My flight from Atlanta to Montgomery earlier this afternoon proved to be the perfect start for the Days of Awe. I boarded the plane just before take-off and we were airborne by 12:15. I immediately began to work on a few things for that night's services. I got in a solid hour of preparation and reading until the plane made its final descent and landing in Montgomery. Then it happened: the pleasant voice of the stewardess announced over the speakers that the local time was… 12:15. We call that "gaining an hour" and it is the closest thing we have to time travel. In the course of that brief flight, past, present, and future folded onto and over each other giving me the gift of time: one much needed, extra hour in my life just before Rosh Hashanah services.
It was the perfect way to start the Days of Awe because the structure of time and our relationship to time are the central ideas of the High Holy Days. Our tradition is based on a specific philosophy of time, its flow and cycles, and our ability, human though we are, to determine and control time.
On one level, time is an obvious element of the Days of Awe. Tonight is, after all, Rosh Hashanah – literally the "head of the year." It is the day on which we mark the transition from the year 5760 to the year 5761. It is understood to be the birthday of the world, hearkening us back to the creation of the life, the universe, and time itself as we know it.
Time, however, is a central element of the High Holy Days in another, more subtle way. The very essence of these days - the concepts of teshuva, repentance, and renewal, atonement and forgiveness - are all grounded in our specifically Jewish understanding of time. The imagery we invoke in our prayers exemplifies this understanding of time and its central position in the High Holidays.
One of the most potent and well know High Holy Day images is that of God sitting in judgment with the Book of Life and Book of Death open before him. As our liturgy reads: on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. Who shall live and who shall die, and so on. This imagery is ancient. One of the first examples appears in the Talmud. A story is told of a group of angels who want to know why the High Holy Day services are so solemn, especially when compared to other Jewish holidays. They appear before God and ask Him: Why is it that the Jewish people do not sing the Hallel on this Holiday? The Hallel, some of you know, is that collection of psalms that we sing on most holidays - collectively taken as a prayer that our ancient sages believed to be the most effective and appropriate way to extol and glorify God. So, if the Hallel is so important, why not sing it on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? God responds to the angels: my people do not sing Hallel because it would be inappropriate for them to sing my praises while I sit in judgment with the Book of Life and Book of Death open before me. We just cited this imagery in the special insertions for the amidah - we asked God to inscribe us in the book of life. We also see this imagery in the traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting: l'shanah tovah tikatevu, which literally translates: "May you be inscribed for a good year in the book of life."
Ironically, despite the ubiquity of the imagery, we find little if any discussion or commentary on the Books of Life and Death. We are left begging the question: what is actually in these books, what do they represent? If we could imagine grabbing hold of them and opening them what would we find? Particularly regarding the Book of Death we are left wondering. Does the book of Death include a list of names of all those souls who will not live to see the next new year? This would seem to make sense. Just as the Book of Life would include those who have been inscribed for good and for life through the next year, the Book of Death would contain the corresponding list of those who will exit this world.
One of the greatest rabbis of the nineteenth century, Rabbi Chayim of Volozhin offered an alternate approach. He suggested that the Book of Death contains a list of all those who have already died throughout eternity, a kind of Book of the Dead. But if that is the case we need to explain why the dead are continually judged for their deeds. They who are no longer alive can not repent or seek forgiveness, turn over a new leaf, nor can they do good deeds or bad. It would seem that at a certain point the wicked would be judged eternally wicked and the good eternally good. The same frozen judgments merely would be recycled every year.
Rabbi Yithak Lapranti explained in a more recent work that the dead are in fact judged annually on the High Holy Days. They are not, however, judged on their past deeds the way we are. Rather, they are judged on the present ramifications of their past deeds. In other words, our memories of those who have died and the ways we are inspired to act, or not act, on those memories become their living, eternal legacy. Their bodies may no longer be here, but their lives continue to reverberate. It is, in effect, the past existing in the present propelling us to a renewed future. The past as embodied by those who came before us is never truly dead, frozen, and inaccessible. It is very much alive and therefore always open to new judgment.
This is the core of the Jewish philosophy of time upon which teshuvah and the Days of Awe are based: The past is never dead and gone forever and the future is not predetermined. Past, present, and future are linked in constant relation to each other.
The whole process of teshuvah - atonement and forgiveness - relies on this. We stand in the present, conscious of all that has happened before us, our personal and group histories. From that vantage point we envision an unrealized future. Who do we want to become? What kind of person? What kind of society? We then take the values embedded in that vision and examine our past for those moments and actions that violate those values and block us from that envisioned future, from that yet unrealized potential. But we do not stop there. We go back to the past and we get right by those moments and we get right by all that we have wronged. That is the essence of teshuvah.
We have a living present. We must seize the day - today - and undertake the process of personal renewal. We can not dwell in the past nor can we get lost in a future yet to come. Both of those will guide us, but we must be here and now. We must take the crucial step today.
We have a living past. If we can not imagine ourselves to be better in the future than we will never see anything as wrong in the past. We will grow brittle and ossify and our future will be the self-fulfilling prophecy of our polluted past.
We have a living past. We have the power to overcome the most horrific things in our past because the past is alive. We can access our past and therefore we can always transform that past. If we can not overcome our misdeeds than we are forever doomed to a future frozen and determined beyond our control. If there is no possibility to atone for past deeds and make them right or forgive that which has hurt us, than there is no teshuvah and there is nothing to these Days of Awe.
On the flight from Atlanta today I gained an hour. I received a precious gift of time. We all have been given a precious gift of time. We have been given a Jewish tradition that sees past, present, and future as always linked in relationship to each other. We have been given an annual gift of time: the chance to spend ten days reflecting, praying, atoning and forgiving, renewing ourselves, our lives, and our community for another year.
It is my prayer that we all find the strength and the wisdom to stand in the present, conscious of our past and envision a future yet unrealized in which we know happiness and peace, life and good health; that we take that vision and look through it as a lens on our past to identify those transgressions that violate the values of our envisioned future and keep us from becoming the person we would be; and that we fix them and get right before each other, before ourselves, and before God.
"L'shanah Tovah tikatevu" To the year 5761: May we all be inscribed for good in the Book of Life.
Home