The Jewish High Holy Days are still over a month away, but I received a version of a classic prayer that I think is worth sharing. The Unetaneh Tokef presents those days as days of judgement when all of us human beings are judged in a court-on-high where the judge is God’s Self. The record of our lives is before The Judge and so are two books – A Book of a Good Year and a Book of a Bad Year. During this season of repentence we seek to make things right in this world so that we can be forgiven and written in the Book of Life for the coming year. The traditional greeting among Jews is “May you be written for a good year.”

Some reading this may be familiar with Leonard Cohen’s extraordinary song, “Who By Fire.”https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Leonard+Cohen+Who+By+Fire+youtube&refig=10665064ce0f486f9e73c593ba257557&pc=DCTS&ru=/search?q=Leonard+Cohen+Who+By+Fire+youtube&form=ANNTH1&refig=10665064ce0f486f9e73c593ba257557&pc=DCTS&mmscn=vwrc&mid=C7103F4E6079B81ED3FBC7103F4E6079B81ED3FB&FORM=WRVORC

Today, in my inbox, I got a new version by a colleague who is also a distant cousin, Rachel Barenblat. What I really like about it, is that she included a positive verse. I have never seen that before.

B’Rosh Hashanah yikateivun,uv’Yom tzom Kippur yeichateimun:

בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתֵבוּן, וּבְיוֹֹם צוֹֹם כִּפּוּר יֵחָתֵמוּן.

(on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed)

Who will live, and who will die? 

Who by wildfires and poor air, and who by lack of medical care?

Who by flood and hurricane, and who by the power outages that follow?

Who by polar vortex cold, who by heat that makes asphalt burn?

Who by lack of a place to live, and who arrested for being unhoused?

Who by the hands of those whom we entrust to protect and to serve?

B’Rosh Hashanah yikateivun,uv’Yom tzom Kippur yeichateimun:

בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתֵבוּן, וּבְיוֹֹם צוֹֹם כִּפּוּר יֵחָתֵמוּן.

(on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed)

Who by bombs and rocket fire, who by starvation or disease?

Who by pandemic that’s not over yet, who by the next pandemic to come?

Who by polio or measles, resurgent because some fear vaccines?

Who by the greed for power and money driving decisions everywhere?

Who by bigotry, subtle or clear? Who by loneliness and despair?

B’Rosh Hashanah yikateivun,uv’Yom tzom Kippur yeichateimun:

בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתֵבוּן, וּבְיוֹֹם צוֹֹם כִּפּוּר יֵחָתֵמוּן.

(on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed)

Who will live to the fullest, no matter what they don’t have?

Who will take joy in simple things, and who will savor complexity?

Who will uplift others’ hearts? Who will find blessings in each day?

Who will build and create and plant? Who will tend the seeds of hope?

Who will do what they can to help, and know that they are enough?

U’t’shuvah u’t’filah u’tz’dakah  ma’avirin et ro’a hag’zeirah.

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָהמַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה.

Teshuvah, and spiritual practice, and justice 

Together sweeten every decree!

Our lives are written by our actions 

And signed by our own hands.

Help us. We can’t fix this alone. Mere human beings

Are a broken urn, withering grass, a fading flower, a fleeting dream.

We are dust and ashes, yet we dare to believe the world

Was made for us. For every other creature, too.

You are slow to anger, ready to forgive.

Are we ready to turn from our ways and live?

I see Tisha B’Av as an annual warning concerning what we have done to ourselves in our history.

In my study I have Rembrandt’s Jeremiah, the Biblical figure I most identify with.  He stood up to a king and his court when they were planning to revolt against their Babylonian overlords because Egypt promised to aid them.  Jeremiah was repeatedly rejected and thrown into prison.  The revolt took place and Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed and the people exiled.

For Tisha B’Av this year I recommend reading Jeremiah chapters 28 and 38.  The warning is clear.

In the year 66 there was a revolt against Rome and we all know how that ended.  During the siege of Jerusalem the Zealot terrorist extremists fought other Jews and burned the city’s food supplies.  In the end, a few years after the Hurban they were defeated at Masada (I do not believe Josephus’ account of mass suicide) and they represent a dead end in our history.

It was Yohanan ben Zakkai who saved us by going to the Romans to create Yavneh.  Of the Merssianist Zealots he said, “If you are planting a tree and someone comes and says, ‘the Messiah is here, let’s go greet him,’ first finish planting the tree and then go greet the Messiah.

Half a century later Bar Kochba, another false Messiah, arose against the Romans.  There is not one positive word about him in the rabbinic literature.  When Akivah declared him as Messiah, his colleague, Yohanan ben Torta said to him, “Akiva, grass will grow from your cheeks and still the Son of David will not have appeared.”

Both Hurbans[1] were the result of nationalist hubris and the second from messianism.

When Israel prevailed in the Six-day War in 1967, it was regarded as miraculous.  In terms of such a new and small nation against several larger foes, it was a welcome and amazing turn of events.  However, certain religious Zionists at the time declared it the footsteps of the Messiah, a sign of the coming of the End. 

One of the wisest voices against such thinking was Yehoshafat Harkabi in a book called The Bar Kochba Syndrome: Risk and Realism in International Relations.  In this book Harkabi, who had served as Chief of Military Intelligence for Israel, was concerned about what would happen to Israel is the territories taken in the Six-Day War were kept by Israel.  He referred to a Talmudic maxim: One who seizes too much has seized nothing (tafasta m’rubeh lo tafasta).  Others, including this writer, foresaw the danger to the Jewish state resulting over governing a population that rejected that governance.

Now we see Israel in a war that endangers Israel, not from its foes, but from its own government giving in to the messianic politics of some of the parties in the government coalition.  This war, which began as a response to a truly heinous attack on Israel, has expanded into a wider conflict while the government refuses to do anything in a search for ending the conflict through peace. 

As the well-known George Santayana quote, “Those who cannot remember thre past are condemned to repeat it.”  I see Tisha b’Av as an annual warning.  It is one thing to mourn the tragedies in our history and quite another not to learn from them.

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[1] Hurban is the Hebrew term referring to the destructions of Jerusalem and the Temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE