For You are the One who judges and decides, who knows and witnesses, who inscribes and seals, who recounts and counts, who remembers everything that has been forgotten. You open the Book of Memories, and read from it. And the signature of every person is sealed in it. 

I have always found comfort in Unetane Tokef.

I know that’s not a common feeling. It’s a strange liturgy, presenting us with this image of humans and angels walking past God year by year, receiving judgment of our fates for the year to come. Will we make it into the line again next year, to repeat the walk, and the process, again? Or will we fall off, meeting our ends? Will we figure out how to pray, change, give enough to change our fates? 

On its face, the liturgy comes off stark, and harsh, and cruel. 

But what happens if we look beyond the face?

There’s no consensus on when Unetane Tokef was written. Some say 1200 CE, but this is not likely. Most likely it was written much earlier, between the 4th and 7th centuries CE, in Palestine in the period just after the fall of the 2nd Temple. A period of great political and economic turmoil, with periods of more-or-less stability where diasporic cultural centers were created around Palestine and Babylonia. Interspersed in this period there were massacres, and another expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem. It wasn’t sure, not at all, who might survive from one year to another. 

Who might live, and who might die.

Time was fragile. And, of course, lives were fragile. 

You remember everything that has been forgotten. 

Time IS fragile.

Lives ARE  fragile.

Admitting this truth, that’s what I find comforting in this prayer. And the idea that there is some Book of Memories that holds us all, always, whatever else may come to pass.

Every day, I go to work as a Palliative Care Chaplain. In Palliative Care, we work with patients at any stage of their disease, to help manage symptoms and to aid with communication and decision-making. Most of my days I help teams figure out how to communicate with patients about how their disease has changed and what it means for their lives. And help patients and their people communicate with their teams about what is most important to them, and about what kinds of care they want to pursue. 

Most days I spend talking with patients, and with their people, about what their bodies are going through, about what is manageable and what is not. As people’s illnesses progress, less and less becomes manageable as people come closer and closer to the fragility of their own lives.  Sometimes they are able to admit that fragility, and sometimes they are not. But whether or not we admit or accept fragility, it remains. 

I spend my days with people confronting their fragility. And with medical clinicians confronting the limits of their own scopes of practice, another kind of fragility in itself. Sometimes we can cure or control diseases, sometimes we can palliate pain. And, sometimes, we can’t do either, despite our best efforts. Always, we come to a limit of what we are able to control. The scales shift. The future changes. 

The reality is, we can’t control anything, not at all. 

And that, I think, is terrifying. 

Who will live and who will die

Who by water and who by fire

Who by hunger and who by thirst

Who will rest and who will be listless

Who will have peace and who will be torn up

Who will be poor and who will be rich

When we look at Unetane Tokef, I don’t think we are looking at a list of the possible judgements that God might mete out. When we look at Untenate Tokef, I think we are seeing a list of our ancestors’ existential anxieties. Anxieties grown out of the experiences of living in political and economic instability, with great inequality between people in power, who had access to sustaining resources, and those who do not. 

This list of possibilities of how this year might go feels real, and so familiar to me. It feels very relevant today, in this world, where we are facing terrors that are the results of late capitalism, that are the result of climate disaster, that are the result of colonial and white supremacist violence like we see in Palestine, in Israel, in Lebanon, in Sri Lanka, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan, in the United States, and in so many places. In Unetane Tokef, I think we see a list of things that people are afraid to live through, afraid to die of. 

And I think we see, too, hints of a list of things people hope will be true for the year to come. That we will live. That when we die, it will be after a full life has been lived. That we will have rest, and peace, and ease, and that our lives will be abundantly resourced. These are things that we want, we need, that we all deserve.

And. These are things that most of us do not have much direct personal control over. I cannot make peace happen when our nations insist on war. I cannot make rest and ease happen when the conditions of this world are improbably hard. And though I live in an economy that claims that wealth and resources are earned, those resources have generally been amassed, by a family, by a country, for generations. We do not control how we come into this world, and generally, we do not control how we leave it. This is the existential anxiety that I think Unetane Tokef speaks so powerfully to. 

Whatever I hope might happen in the year to come—and I hope that we all will live long and full and abundant lives—the reality is that we know that when we sit here together next year, our kahal, our community, will be different. The anxiety this creates for us is where we start to wrestle with what we do, and do not, have control over.

But t’shuvah, t’filah, and t’zedakah limit the harshness of the decree.

T’shuvah, the process of transformation and repentance and forgiveness. T’filah, prayer. And tzedakah, justice. What does it mean for these to limit the severity of the decree?  

