Given by Greenstein Family Executive Director, Amee Huppin Sherer
Cantor Matt Axelrod recently shared in an article for My Jewish Learning, that “if there’s one word that is closely connected with the High Holiday season, it’s teshuvah. Repentence.” It’s part of the vocabulary I taught for years as a day school educator – carefully explaining the steps we take to ask for forgiveness: acknowledge that you have made a mistake, apologize to the person, and then, the hardest part and the one most of us often forget to do – actually work on changing our behavior so that it doesn’t happen again.
He goes on to remind us that there’s one iconic prayer that expresses in a clear and dramatic way our need to perform teshuvah. The text of Unetaneh Tokef lays it all out for us in a vivid image: Before God lies a giant book – the Book of Life – in which we hope all our names will be inscribed for the coming year. The Unetaneh Tokef goes on to tell us that on Rosh Hashanah, those deserving names are entered – ensuring they will live through the coming year – and on Yom Kippur, the Book is sealed – and our fate is no longer alterable. We have until the very end of Yom Kippur, during the concluding Neilah service when the liturgy tells us that the gates are closing, to sway G-d’s decision in our favor. We recite not only the words “Who shall live and who shall die” but the poem goes on to offer all the ways the latter could happen – who by fire and who by water…who by hunger and who by thirst? We could add who by hurricane and who by earthquake? Who by premeditated gunfire and who by a random act of violence? There are simply too many ways for us to contemplate our possible demise, and even with the shred of hope that we are offered at the end of this long list, I am left feeling the weight of it all.
Each year, when we read the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, I wonder how it is that we really have any power to change what is written in the Book of Life. The Rabbi’s offer that three things can at least annul the severity of the decree:
U’teshuvah, u’tefilah, u’tzedakah ma’arvirin et roa hag’zeirah.
Tefilah, Tzedakah and Teshuvah.
We can pray, we can give money to worthy causes, and we can go through the process of asking for forgiveness.
I, like Cantor Axelrod and perhaps many of you, find this prayer to be disturbing, confusing, and theologically questionable. If it is true that on Rosh Hashanah our names are written and on Yom Kippur they are sealed, then what good are our actions throughout the year? If it is really pre-determined whether or not we will live or die, then what good are our acts of teshuvah? How can we annul the severity of the decree through giving tzedakah if that decree is not only recorded but sealed in a book? Should we leave here tomorrow night and simply hope for the best, acknowledging that nothing we can do from that moment on will matter?
Rabbi Lauren offered last week that doing these three things can’t ultimately change the outcome of our lives, but they can help us connect to community and not be alone when life happens.
And it’s also true that while our High Holiday liturgy doesn’t change from year to year, we change. We bring the person we are in this moment to the prayers, opening ourselves up to the opportunity to look at them with a new perspective gained from another year of life experience.
Six years ago, I received the results that a recent breast biopsy was malignant. The call came just a few hours before Kol Nidre, and there is really nothing like a cancer diagnosis to help you look at the Book of Life liturgy differently. I learned a lot of things that year – how to ask for and receive help in new ways, when to let people in, and when I needed privacy. I learned that sometimes it was all I could do to get through the day, and other times when I craved contact with the outside world. I felt the disappointment – the grief, of missing each life cycle event, celebration, and Shabbat dinner. For me, having cancer was a moment in time that I just needed to get to the other side of – it would be a year of surgery, chemo and radiation, and then I would get my life back. And so, I did. I put in my time, and months later finally felt like myself again. I never really thought about my mortality in any kind of concrete way. I didn’t question it. I didn’t fight it. I don’t know why. I just took each day as it came, trusting that time would pass.
Living through a global health pandemic like Covid has now taught all of us that lesson. What it means to be quarantined. Away from family and friends. Unable to live our lives as we had always dreamed. Missed graduations, family gatherings, funerals. Life as a student, whether you were in first grade, high school, or college, was forever changed. Lives of teachers, essential workers, and health care workers will never be the same. Time on a screen, for better or worse, became a way of life. And odd as it is, Zoom and FaceTime and Livestreaming will continue to offer us the opportunity to be together with friends and family all over the world that many of us never could have anticipated.
But this past April, when I was unexpectedly diagnosed with Grave’s Disease, things felt different. Grave’s is an auto immune disease where the thyroid is kicked into high gear. I wouldn’t have known I had it – I just assumed I had lost a few pounds and wasn’t sleeping well last winter because my father was dying and I was traveling back and forth to California frequently to spend time with him and my mom – but then something was not right with my eyes, and after a few more doctors, tests, and a lot of blood work, I learned that roughly half the people who have Grave’s Disease also develop thyroid eye disease and apparently, I was one of those lucky ones. When I came back to work after my father passed away, people thought I was sitting in the dark because I was mourning. But no – my eyes were now light sensitive and very dry. I often saw double, or had blurry vision, so driving became challenging.
While this new diagnosis wasn’t cancer, it was a thing. 10 sessions of orbital radiation to my eyes. 3 months of weekly IV infusions of high dose steroids. Missed opportunities to travel. Suddenly, I was back to relying on others, especially my husband who once again was spending his days taking me to and from medical appointments and infusions and procedures.
And this time I felt angry. I’ll admit to asking the question: Why Me? What did I do to deserve this? Hadn’t I already put my time in? I knew I needed to start this New Year better equipped to handle the inevitable stress and roadblocks that life keeps on throwing our way.
So, I started to think about how I could look at the High Holiday liturgy differently this year. What could help transform my heart and mind and allow me to make meaning that would last longer than the time we are sitting here tonight? Because, honestly, it has been a year. And the year before that was a year. And the year before that…well, it was also a year. How much can we hold? How might we try and hold things differently so that we don’t break from the weight of it all?
