In advance of Rosh Hashana, I want to unpack one of the most loaded bits of liturgy in the tradition.

“Who will live and who will die? Who by the length of their days, and who before their time?”

Thread 1/x https://forward.com/life/faith/383080/what-this-rosh-hashanah-liturgical-poem-means-in-trumps-america/

Who will live and who will die?

Who by fire and who by water?

Who by wildfire, and who by hurricane?

Who by repeal of their health care, and who by unjust pricing of their lifesaving medicines?

The questions that we ask on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are not theoretical.

The High Holy Day liturgical poem “Unetane Tokef” is one of our toughest pieces of liturgy. The answer that it gives to these essential existential questions is, “teshuvah — repentance; tefillah — prayer, and tzedekah — acts of righteousness can avert the severity of the decree.”

Can individual acts of piety save us from earthquakes, car accidents, persecution? Will God give you a cookie if you do your homework? We know that a lot of very good people suffer every day, and that many people who do horrible things prosper. It’s clearer than ever these days.

We’re trained by our highly individualistic American culture to regard this prayer as an individual exhortation to shift our individual fates. And yet — maybe that’s not what’s going on.

Rather, perhaps “Unetane Tokef” is a collective imperative.

The prayer is written more or less in the third person, with some second-person address to God. And when it’s written in the first person, it’s in the plural, as is much Jewish liturgy. Not I. We.

What if this wasn’t about my own personal repentance as it affects my own specific fate? What if our repentance as a society (which demands that each individual do his or her part) is the thing that affects our collective fate?

Each of our culpability, each of our roles, each of our actions for good or for bad is tied inextricably with the actions of our community, with all Jews, with all people.

It’s upon each of us, individually, to take responsibility for our role in everyone’s political, economic, environmental and social well-being — and to not pass the theological buck to a deity who has done nothing if not give us the power of free will.

Free will: the power to heal or to hurt, to push for climate accords or to push for corporate interests, to enter a war or to refrain from entering war, to build gas chambers, to dismantle them — or to stand idly by and do nothing.

What if the reason that a person develops cancer is not because he or she personally did something wrong, but because we as a nation and a globe have poisoned our air, our water and our food with toxic chemicals and negligence?

What if the reason a person was hit harder by the hurricane is because that person’s city invested more infrastructure in neighborhoods wealthier than their own?

What if the reason that they don’t survive their illness is because senators took away their health care — because we, in a fit of resistance fatigue, stopped calling? Didn’t make it out to yet another town hall?

Our work can impact the severity with which evil besets us all.

We need teshuvah — literally, “returning” — to face the reality of who we are, to see how far we have strayed from where we need to be in relationship to others, to ourselves and to the transcendent.

We need tefillah, prayer, to remember that we are on this earth to serve, not to please ourselves, and to connect to the ever-flowing source of the Holy.

We need tzedekah, acts of righteousness, to enact, in part, this service in the world.

The deeper we get into prayer, returning and righteousness, the more we begin to understand that our every action is — rather than being isolated and individual — intertwined with the well-being of our culture as a whole.

It’s not necessarily about saving our individual selves. We’re not in control of that, really.

The liturgy continues:

The human’s origin is dust and end is dust, at the risk of their life they earns bread, they are like a broken vessel of clay, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shadow, a drifting cloud, a fleeting breath, scattering dust, a transient dream….

The Talmud (Shabbat 54b) teaches that "Whoever can forbid his household [to commit a sin] but does not, is considered liable for [the sins of] his household; [if he can forbid] his fellow citizens, he is considered liable for [the sins of] his fellow citizens... (cotd)"

"... if the whole world, he is considered liable for [the sins of] the whole world."

It's not enough simply not to sin. We must take active steps in preventing others from causing harm–else, their transgression becomes our own.

We are both vulnerable and responsible.

We can't do anything to guarantee that we will stay safe all year. We can't do anything to guarantee that we will emerge from this coming year healthy and whole.

We have in large part to hope that others will do their part. And we have to do our part.

And there are still no guarantees. Even when we do all the things right, sometimes bodies get sick, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

But we can all mitigate the severity to which evil besets us all. That's all we've ever got. That's the work.

And yes, in the end, it's all up to God--that's why this is just before the Kedushah. But I don't think that means that we have to read this as the theology of "if you're good you'll get a cookie and never feel pain." It's not that.

All the more so--we must do our part to mitigate suffering. And that doesn't guarantee that we won't suffer, in part because there's a whole collective project here of good use of free will and in part because suffering is a thing that happens sometimes.

But all the more so--we must do our work to help us all, and serving others is how we serve God. The two are forever and always intertwined.