Days of Awe, Days of Assurance

“In the year that we are now parting with, 5774, it became dangerous once again to be a Jew,” writes Jonathan Sacks, and in many parts of the world to be a Christian, a Bahai, a Yazidi, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and even atheist, and even a Muslim if you’re the wrong kind of Muslim. Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom now teaching at NYU and Yeshiva, offers an answer to our fear in the high holy days, the ten days of repentance or awe from Rosh Hashanah (the new year) to Yom Kippur (the day of atonement).

There is a note of universality to the prayers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that we do not find on other festivals. On other festivals, the key section of the Amidah prayer begins “Atah bechartanu mikol ha-amim,” “You chose us from among all the nations.” The emphasis is on Jewish singularity.

On the Yamim Noraim [the Days of Awe] the parallel prayer begins, “And so place the fear of the Lord our God, over all that You have made . . . so that all of creation will worship You.” The emphasis is on human solidarity. And human solidarity is what the world needs right now.

It is a this-worldly thing, he says, noting that “anthropologists and social psychologists still argue today that the reason religion exists is because of people’s fear of death.”

Which makes it all the more remarkable that — despite our total and profound belief in olam haba and techiyat ha-metim, life after death and the resurrection of the dead — there is almost nothing of this in most of the books of the Bible. It is an astonishing phenomenon. All of Kohelet’s cynicism and Job’s railing against injustice could have been answered in one sentence: “There is life after death.” Yet neither book explicitly says so.

Christians tend to say so, relying the promise of the next world to make tolerable the suffering in this one, and rightly so, but that’s not all we should say. The rabbi explains that the Bible doesn’t say this, he says, “Because since civilization began, heaven has too often been used as an excuse for injustice and violence down here on earth. ”

Against this horrific mindset the whole of Judaism is a protest. Justice and compassion have to be fought for in this life, not the next. Judaism is not directed to fear of death; it is directed to a far more dangerous fear: fear of life with all its pain and disappointment and unpredictability. It is fear of life, not fear of death, that has led people to create totalitarian states and fundamentalist religions. Fear of life is ultimately fear of freedom. That is why fear of life takes the form of an assault against freedom.

Against that fear we say from the beginning of Elul to Sukkot that monumental psalm of David: “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom then shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom then shall I be afraid?” On Rosh Hashanah we blow the shofar, the one mitzvah we fulfill by the breath of life itself without needing any words. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the “anniversary of creation,” we read in the Torah and Haftorah not about the birth of the universe but about the birth of Isaac to Sarah and of Samuel to Hannah as if to say one life is like a universe. One child is enough to show how vulnerable life is — a miracle to be protected and cherished. On Yom Kippur we wear the kitl, a shroud, as if to show that we are not afraid of death.

Never before have I felt so strongly that the world needs us to live this message, the message of the Torah that life is holy, that death defiles and that terror in the name of God is a desecration of the name of God.