This year, I helped lead the Jewish High Holiday services I attended (on top of blowing the shofar, as I’ve done in a number of past years).  So, more than I would have been otherwise, I’ve been immersed in the Jewish liturgy over the past few weeks, leading up to Rosh Hashanah and then Yom Kippur.

In the midst of that, I learned that one of my friend’s mother had passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Which made the prayers I was practicing, most of which revolve around life and death, judgment and compassion, seem all the more relevant and real.  Even so, I felt unprepared to comfort my friend in his loss, much less to really contemplate how fragile my own life is, like the lives of the people I love.

Though the High Holiday services are built on the same framework as a regular Saturday Shabbat service, they include all kinds of expansions and ornamentations.  Among those additions, there is one prayer that I’ve thought about in particular in the past few weeks, especially in light of my friend’s loss: Unetaneh Tokef.  Since I first remember hearing it some thirty years back, it has always seemed to me the central expression of what the holiday is about.

Though much of the service is considerably older, Unetaneh Tokef was written only about a thousand years ago, by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, Germany. Apparently, Amnon was a close friend of the bishop of Mainz.  Close enough that the Bishop was concerned for the Rabbi’s soul, and insisted that Amnon convert to Christianity.  To buy himself time, Amnon asked for three days to consider.  But once he reached home, he became distraught about having given the impression that he might be willing to betray his god.  So he spent the three days fasting and praying.  And when the time ran out, he didn’t come back to see the bishop.

Eventually, the bishop had the rabbi rounded up, and demanded an answer.  To which Amnon replied that, not only would he not convert, he’d rather his tongue be cut out for having said he’d even consider it.  Furious, the bishop told Amnon that his sin wasn’t in his tongue for what he’d said, but rather in his legs for not coming back as promised, and he ordered Amnon’s feet to be chopped off, joint by joint.  They chopped off his hands, joint by joint, too, asking after each cut if Amnon might reconsider.  And, when he didn’t, he was eventually sent home, along with his amputated limbs.

When Rosh Hashanah arrived a few days later, the Rabbi asked to be carried to the front of his synagogue, where he recited one of the central prayers of the service – the Kedushah – recited a poem he had composed – Unetaneh Tokef – and then died on the spot.

Three days later, Amnon appeared in a dream to another Mainz Rabbi, the famed Kabbalah scholar Klonimos ben Meshullam, teaching him the text of Unetaneh Tokef, and asking him to send it out to the Jewish world so it might become part of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers.  As indeed it has.

Anyway, even for non-Jews, the prayer itself is kind of amazing and haunting as just a piece of literature, with descriptions of how the great ram’s horn will be blown, how a “still, thin sound” will be heard, how even the angels will tremble. Amnon writes that god will make “all mankind pass before [him] like members of the flock. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall [he] consider the soul of all the living [and] inscribe their verdict.”

But it’s in the middle of the prayer, set to a mournful melody that gives me goosebumps every time, that he really gets going, describing in detail the fates we might face:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning.  Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

Tough stuff.  Though as the rabbi eventually advises at the denouement of the prayer, “through repentance, prayer, and charity, we may reduce the severity of the decree.”

I’ve always been fascinated by that phrase.  Amnon doesn’t say that repentance, prayer, and charity will nullify the decree, just reduce the severity.  Yet when you’re talking about death, it seems like a pretty binary outcome: you die or you don’t.  And as I read the prayer, that’s Amnon’s point – eventually, all of us do die.  Yet by trying to return to our best selves, trying to be our most transcendent, trying to do the greatest good we can in the world, we can at least change the ‘severity’ of our eventual death.  We can change what our life means along the way.  And we can leave a lasting legacy to the people we love.