Dear Sir,
Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding the upcoming High Holidays. You want to know why it is that people who have palpably little Jewish involvement for the other 362 days of the calendar bother to attend synagogue services—in person or online–on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. On the other hand you are puzzled by Jewish tradition, which places so much emphasis on these three days, as though God is unavailable on a cold despairing midnight in March. Sir, your questions are good ones.
You have searched for answers and heard that the High Holidays remind us about repentance, of reconnecting to Jewish values and Jewish unity. What you have heard much less about are the "ghostlier demarcations," the bare night of death.
And Rosh Hashanah is, on some fundamental level, about remembering that we are going to die. That real life is a transient dream. That one morning at three a.m. you will wake up in the darkness, listen to the sound of your breathing, and realize "Me – this body, husband, son, friend, colleague, this laugh, this pride, these dreams, this preening for others, this skin, this scent, this secret lust, this spirit, this shifting heart, this semblance of power, this face, this wallet stuffed with cards of identity and affluence, this seat at the dinner table – all will vanish." We do not like to talk about this because as a culture we shun feelings of intensity. We substitute ennui for grief, distraction for joy, religious posturing for an open and sharing quest for enlightenment.
But death consciousness is not a cause for paralysing feelings of depression. Quite the opposite – in the great moments of religious history, it formed the powerful beginning of life change. It is what allowed the Buddha to break free of stultifying social expectations and seek real inner understanding. And it is the knowledge of our own mortality that propels the Jew on the Days of Awe to move beyond the harrowing cage of daily calculations, the utterly futile preoccupation with temporal successes and approval, and begin to hunger for the highest things.
Rabbi Israel Salanter, the great ethicist of the 19th century, writes that "our entire life is God's mercy; by miracles we stand – but miracles may not happen every day." On Yom Kippur, death is not just ruminated upon but enacted through the prohibitions against eating, drinking, bathing, sexual relations. The breeze of death, felt close to the skin, can shock us into appreciating the miracle that is life.
Of course, this is hardly an answer to your dilemmas. Why do people bother with the High Holidays? Some want to, some have to, some feel compelled to, some do it for others, some pay homage to the past, some throw darts at the future. But I suspect that both for the fastidiously observant and even for the Jewishly unconcerned, it is the faint–and growing ever fainter–whiff of gravity in the air that proves compelling in a way that is hard to fathom rationally.
And why are Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur greater in God’s eyes than that cold night in March? Well, I would not think that they are. But it seems to matter to us. We need deadlines.
Human beings do not like most things to end. Both high and low art have understood this well, from the Beach Boys’ perfectly titled greatest hits compilation—Endless Summer—to the breathless desire of John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
“More happy love! more happy, happy love! Forever warm and still to be enjoyed, Forever panting, and forever young.”
But we know, each one of us, that we cannot remain forever young, yet we spend a great deal of time and money trying to avert the implications and natural process of growing older and making way for the next passers through. What marks us out from other species, along with our ability to make a fundraising speech or split the atom, is our denial of death.
We act as if everything is always going to be like it is now. Next year will bring the same friends and neighbours, the same family members, same supermarket, same check-out line. Same celebrations with the same people. Same route to work; same treadmill, literal and metaphorical. People will always congregate as they have done. No one will get sick or move away or change life direction. Or die. As fantastical and absurd as this all sounds in retrospect, we do seem to live that way. Think of how surprised we get over the inevitable.
Did we think the sun would not go down at the end of the day? Is that a cause for shock and bewilderment? Is there someone to blame for the twilight moving in fast? And yet, that is our attitude to our lives. In his book Flow, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it this way: ”Like waiters in a restaurant starting to place breakfast settings on the surrounding tables while one is still having dinner, the message is: `Your time is up, it's time to move on. When this happens, few people are ready'"
The Middle Ages saw the mother of all pandemics, the Black Death, in which millions perished without any chance of survival. As Dr. Claugia Aguirre points out, in the wake of the Black Death, “Latin texts known as Ars Moriendi began circulating in European households. Ars Moriendi – literally `The Art of Dying,’ offered advice on how to die well…Traditionally, Western culture keeps death at a nice, safe distance. A process left to hospitals and funeral parlors and not for everyday conversation. Perhaps, we do ourselves a disservice in keeping death so distant.”
The surgeon Atul Gawande writes in his book Being Mortal, “Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.” And so Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur tell us that our death is coming in order to teach us how to live. You cannot learn the latter without internalizing the former. That’s the deal.
A well-known phenomenon in psychotherapy is what is known as the “doorknob confession.” As defined in the Urban Dictionary, a doorknob confession describes a scene that occurs quite often: the client divulges something incredibly important or critical in the last few minutes of a therapy session – a death in the family, suicidal/self harming thoughts or actions, a relationship crisis, drastic change in your living situation. With their hand on the doorknob, so to speak, just about to leave, the patient drops the bombshell.
Whether it is because they unconsciously do not want a response, or just because it is difficult to talk about the particular issue, the doorknob confession speaks to the fact they for all of us, it is so very hard to say what we really feel and what is at the root of our pain. But faced with the deadline of the clock—whether you like it or not the session called life comes to a close—we may blurt it out at the last minute.
And so, sir, the High Holidays give us practice in talking at the doorknob, reminding us that we need to get to our lives with urgency and focus. Our time may be finite, but the good deeds we do, the compassion we offer, and the love we can still give, is infinite.
Your blog sure drives the point home. Very well put. Interesting that most religions push us into thinking beyond this life and the temporariness of our being. This was a constant refrain from my yoga teacher of 40 plus years.
Shana Tova