episode # 152—The High Holy Days Explained

We’re podcasting a few days early this week because the High Holy Days begin tomorrow evening, which is when Rosh Hashanah 5785 begins. Very few people really understand what the purpose of this 10-day period that ends on Yom Kippur is—but we need to understand it because the very future of the world is at stake. And that’s not an exaggeration.

Transcript

Episode No. 152: The High Holy Days Explained

Welcome to Keep the Faith, the bi-weekly podcast in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition.

We’re podcasting a few days early this week because the High Holy Days begin tomorrow evening, which is when Rosh Hashanah 5785 begins. Very few people really understand what the purpose of this 10-day period that ends on Yom Kippur is—but we need to understand it because the very future of the world is at stake.

That’s not an exaggeration.

This period is not about our ritual sins. It’s about how we behave to each other and how our behavior is meant to influence everyone else in this world.

And so the topic for this week is What the High Holy Days are Really About. I prefer to call this period The Aseret Yemai Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, or more accurately the Ten Days of Return, because that’s what teshuvah really means. We’re devoting ourselves, or we should be devoting ourselves, to returning to a more righteous, just, equitable, moral, and ethical path. Once we’re on that path, we need to do whatever we can to encourage the world at large to walk on that same path with us—especially now, when our world is such a mess.

A major reason why so many of us misunderstand what these Ten Days of Return are about is because we don’t believe a word of what we’re saying when we read the prayers we recite on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Perhaps the most important prayer during this period is one that’s chanted during all three morning services, the two on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur. It begins with the words U’netaneh tokef k’dushot hayom, which means “And we shall ascribe holiness to this day.” Most cantors chant it with great embellishment because of its importance. They see it as their big number. But listen to some of what it says:

QUOTE Your throne is established in mercy. You are enthroned upon it in truth. In truth You are the judge..., [You are the one] who inscribes and seals, remembering all that [we have chosen to forget]....Behold the Day of Judgment! For all the hosts of heaven are brought for judgment....All creatures shall pass before You as...[You] decree the length of their days, inscribing their judgment.”

Seriously, how many of you listening right now really believe that God sits on a throne, opens a book filled with our deeds and misdeeds, and decides our fate in the year about to begin?

How can we believe it? Such an anthropomorphism defies everything we think we know about God. It defies things the Torah says about God. What the Torah doesn’t say is that God sits on a throne reading any kind of book, much less a book in which is recorded how each of us lived our lives in the past year.

If we don’t believe that, of course, then why do we say it? 

Why do we even bother to go through the rituals of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur if the idea is so unbelievable that God sits on a throne, pen in hand, deciding who was naughty and who was nice?

Whenever I ask that question, I always hear the same answer in response:

It’s because that’s what we’re supposed to do on the High Holy Days. Going through these rituals and reciting this prayer and all the others year after year at this time is what we Jews do.

In other words, it’s all about tradition—but it’s not about any belief in a God who has the souls of all living beings pass before the heavenly throne to be judged.

Well, the Torah says other things about God, including that God does, in fact, judge us—not necessarily as individuals, but certainly as a community. It says that over and again, and it’s true, but not necessarily in the way we think God judges us.

Most Jews, of course, and most people for that matter, don’t believe it’s true because they look at the words literally, and so they miss what it is that the Torah is really saying.

When it tells us that if we follow God’s law, there will never be famine, it doesn’t mean that God will subvert the laws of nature—laws God created when God said “Let there be light” and set the process of creating everything in the universe that was, is, or ever will be.

What the Torah means is that if we as a community, or as a nation, or as a world, create the kind of caring society God’s laws require of us, then there’s no disaster we cannot overcome.

But if we fail to do that, then those disasters will take a heavy toll, which is what the Torah means by God judging us.

The fact is, though, that nature is nature, and God, who created nature, left nature to take its course, come what may.

