God is all Life, the sanctuary was a place where death could not enter and the priest was supposed to remove himself from contact with death. Why are cohanim prohibited from entering cemeteries? It is because in ancient Israel, the priests served in the Tabernacle, the most sacred space in Jewish consciousness, the point of contact between God and humanity. Which is odd because for most of the year Judaism defies death. The Maharal, Rabbi Judah Lowe, notes that each of the five afflictions we impose on ourselves – no eating and drinking, no sexual behavior, no leather clothes, no washing, and no anointing with pleasant smelling oils or perfumes – is designed to create dissonance between our souls and our bodies. Throughout the 25 hours of this day, we descend into death: we refrain from eating and drinking, we wear a death shroud, we do not engage in physical pleasure, we plead for divine gracenot to condemn us. Thus, the great historian Gerson Cohen translated Hayom Harat Olam as the day pregnant with eternity – everything lies before us, new vistas, new opportunities, new chances.īut Yom Kippur is a call to death. We declare “HaYom Harat Olam “Today is the Birth Day of the World.” Although technically “harat” means pregnant, and Olam can mean eternity. Rosh HaShanah, though referred to as a Day of Judgment, is also a call to life, all our Scriptural portions concern themselves with birth. Terrible because during these days we undergo true existential angst. Translated sometimes as the Days of Awe, but might be translated as the Terrible Days. Within that more extended journey is the path we take from Rosh HaShanah to Yom Kippur. Rabbi Lew begins the journey with Tisha B’Av, the holiday that commemorates destructive and tragic events in Jewish history, through Sukkot it is a journey that takes the soul from brokenness and despair to healing. This image is based on a scene in Rabbi Alan Lew’s book This is Real And You are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation. The gate clangs shut, the great horn sounds one last time.” The gate between heaven and earth has suddenly begun to close…. ![]() A fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly, until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime…Then a chill grips you. You summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments…. You wear a shroud, the kittel and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. ![]() ![]() And so you determine: for the next twenty-four hours you rehearse your own death. All of a sudden you hear your name being called, and you want to cry out, No! No! No! Not now! I didn't realize this was real. If it is written in the Book of Life, relief goes up all around the room if it is written in the Book of Death a cold silence grips the sanctuary. ![]() There's no hand, there's no quill the pages of the book simply rustle and then quiver, and when the rustling stops, the name is already written. Each time a name is called it is written in one of the books. But this time the books are actually there on the bima. You are familiar with the imagery of the three books opened on Rosh HaShanah and closed on Yom Kippur: the Book of Life, the Book of Death and the Book of Suspended Sentence. Please imagine this: You walk into the synagogue on Yom Kippur as we all did last night.
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