September 29th: Awesome and Full of Dread

“Let us proclaim the sacred power of this day; it is awesome and full of dread.”

These are the words that we read on Rosh Hashanah, marking the ten day period between the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

We read a passage that describes God as the Judge and Arbiter, Counsel and Witness. The imagery describes a King, sitting upon a throne, determining “who shall live and who shall die.”

I find this writing both hauntingly beautiful and deeply troubling. There are equal parts safety and helplessness in the notion that God gets to decide our fates in the coming year.

On the one hand, we are taught that, through repentance and good deeds, we have the opportunity to be inscribed in the Book of Life. On another level, though, we are at the mercy of a God who gets to choose our fate, rather than having the chance to create our own way.

Throughout the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, we look at the power God has over our fate. We are confronted by the reality that we are but small pieces in a larger world, with little understanding of how we come to live the experiences we encounter every day. Sometimes this can be comforting, while other times it can lead to a sense of false security.

What I find most difficult, though, is the notion that our actions are pre-determined. Are we to believe that the loved ones we lose from one year to the next are the result of a failure to “make it into the Book”? How do we come to terms with a piece of our faith that is so unsettling?

The reality is that, at the time that this piece was written, we needed a God who would protect, provide, and judge. We believed in these lofty personifications for God, and they brought us comfort, knowing that our actions would lead to good judgement and, hopefully, a promise of another year of life. It also allowed us to rationalize those who we lost, knowing that, for whatever reason, they had been put on the “Who Shall Die” list, rather than the “Who Shall Live” one.

Now, though, we live in a time where faith needs to lead to accountability. We cannot hide behind the false comfort of a God who makes the decisions for us. We must hold ourselves accountable for our choices, and the results of them.

This is not a burden we must bear, but an opportunity to take control of who we are and what we do. We get to use the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to evaluate our behavior, to think of how we can do better in the coming year. But that betterment needs to be for our own benefit, not as an opportunity to get into the good graces of God.

What, then, is the value in a religious practice such as this that focuses so wholly on an area that we don’t find immediately meaningful?

There is hope to be found in the words from our liturgy. We read, in the Gates of Repentance, “Freely we choose, and what we have chose to become stands in judgement over what we may yet hope to be. In our choices we are not always free. But if only we make the effort to turn, every force of goodness, within and without, will help us, while we live, to escape that death of the heart which leads to sin.”

We have the unique opportunity, as Jews, to evaluate our choices, to make an attempt to be better. Judaism never calls for perfection. Rather, Judaism calls for the pursuit of being better. We want to be better people, find more meaning, seek more happiness. Through our observance of these ten sacred days, we are able to better come closer to the divine presence within each of us. We become just a little more Godly.

Shanah Tovah.