Not every Jewish authority accepts this, I know, but they should because our Sages of Blessed Memory were very clear on this, often in very blunt, even critical terms. Says the Talmud, for example: QUOTE The world follows its natural course (olam k'minhago nohaig)  ….[For example,] say that a man stole a measure of wheat and went and sowed it in the ground. The just thing would be for it not to germinate, but [it will, because] olam k'minhago nohaig. UNQUOTE

Famine will come. Floods will come. Hurricanes and tornadoes will come, as we’ve seen this week with the devastation Hurricane Helene has been causing. That’s nature doing its thing, and God has nothing to with it.

We’re confronted by a no-win situation. We believe those Jewish authorities who insist that the Torah says God is responsible for everything that happens, and we believe that nature takes its own course and God is not responsible for any of it.

And that leads us to believe that the Torah is not the legitimate, revealed Word of God and so it’s not to be believed. It also leads too many of us to believe that there is no God and there never was.

And we’re wrong in believing both of those things; we’re very wrong.

The problem is that we’ve been conditioned to believe that every word in the Torah is meant to be the literal truth, which isn’t the case. What is the case is that we don’t understand what we’re reading.

Our Sages had something to say about that, as well. The Torah, they said, QUOTE speaks in the language of man. UNQUOTE In other words, the Torah was written using words and concepts that people could understand, including relying on metaphor when an actual description of an event would have been beyond their ability to comprehend.

The Creation story in Genesis 1 is the best example. People living 3,500 years ago could understand “let there be light,” but there’s no way they could understand the Big Bang Theory. There’s no way they could understand what atoms or plasma were. The nucleosynthesis of protons and neutrons was way beyond them. I’m guessing that it’s way beyond most of us. I know it’s way beyond me. It’s much easier to comprehend God’s simply saying, “Let there be light.”

The Torah says this about us, the People Israel—the Jewish people—Ahm Yisrael. In Genesis, we’re told that God made a promise to our Founding Father Abraham, QUOTE I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring too can be counted. UNQUOTE

At the beginning of the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses says God had fulfilled that promise. QUOTE The Lord your God has multiplied you until you are today as numerous as the stars in the sky. UNQUOTE

Really? We’re as numerous as the dust of the earth and the stars in the sky? There are about 8 billion people in this world, and about 2.3 billion of them are Christians. There are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world. There are 535 million Buddhists in the world. There are between 450 million and 500 million people in the world who don't believe in God in one way or another—that’s about 14.3 percent of the total world population.

And then there’s us, all 15.3 million of us in the entire world—there are a little over 15 million Jews out of nearly 8 billion people. That’s just under two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population—not even a whole percent, just under two-tenths of one percent. So how can we believe it when the Torah says that we’ll be as numerous QUOTE as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then [we] too can be counted UNQUOTE?

If our eyes tell us that it’s not to be believed, how are we supposed to believe anything else the Torah tells us, especially including that God exists, and that God indeed judges us, especially at this time of year?

We read the words, we take them literally, and so we reject them as absurd hyperbole.

What the Torah is saying, though, what God told Abraham, what Moses said to Israel, has nothing to do with actual numbers.

Moses also said something else in the Torah about how many of us there are that would appear to contradict the statement I just cited. QUOTE You are the smallest of peoples. UNQUOTE

That’s what Moses said, QUOTE you are the smallest of peoples, UNQUOTE and that’s pretty close to the truth. But he also said that we’re as numerous as the stars in the sky.

How can both those statements be true?

They’re both true because of what the Torah means by those two statements.

The stars in the sky, the dust of the earth, are both ubiquitous. Science tells us that the sun needs the moon and the stars to regulate the seasons here on Earth. Without the stars, this would be a whole different world, perhaps even an uninhabitable one. As for the dust of the earth, that’s the very ground on which we stand. The influence of the stars in the sky and the dust of the earth on our planet is undeniable.

And our influence on the world is also undeniable.

I don’t mean that in the sense of the anti-Semites throughout history, and especially those who claim we control business, the media, and government, or that we’re hell-bent on world domination. I mean it in very concrete, positive ways that benefit this world and everything in it.

As of recent estimates, Jews have won approximately 20 percent of all Nobel Prizes. We’re fewer than point-2 percent of the world population, yet Jews have been awarded one-fifth of all the roughly 195 Nobel Prizes that have been awarded so far.

