing our lives.
That certainly isn’t how we operate during the rest of the year. We live in a society that constantly engages our attention, keeping us distracted and overwhelmed by design. If we are moving at a breakneck pace, then we don’t have to come to terms with the morbid themes that are the inherent calling card of Yom Kippur. In his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman describes how human beings bend over backwards to avoid looking their finite humanity in the face. “Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, to try to forget our real predicament.” I have seen this firsthand as a congregational rabbi. Every year, more and more Jews are going to work and school on the High Holy Days, whether because they are too overwhelmed with obligations to take the time off or because they find the subject matter of our worship to be unsettling and distant. The idea of sitting through a two-hour service without a phone to distract us from our mortality is excellent inspiration for some to schedule that overdue root canal.
Yet, this is what makes the day so important, so powerful: we need a set time that will force us to acknowledge the fleeting nature of our lives, and to make ourselves understand what a precious gift life is supposed to be. Whether we like it or not, life eventually comes to an end, and we are better served by being prepared for that eventuality than by ignoring it and letting our fear fester. The themes of this season are not meant to punish us or intimidate us; rather, we are invited to welcome our dread into the room with us, to sit with it and engage with it, so that we take away the taboo of the subject.
After all, there is something deeply comforting about knowing that every human being who has ever lived has had to engage with these same questions. We don’t have to come up with the answers all by ourselves; we are invited to do the hard work in partnership with those throughout our history who preserved their views of what we should do about our precarious existential place, and to be surrounded by other people who are willing to admit that they, too, are confronting their reality. Yom Kippur is an opportunity for us to do the thing that scares us, to ask the questions, and participate in the themes that we would otherwise try to ignore.
Because at the end of the day, the ultimate theme of the High Holy Days is one of hope. Unataneh Tokef ends with the words: “but repentance, prayer, and righteousness ease the severity of the decree.” It isn’t that God doesn’t allow pain to happen to those who demonstrate these core Jewish values. Instead, the severity is diminished because of the strength we build by choosing to lean into it, to engage, to participate in the sacred process of coming to terms with our existence. These are our gifts, if only we are willing to reach out and take them.
Austin Zoot is the Rabbi Educator at Valley Temple in Wyoming, Ohio.