Sarah Wildman, a mother who was dealing with her young daughter’s cancer diagnosis in the middle of the pandemic, wrote an article in the NY Times recently that she titled “Every Moment Can’t be a 10 out of 10”
She shared that “of the many, many hours of prayers offered during the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur liturgy perhaps the most resonant text of all is the Unetaneh Tokef. In it Jews ask how each of us will receive God’s judgment this year, who will be allowed to see another year at all, and what we can do to alter our fate. The secular world knows this poem from Leonard Cohen’s interpretation, “Who by Fire.”
As a child, she explained, she tuned out the more awful potentials of the prayer’s plaintive cry — and there are many, and they are terrible, assigning an agency to God she found uncomfortable at best. Instead, she was drawn to the sentences that enjoy less notoriety than the others: “Who shall be at rest and who shall wander,” the poem asks. In Hebrew, that sentence is a play on words, a single letter altering the meaning from “rest” (yanuach) to “wander” (yanuah). It goes on: “Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued? Who will be calm and who will be tormented?” To be forced to wander another week, another month, another year is physical and also spiritual, literal and also emotional. In almost three years of cancer and covid, she wondered how her family could find rest as they wandered. It was, and continues to be, in these small in-between moments, in the noticing, she offers, that they found comfort and moments of peace.
If reciting Unetaneh Tokef every year is meant to connect us to community and give us renewed purpose and energy, then, like Sarah, I want to offer a different approach I’ve been thinking about.
Great minds think alike, as my colleague at Arizona State Hillel, Debbie Younker Kail, recently told me that she led her staff in an exercise this summer where she asked them… if Teshuvah, Tefilah and Tzedakah are the three key words to ensure another good year – what might YOUR three words be? As a mother of two young children, she shared that she was still mulling over hers but for now she was sitting with her three Ps / parenting, patience and presence.
I told her that I was writing my Kol Nidre sermon about this very topic and that my three were:
Relationships, Responsibility, and Radical Acceptance
Hillel professionals love alliterations.
But isn’t it true that we all need to invest in our relationships: with family, with friends, with community. We need to make the time to connect with the people who bring us joy, and with those whom we find comfort and ease.
We need to take responsibility for the way we are in the world, and the ways that we can make the world a better place. There are so many causes to get involved in, but what if every one of us could find one or two that are personally meaningful and follow through on our commitments to make our world a better place? To take responsibility for our actions, both personal and communal, and to make the time we do have on this earth count for something. It doesn’t have to be big things every day, either. Remember that the small, intimate moments where we know we are making an impact – those add up. That not every moment needs to be that 10 out of 10.
And radical acceptance. This is a new one for me. I read about it for the first time this summer in an article titled “6 ways to reduce suffering with radical acceptance” by McKenna Princing, who explained that “Radical acceptance is a core practice of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a type of therapy developed at the University of Washington by Marsha Linehan, professor emeritus of psychology. DBT is traditionally used to treat people with borderline personality disorder, but radical acceptance can be used by anyone who wants to try it. In this case, “radical” is like the name of the mathematical symbol, which means “at the root.” Radical acceptance is about getting at the root of acceptance, about acknowledging the reality of the present moment, understanding reality as it is without judgment. You can still think about moving toward change. Radical acceptance is not the same as complacency or giving up, and it’s not about resigning yourself to a fate you don’t want. For someone who has experienced trauma, radical acceptance doesn’t mean justifying what happened or what someone did to you — it just means accepting that, however awful, it did happen.
When was the last time you wished something in your life was different? Maybe you wish something terrible in your past had never happened or that you weren’t dealing with so many stressful things in the current moment. It’s natural and human to feel this way. But dwelling too much on the “what-if’s” can inadvertently make us neglect to process our reality fully — and negatively impact our future.
Enter radical acceptance: The practice of allowing ourselves to fully accept the past and present to move on and create a future we want. The harsh truth is that pain, illness and hurt is part of life; everyone will experience it in some way. We can’t always prevent bad things from happening, and we can’t make ourselves immune to feeling negative emotions, but can we reduce how much we are suffering. That’s where radical acceptance comes in. If you’re pushing back against what happened or is happening, thinking something “should” have gone differently or be different, you’re only increasing your suffering, says Anne Browning, associate dean for well-being at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “When we take approval out of the picture and just say, ‘I can’t change the past, the present is what it is, I don’t need to like it, I can sit with it,’ there comes a deep sense of calm,” she says.
We all tell stories about ourselves, in our heads and to others, and society and the people in our lives tell (sometimes diverging) stories about us, too. Maybe one of your stories is that, since you have social anxiety, you aren’t good at making new friends, or that after the loss of a loved one you will never heal. Not all stories we tell ourselves are helpful, and sometimes they reflect skewed perceptions rather than the reality of ourselves or our lives.
It is a sad but inescapable fact that some will die over the coming year. Our lives are a gift. We perform teshuvah not to appease a distant and invisible Deity, but rather to remind us of our value to one another and to strengthen our relationships with each other. We give tzedakah to better the lives of those in need. And we engage in prayer to connect with Judaism and our community. Cantor Axelrod says that our job is not to temporarily put on our best behavior in order to convince G-d to let us live for another year. Instead, we acknowledge that our time here on earth is limited and our lives tenuous. The true and vital message of Unetaneh Tokef requires us to ask ourselves not who shall live, but how shall we live?
This year, I’m going to work on relationships, responsibility, and radical acceptance. What will your three words be?
