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“On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.” – Unetaneh Tokef High Holiday Prayer
This week we are in the midst of what Jewish tradition calls, Yamim Noraim, “The Days of Awe.” They are the ten days between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. During this time, we are urged to hold up a spiritual mirror to ourselves to examine who we have been, what we have said, and what we have done during the year that has passed, to make amends to those in our lives whom we have hurt or ignored, and to recommit ourselves to doing better in the year ahead.
The traditional imagery of the High Holidays is that of a celestial court, where God sits on the throne as judge and each of us stands in court with one angel as our prosecutor and another as our defender. All our deeds of the past year are presented to the court for God to consider, to determine as the Unetaneh Tokef prayer says, “who shall live and who shall die.” The imagery is so powerful and so dramatic that for thousands of years throughout the world, every Rosh Hashanah has been a time of spiritual trauma, when our very lives seem to hang in the balance and we are urged to pray with such fervor that God chooses to give us another year of life, whether our actions deserve it or not.
What is most powerful of all, however, is that this courtroom drama imagery provides one of the greatest spiritual innovations in all of Judaism, that the ultimate power rests actually not with God alone, but in our own hands. What the liturgy reminds us year after year, is that it is what we do and the choices we make that ultimately determine our fate. The quality of our lives is a direct result of the quality of our choices, and so the prayer goes on to declare, “But teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah, repentance, prayer and righteous behavior can avert the evil decree and change everything.”
This is the lesson that matters most. We are not defined by our past – by our worst moment, our worst act, our worst decision. Instead, what we say today matters, what we do today matters, who we are today matters, and choices we make today are what can determine the rest of our lives.
“On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed,” and this is the week to choose the best vision of who we can become so that what is “sealed” on Yom Kippur is the person we are most proud to be in the year ahead.
Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, Home Shalom
Naomi Ackerman, The Advot Project
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