For Ilana.

Rabbi Harold Kushner tells us: Unetaneh Tokef is one of the prayers we say on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur that simultaneously moves me the most and makes me question myself the most. In the first part, this prayer tells us that all of our actions, the good and the not so good, are written by us, and that part of what will happen to us in the next year will be the result of how we have lived and how we have behaved, including how even what we eat will affect us, and all of this will determine only part of our future. And this part, it is clear to me, is our responsibility.

But in the second part, Unetaneh Tokef tells us that on Rosh Hashana our destiny will be written and on Yom Kippur our destiny will be signed, who will live and who will die and there is not much we can do about it. And this makes us uneasy. Because we don’t want to accept that life is unfair. And we don’t like to hear this phrase. We’d like to think that someone is at the steering wheel and that everything has a reason for being. We’d rather blame ourselves and say that we deserve it and not have to admit that things happen in the world at random.

Kushner continues: Rabbis teach us that we can comfort the hurting by saying that in the long run what happened will be for the best or that we shouldn’t question God’s ways. And this doesn’t mitigate the pain or take away the anger that many feel when they have suffered, for example, the loss of a loved one. How can it occur to us that God wants deformed children to be born? How can it occur to us that God wanted a young mother to get multiple sclerosis? That God wants a father and husband to die at an early age from a heart attack? Who told them that we glorify God by holding Him responsible for every earthquake, every tsunami, every hurricane, every fire, every mudslide, every car accident, every terrible disaster, including the Holocaust?

Rabbi Kushner concludes by saying: When we understand that God is not the cause of a baby’s terminal illness, we understand that God is actually on our side and not on the side of illness and calamity. We understand that God is all-powerful, but that His power is not to control everything but to allow the laws that govern order in the universe to act according to the original plan that He defined. For those who suffer, God is responsible for giving us the strength to endure it, for taking us by the hand and helping us cross the valley of shadows and darkness, until we see the light again. Because not everything that happens in the world is God’s will.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Rabbi Harold Kushner’s participation in the book Jews and Judaism in the 21st Century, edited by Rabbi Edward Feinstein.