This word I’ve translated as limit, in the Hebrew is עביר meaning to make navigable, passable, crossable. T’shuvah, t’filah, and tzedakah make it possible to pass through the rough waters of the decree. They make it possible for us to move from the place we are standing now to the place we will stand next year, through all the tides of change and loss that we know we will weather. 

This is where I start to think about the two planes this liturgy works on. The personal and the collective.

Much of Unetane Tokef  is about saying aloud that we, and our world, are fragile. 

And that while we hope we will weather through this year and be sustained and resourced through it, we know we might not be. There is a way to understand this that says: we have no control, but we will do our best to live fully and well and do right by each other. I think that this makes sense if we are thinking about individual relationships where there is not much of a power differential happening.

But, the reality is that power impacts our relationships at every level. And this prayer, ultimately, is like all of our prayers during these Days of Awe—It is not about the individual, me. It’s about the collective, us. 

Our individual survival, our individual thriving, is bound up in each other. Our survival and thriving in this community, this state, this country, is bound up in the survival and thriving of others worldwide. Our survival, our thriving, as Jewish community in this world is bound up in the survival, the thriving, of Palestinians in Palestine and worldwide. Our survival, our thriving as humans in this world is bound up with the survival and thriving of our planet, of our solar system.

T’shuvah, t’filah, tzedakah.  

Through these, the scales shift. The future changes. 

What t’shuvah do we need to do to address ways we have misused power, and created conditions that mean that some will not survive through the next year because of our misuse of power?

What t’filah will help us hold ourselves with grace, with love, and with peace, as we seek to re-establish right relationship in this world?

What tzedakah, what acts of justice, restoration, and redistribution of resources, are needed to bring about justice and liberation in this world for all, and especially for communities facing direct and generational attacks—black and brown communities; poor and working class communities; trans and queer communities; disabled and chronically ill communities; Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities; Jewish communities. What tzedakah will help us build lasting justice and liberation that is interdependent. That lifts us up, together.

Much that happens to us at the individual level is beyond our personal control. The families and countries that we are born into. Whether or not the government recognizes our personhood and works to support our lives. What accidents happen. What we may be diagnosed with. We are subject to the whims and systems of life every day, for good and for bad. But when we move to that broader, collective level  that Unetane Tokef speaks to, we gain a little more control. 

We cannot promise that anything will or will not happen in this year to come. But we can work to weather the tides together. And we can work to make a world in which there is less death. Less destruction. Less wild inequality and oppression leading to war, famine, and genocide. 

T’shuvah, t’filah, tzedakh. 

By helping us to change this world together, these are the things that might avert the severity of the decree.

Shana tova u’metukah. 

May we move together through to a new year of sweetness and liberation and good.

Unetane Tokef, translated by Max Reynolds

We give power to the holiness of this day, for it is awesome and dreadful, and on it we lift up Your realm, and set up Your throne with hesed, and You will sit on it with emet. 

Emet. For You are the One who judges and decides, who knows and witnesses, who inscribes and seals, who recounts and counts, who remembers everything that has been forgotten. You open the Book of Memories, and read from it. And a signature of every person is sealed in it. 

A great shofar will blast and a still small voice will be heard. 

The m’lakhim will be alarmed, and writhing and trembling will take hold of them. They will say: Here’s the Yom haDin, to visit upon the heavenly hosts with judgment, for they will not be made pure in your eyes by judgment, and everything in the world comes and will pass before you like a herd of sheep. Like a shepherd seeking their flock, directing their sheep under their staff, so shall you direct, count, and observe the souls of all living, and decide a limit for every living creature, and inscribe their final judgment. 

On Rosh Hashana it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed—

How many shall pass on and how many shall be born.

Who will live and who will die

Who in the fullness of their life and who before their fullness

Who by water and who by fire

Who by sword and who by beast

Who by hunger and who by thirst

Who by earthquake and who by plague

Who by strangulation and who by stoning (execution).

Who will rest and who will be listless.

Who will have peace and who will be torn up.

Who will be at ease and who will be tried.

Who will be poor and who will be rich.

Who will be brought down and who will be lifted up.

But t’shuvah, t’filah, and t’zedakah pass through (deter) the harshness of the decree.

For just as Your name is, so is Your praise—difficult to anger and easy to please. For You do not delight in the death of the dead, for if one returns from their path and lives, from the day of their death You wait for them, if they return, You receive them immediately. 

Emet, for You are their Creator, and know their yetzer, while they are flesh and blood.

A person’s foundation comes from dust and ashes. Their life brings their struggle, like broken pottery shards, like dry grass, like a withered flower, like a passing shadow, like a passing cloud, like a breeze that doesn’t move, like scattering dust, and like a flickering dream. 

But You are the One King, God of Life and Existence.