For many folks, the most dramatic portion of the High Holiday liturgy is the Unetaneh Tokef prayer. And the most emotional part of the prayer—at least for me—is the very graphic description of who shall live and who shall die.
For more than 40 years I have been leading the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services as a ba’al tefillah, and it’s hard for me not to get emotional when I reach this point.
But it wasn’t always that way.
When I was much younger, and I had just started leading the Yamim Noraim services, it actually was very difficult for me to relate to this part of the prayer. After all, who today dies of starvation or by drowning or by fire?
In trying to understand and appreciate the prayer, I attempted to look at the words more metaphorically: who shall be tormented by the fire of ambition … who shall hunger for companionship … who shall thirst for approval … who shall be strangled by insecurity … who shall be plagued by the pressures of conformity.
It made more sense to me that way, as it broadened the scope of the potential universe.
As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve begun to look at the words more literally. Each year, someone else unfortunately seems to come to mind.
Many years ago, when I read the words “who by choking,” I thought of a two-and-half-year-old baby, the grandchild of friends of ours, who lost his life when he choked to death on a grape.
After 9/11, when I read the words “who by fire,” I thought of all the people who were incinerated in the fires in the Twin Towers.
A year later, when I read the words “who by the sword” at the height of the terrorist attacks, I thought of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan.
Several years after that, Rabbi and Mrs. Rubenstein of the Young Israel of Scarsdale, who had just lost their lives in a tragic fire, immediately came to mind.
Several years ago, when I read the words “who by water,” I thought of those who perished in the tsunami. A year later, I remembered those who lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina—and a few years after that I thought of those who died in the Texas and Florida floods.
And unfortunately, “who by plague” has taken on much added and unexpected meaning this year.
If you asked any of us last Rosh Hashanah whether 25 million people could be inflicted with a virus that would cause the deaths of close to a million people in six months, no one would have believed you. Yet here we are facing those horrible statistics, praying to God for an end to this pandemic. And once again a word that only recently seemed more closely associated with what happened to the Egyptians thousands of years ago has reared its ugly head.
Yes, I no longer look at the words of Unetaneh Tokef metaphorically. Part of why this change has occurred is because I’ve gradually become more acutely aware of my own mortality—but a bigger part is that I’ve simply witnessed more of these types of tragic deaths.
God willing, we’ll never personally have to experience any of these ghastly ends. May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life in the coming year.
Michael Feldstein is the founder and owner of MGF Marketing (mgfmarketing.com), a direct marketing consulting firm, and a contributing editor to The Jewish Link. He lives in Stamford, CT.
