The image of the Book of Life is so central to the high holidays that when we greet each other, we say, L’Shana Tova Tikatevu, May you written for a good year [in the Book of Life]. And on Yom Kippur, we’ll say Gemar Chatima Tova, May you be sealed for a good year [in the Book of Life.] The Book of Life appears in all the central prayers of the high holidays. Every time we pray the Amidah, we ask to be written in it. Same with Avinu Malkenu and Unetaneh Tokef, “On Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed…”
The idea of God opening up a book and decreeing a verdict about our fate comes from the Talmud. In the tractate of Rosh Hashana (16b), “R. Kruspedai taught in the name of R. Yohanan: On Rosh HaShanah, three books are opened-- one with the names of the completely wicked, one with the names of the completely righteous, and one with the names of those who are, well, in the middle. The completely righteous and the completely wicked, their verdict is written down and sealed at once. Those in the middle (that’s most of us, by the way): their verdict is suspended between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. If they are deemed to merit it, they are inscribed for life; if not, they are inscribed for death.”
Much of the high holiday liturgy is based on this notion. The books are open and God is judging us, so we’d better do the work of repentance, prayer, and tzedekah so that we can convince God that we’re worth keeping around for another year and that we should receive health, prosperity, and goodness.
As much as we’re accustomed to this imagery, it’s actually quite problematic in a few ways. First, it seems like a pretty simplistic explanation for how God works; God is portrayed like a certain well known imaginary figure who is checking his lists and seeing who has been naughty or nice.
Secondly, especially when I look around the room and take note of who is no longer here with us, when I see those who are struggling with illnesses or with getting by financially or who are suffering with chronic pain or emotional pain or with family troubles – it seems clear that the decree written in a celestial book doesn’t have much to do with one’s righteousness or wickedness. We all know that good, righteous people who give so much to the world can die young or suffer tragically, and we know that criminals and rotten people can live long and healthy lives. Living, as we do, post-Holocaust, I don’t have to give you too many examples to prove my point.
But even our ancient sages and medieval commentators struggled with this notion. Ramban, the 13th Century kabbalist and commentator, challenged the idea of these three books opened on Rosh Hashana, “How could Rabbi Yochanan have said such a thing? Do all the righteous indeed live and all the wicked die? Biblical verses cry out against him! Has he not seen the book of Job?”
While many commentators throughout the centuries struggled with the same question, the imagery of the book of life remains central to our prayers today. Why? Well, as much as the notion of God’s judgment might trouble us intellectually, as much as empirical data might disprove the idea that we are written in the book of life or not according to our deeds, there is a part of us that sometimes believes it. Especially when we are the ones suffering, there is that voice in our heads that blames ourselves. - Now, of course there are ways that we are responsible for our fate. If we ‘text message’ while driving and have a car accident, we can’t say: Oh! Why did this happen to me? If we’re mean and gossipy and untrustworthy, we can’t say: Oh! Why don’t I have any friends? - Rather, I’m talking about those decrees that are outside of our control, the ones that don’t make any sense, but the ones in which we still somehow feel that God has judged us worthy of punishment.
When we hear a religious fundamentalist on the news claiming that a natural disaster or act of terrorism was deserved because of some moral lacking on the part of the victims, we find it offensive and absurd. We were rightly outraged when some claimed that hurricane Katrina was divine retribution for New Orleans’ hedonism. Yet, we apply that same retribution theology to ourselves when we suffer. We wonder: what did I do to deserve this?
Retribution theology comes out of our fear of not being in control. We want to blame ourselves for misfortunes that we can’t control because it’s a way for us to feel we have some control over our situation. Perhaps this is the psychology behind the Book of Life.
The Unetaneh Tokef says:
On Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
Who shall live and who shall die?
Who by fire and who by water?
Who shall be at ease and who afflicted?
Who shall be poor and who shall be rich?
And then the climax of the prayer declares:
Teshuva, Tefilah, and Tzedekah Maavirin et roa hagezera!
Repentance, prayer, and righteous-giving avert the severity of the decree!
Some high holiday commentaries read this as an assertion of human power. We determine our fate through our actions! We control what happens to us! It’s a wonderful idea and very reassuring. The problem is: it’s not true; we aren’t completely in control. We can’t just press a magic button and make God give us what we want. It’s been a hard year for many of us in our community; we’ve had losses, setbacks, and struggles, and we know, as individuals, we don’t always have the power to avert the decrees of car accident, cancer, or the recession.
But if we look carefully at the language of our prayers, we’ll see that the theology of the Book of Life isn’t as simplistic as it seems. First of all, the author of the Unetaneh Tokef actually changed the language from the Talmud. The Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud Taaniyot 2, 65b) originally said that these three things, repentance, prayer, and tzedekah, mevattelim et hagezerah, they cancel the decree. But the author of the prayer changed it to say that they cancel the severity of the decree: maavirin et roa hagezera, literally, they cause the evil of the decree to pass.
