Who will live and who will die?
The prayer Unetaneh Tokef (“We ascribe holiness to this day”) is the high point of the High Holy Day liturgy. It is quite ironic that, legends aside, we don’t know who wrote this magnificent prayer, but the anonymity of the author only serves to underscore the universality of the message.
The prayer has several parts, with interlocking themes:
1. We recognize that this day is a day of judgment
2. “On this day we all pass before You, one by one, like a flock of sheep. As a shepherd counts his sheep…so You review every living being and decree their destiny.
3. On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:…who will live and who will die…”
4. “But Repentance, Prayer and Deeds of Kindness can remove the severity of the decree.”
It is well worth noting that the prayer can be interpreted in two extremely different ways. The first, which I expect was the original, was an almost literal description of the judge sentencing the convicted man. By this reading, G-d judges our deeds, determines whether we will live or die in the coming year, and, indeed, how we will die: “who by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by wild beast, who by famine and who by thirst, etc.” As daunting as the threat of death may be, we can take some comfort in knowing that “Repentance, Prayer and Deeds of Kindness can remove the severity of the decree,” thereby sparing us from death, if not from punishment altogether.
As I mentioned, this was probably the original intent of the prayer, but for us, especially after the Holocaust and more recently October 7, this is a hard prayer to swallow. It is daunting, if not also disgusting, to imagine a G-d who, for whatever reason, decrees that babies should be murdered in their beds and young girls raped to death. With that in mind, there are those who want to omit Unetaneh tokef from the High Holy Day machzor entirely.
There is, though, another way of looking at it. One need merely to open a newspaper or turn on the tv to note that people die in grotesque, and often cruel, ways. Famine, whether man made or due to natural disaster, is real. So is war. So are shark attacks and car accidents. We don’t need to imagine G-d as a sadistic puppeteer arranging all these catastrophes to recognize that life is filled with them. So the “severity of the decree” is less a reference to G-d’s vindictiveness than a challenge to the value of our lives. Put it this way: our lives could be snuffed out at any moment. And we are therefore challenged at every moment to demonstrate, and embrace the fact, that our lives are somehow purposeful, that mortality is not synonymous with meaninglessness, that our fragility does not make us frivolous.
What a relief it would be to know this! Would this not indeed “lessen the severity of the decree” that we, somehow, sometime, will die? And how do we achieve that sense of life’s meaning? Here’s a suggestion: Repentance, Prayer and Deeds of Kindness.