Take medicine for example. Many of these Nobels went to people whose discoveries have saved millions of lives over the years. Blood transfusions are safer because Karl Landsteiner discovered human blood groups. Paul Ehrlich gave us the so-called “Magic Bullet” that targets specific pathogens. Selman Waksman discovered streptomycin, which was the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. Last year, Drew Weissman was awarded the Nobel for the work he did that led to the very swift development of COVID-19 vaccines.

Let me quote what two Christian scholars have said.

First, in describing what he calls the Jewish impact on humanity, the historian Paul Johnson wrote this in his “A History of the Jews.”

That impact, he wrote, began in antiquity when the Jews QUOTE were the great innovators in religion and morals. In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe, they were…transmitting scarce knowledge and technology. UNQUOTE By the end of the 18th century, though, the world shoved us off to the sidelines. But, Johnson wrote, QUOTE then came an astonishing second burst of creativity. Breaking out of the ghettos, [the Jews] once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere. Much of the mental furniture of the modern world…is of Jewish [manufacture]. UNQUOTE

Then there’s the author Thomas Cahill, former director of religious publishing at Doubleday. He wrote “The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.” In it, Cahill describes the Jewish contribution to the world this way:

The Jews, he wrote, started it all—QUOTE and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings....We would think with a different mind, interpret all our experiences differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives. UNQUOTE

Those are the words of two Christian authors, not Jewish ones. And those words only cover the surface of what Jews have given to the world.

Our democracy, right here in the United States, is a gift of the Jews, as you’ve heard me say before. Forget the notion that America’s founding fathers built on what the ancient Greeks did. The democracy we enjoy in this country is built on what we did—or, more specifically, what our Torah had to say, what it commanded of us.

I’ve often discussed in previous podcasts the influence the Torah had on the American republic, and I won’t go over all of it now. Suffice it for me to quote from an article in the Brigham Young University Law Review written by the Mormon legal and religion scholar, Dr. John Woodland Welch.

QUOTE The [Hebrew] Bible was nothing short of the underlying fabric upon which American society was founded….[T]he profound influence of biblical law on early American colonial law is obvious to those who have studied 17th-century law in America....This utilization of biblical law was not a passing fancy in colonial America. UNQUOTE

Welch wasn’t exaggerating, as you’ve also heard me say at times, especially around July 4th. Don’t take my word for it, Go back and listen to one of those podcasts.

So when the Torah says we’re the smallest of nations, it’s telling an eternal truth. And when the Torah says we’ll be as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the dust of the earth, that’s also true—because, despite our small size, we’ve been a major influence for good starting 4,000 years ago and continuing until today.

The truth of what the Torah says about us has withstood time and history. What it says will be is what is.

So when it says God judges us, that’s also true.

And that brings us to the ten days that begin on Wednesday night and end after sunset a week from this Saturday night. This is the time when we must look at ourselves and how we live our lives—because how we live our lives is meant to eventually inform how everyone else in the world should live their lives.

There’s a reason the haters hate us. We embarrass them. Our survival, despite all odds, puts to the lie everything they stand for.

We need to understand that. We need to embrace that.

And we need to recognize that how we live our lives is not just our business. How we live our lives can change the world for better or for ill.

The choice is ours.

U’netaneh Tokef, “We shall ascribe holiness to this day,” because the three days on which these words are uttered by us are also our three best opportunities to make that choice.

Are we a kingdom of priests and holy nation, or are we a small, inconsequential people whose behavior is of no matter to anyone but ourselves?

Over these ten days, choose wisely. The future of the world depends on it.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast two weeks from today, on the eve of Sukkot, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.org—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email please. If you don’t get the Jewish Standard, you can also read my columns by going to the columns page of my website. This week’s entry is about how the shofar symbolizes all that’s wrong in our Jewish world today.

Shabbat Shalom, stay healthy, may we and the world be inscribed for a happy, healthy, and peaceful 5785, as unlikely as that may seem right now, and, above all, stay safe.