There’s an important difference. The author of the prayer knew that there isn’t a simple causality between goodness and righteousness and the reward of health and a good life. We can’t always change the decree. But we can, through our choices, make the harshness of the decree pass. Through teshuva, turning towards another person, repairing relationships, making amends; through prayer, finding comfort and connection in the Holy One; and through tzedekah, giving generously of oneself, we can soften the blows that we might experience. The roa hagezerah, the harshness of our lot, does not have to lead to bitterness, self-pity, destroyed relationships, and distance from God and can actually be an opportunity for change, growth, and connection with God. Life can knock us down, but we still have the choice to try to get back up.
I’ll never forget a patient I met when I worked as a chaplain at Mt. Zion hospital. Sam was a sweet Jewish man who knew his illness was terminal. He wasn’t a particularly observant Jew, but whenever I’d visit him in his hospital room, it didn’t matter what day of the week it was, he’d be there with family and with wine, challah, and candles. He explained, “I’ve come to realize that every day is yontiff, so I make every day I have left a holiday. I celebrate yontiff everyday.”
There’s another way to understand the idea that we can choose, not to cancel the decree, but to cause the harshness of the decree to pass, that is: by softening the blow of the decree for another person. It’s our duty, in fact, when another is suffering, for us to reach out to them, to pray for them, to be generous with them. Those of us who’ve been recipients of another’s kindness when we’ve been sick or when we’ve been a mourner know this to be true; somehow the grief is more tolerable and pain is eased when another person shows up for us. So, teshuva, tefilla, and tzedekah lessen the harshness of someone else’s decree as well as our own.
The image of the Book of Life teaches us that we can’t always choose what life will bring, but we can choose how we will respond. Victor Frankel said it powerfully when he wrote, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
The Book of Life is the enduring image of the high holidays because it’s not so simplistic after all. It means much more than “there’s a judging God out there rewarding or punishing us according to our deeds.” Rather, it holds a paradox that is the essence of these high holidays.
On the one hand, we humans are powerful and we have the free will to choose what our lives will be like
AND on the other hand, we humans are fragile and vulnerable and cannot control what happens to us.
Our sages understood this paradox when they wrote the prayers we say today. When the Unetaneh Tokef speaks of God opening up a book and judging us, it says V’Chotam Yad Kol Adam Bo – each person signs the book themselves. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, explains this to mean: We write in our future. We decide what book we’re written in and what gets written. It’s up to us.
It’s a very different image than that of God as Heavenly Judge. We’re the judges. In fact, the Hebrew word for “to pray,” lihitpalel, means “to judge oneself.” In grammar, it’s a form called “reflexive,” meaning: it’s something we do to ourselves. Prayer is examining ourselves; we’re considering our lives, making changes, deciding our destiny, choosing the life we want for ourselves. So, on the one hand, the book of life is all about human agency.
And, at the same time, the prayer says:
Our origin is dust and our end is dust.
We are like a clay vessel easily broken.
We’re like the grass that withers,
The flower that shrivels, the shadow that passes,
the cloud that vanishes, the wind that blows,
the dust that floats, the dream that fades.
Yes, we are powerful, given the opportunity to write our own Book of life, and we are so vulnerable and ultimately not in charge. Gilda Radner, the great comedienne who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 42, expressed this beautifully when she wrote:
“I wanted a perfect ending,
So I sat down to write the book with the ending in place
before there even was an ending.
Now I’ve learned the hard way,
that some poems don’t rhyme
and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Like my life, this book has ambiguity.
Like my life, this book is about not knowing, having to change,
taking the moment and making the best of it, not knowing.”
This is the paradox that is the spiritual work of Rosh Hashana. We don’t have control, but we do have a choice. In the special sections added to the Musaf Amidah on Rosh Hashana, the first two are called Malchuyot and Zichronot. Malchuyot means Sovereignty and it proclaims God as Ruler, Creator, Author of all existence. In Malchuyot, we say the Aleynu and prostrate all the way down to the floor as an expression of total surrender, as an acknowledgement that we are we are ultimately not the one in charge.
And then immediately after, we say Zichronot, which means Remembrance and which says our actions are remembered, our actions matter, what we do is important and makes a difference.
Again, it’s this paradox of: we have power, we choose what will be remembered in the Book of our lives, AND we’re vulnerable and ultimately not in charge.
So, this is what the Book of Life is about. It’s not about God out there judging us and deciding that some of us deserve to suffer. I, at least, cannot read it that way. Rather, it’s an expression of the fact that life is unruly, that we are vulnerable to life’s vicissitudes, and that we can’t say the magic words or do the magic act to force God to give us what we want. And on the other hand, it’s an expression of the profound hope and faith that even if we can’t control life, we get to choose how we will live. We have the power to make a difference, to give our lives meaning, to write the next chapter in the Book of our Lives.
In the end, this paradox requires more faith on our part than does the easier notion that if I’m a good girl, God will write my name in a book and everything will be just fine. It requires us to hold simultaneously:
Uncertainty and trust
Loss and hope
Surrender and action
Fear and faith
And that is what the high holidays are all about.
I pray, please God, that we may all be written in the Book of Life for a good year. L’Shana Tova Tikatevu.
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