“U-netaneh Tokef, Let us speak of the sacred power of this day – profound and awe inspiring.”
This quotation is from one of the most well-known High Holiday prayers, renowned both for the power of its descriptive images of passing before God in judgement of who will live and who will die, and for the stirring and emotionally resonant quality of its music. This opening line of the poem lays out the proposition that the days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have sacred power. This is both true and not true. The days themselves have no inherent power. If you wake up on the mornings of September 23 and 24 and go to work or to the gym or go about your normal daily routine, then for you, Rosh Hashanah does not have sacred power. If, however, you alter your routine and consciously recognize the day by your behavior, it begins to have power in that the day itself motivates you to deviate from your expected actions. If you spend some part of the day at the synagogue, if you read specific pieces of literature and contemplate certain prayers, the day begins to have sacred power in that your mind is traveling down a different set of pathways and is opening up to a different set of thoughts about who you are and how you can best fulfill your life’s purpose.
It is only when you throw yourself in the traditions and liturgy of the day that you give it its full sacred power to inspire awe. When you hear the shofar, imagine the sound waves blasting through your heart, breaking down the callouses that build up over time which insulate you from being sensitive to the cries of the world. When you hear the melodies of the Torah reading, imagine yourself as the obedient servant of God or as offering yourself freely as an agent of God’s will. When you taste the apples and the sweet honey, imagine what your life might be like if you consciously removed jealousy, hatred, resentment, and excessive ego from your heart. When you hear U’netaneh Tokef, imagine how you would behave if your life depended on taking the best possible moral action at every decision point.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur can act on agnostic and skeptical Jews, Jews who call themselves non-religious, and Jews whose synagogue affiliation is motivated by little more than nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. But it all begins with a single step, a single mitzvah. It’s like the old joke, “How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. But the light bulb has to want to change.” The single mitzvah is to be fully present with an open heart. This single mitzvah may be prompted by a different single mitzvah, of putting on tefillin every day or giving tzedakah every day or carrying energy bars in your car to give away at stoplights or lighting candles or saying Kiddush every Shabbat. The only way through the door to profound and awe-inspiring experience is to awaken your soul and teach it how to engage in a single mitzvah at a time.
Pirke Avot (4:2) teaches, “mitzvah goreret mitzvah, one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah.” May your hearts be open to the wonders of the transformative power of Rosh Hashanah, a single mitzvah at a time.
Hebrew word(s) of the Month:
- teshuvah – repentance
- tefillah – prayer
- tzedakah – giving, acts of righteousness
- gezerah – decree
“Teshuvah, Tefillah, and Tzedakah have the power to lesson the severity of the decree against us.”
Embodied Torah 