The Talmud teaches that three books are opened on Rosh Hashanah and closed at the end of Yom Kippur. The thoroughly righteous are inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life, while the thoroughly wicked are inscribed and sealed in the Book of Death. The verdict of the beinonim, those in the middle, is temporarily suspended, and their actions between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur determine into which book they are ultimately inscribed. Of course, we know that almost all of us are neither fully wicked nor fully righteous; we are all in the middle, we are all beinonim.
A Hasidic teaching from the Toldot Yaakov Yosef understands this as follows: Each season, every person opens three new books, in which each person must inscribe themselves for the coming year. He knows that we play a role in deciding what kind of year we will have. He gives us permission to reimagine these books not as prescriptions of what will happen to us, but descriptors of how we might choose to live. Will it be a year where we feel alive, where we embrace what life has to offer? Will it be an opportunity where we forego opportunities to make meaning? Will it be a year where we just coast by, arriving at next year’s High Holidays not sure how another year has passed.
I appreciate this Hasidic teaching in part because it acknowledges that God isn’t actually deciding who will live or die in the coming year. These books, open during these ten days, are metaphors for the choices we make. But more than that, this teaching pushes us to see ourselves as empowered writers in the story of our next year. We all sometimes carry out incredible righteous acts, and we all sometimes make mistakes that hurt. As humans, we have the capacity to do both. And we enter into Yom Kippur, as the Talmud teaches, with those books still open, those books still being written.
These are the days for us to decide what we want to write in the books. Yom Kippur, through the words in the machzor, through the melodies, through our own reflections, invites us to sink into what words might be written in each of our books. That is the book, the one that only you can write, that can be a guide for the year to come.
I wish you each a G’mar Chatimah Tovah, may it be sealed well for each of us. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
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