Yom Kippur 2024: Not Knowing

It’s 4:35 in the morning and I’m lying awake waiting to die. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with me. Other than the fact I’m convinced something terrible is going to happen to me in the next five minutes. Or in the five after that.

How many nights did I lose sleep (not to mention disrupt Andi’s), panicking over something that, if I thought about rationally, I knew was not likely to happen? For a relatively intelligent mother of four, a spiritual leader and teacher, it felt ridiculous and humiliating. 

When I was a child, I would panic in bed at night trying to contemplate the vastness of the universe and to imagine what it would feel like to no longer be alive. I’d run into my mother’s room screaming and crying. To this day when I let my mind wander there, I feel the panic rising.

My work often brings me face to face with other people’s illnesses and deaths, requiring me to set aside my own worries about dying in order to support them. When I’m not ministering to someone else, my own fears can emerge; hence, the 4:30am crises.

It is impossible to describe it to someone who hasn’t felt it: what it’s like to be certain that any minute could be the end. The terror, the palpitations, the chaos. And then to step outside of it and realize the craziness of it all, the audacity of it all knowing there are people with genuine reason to think any minute could be their last, and yet still be pulled back to the slavish, heart-thumping, sweat-producing, nausea-filled terror of my own demise.  

Over the years I’ve talked through my death anxiety with a wonderful psychologist. I exercise a lot, eat healthfully, and spend lots of time with family and friends. I have a couple of massages a month, listen to beautiful music, and spend lots of time in nature. I believe it all helps. And yet, sometimes in the middle of the night, mercifully less and less frequently, my panic will return.

These are not things I’d usually share beyond my inner circle. Who would respect, a public figure and community leader who loses sleep at night because she’s convinced she’s about to die? Who would seek counsel from someone who can’t control her own demons?

I’ve endured ribbing from friends who simply don’t get it.  They’ll poke fun at my heightened sensitivity to my health, not having any clue how much I have struggled to contain my worries.  My close friend, Rachel, whose heart I believe was in the right place, once bought me this wheel called “A Hypochondriac’s Key to Worst Case Scenarios: Yes, You’re Probably Dying”.  On the outside of the wheel are different symptoms and as you turn it and point to a symptom, it lines up with different windows in which there appear the answers to “what you may have”, a definition of what that is, the kind of specialist to see, what you should obsess about in the meantime, and finally, what it’s most likely to be.  Here’s an illustration:  blurred vision – mad cow disease – degenerative brain disorder – neurologist – not eating meat ( I haven’t in 25 years) – a hangover; or: bruising – aplastic anemia – low blood cell count – hematologist – contaminated transfusion -- clumsiness]. I’ll admit it does help to laugh at myself sometimes. But tragically, and no less ironically, two and a half years ago Rachel died suddenly at the age of 55.

Rachel’s unexpected death was a terrible loss for me, and it also terrified me. But what I find myself unable to stop thinking about these days is how tragically real this anxiety became last October 7. Just trying to imagine - as we all have, let’s admit it - a loved one savagely murdered, our child suffering in a Gazan tunnel, being chased out of our home because of rocketfire - just imagining it all can provoke anxiety.

You watch the footage from the massacre at the Nova Festival and from the rampages at the kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope, and you start to feel this terrifying panic wondering if, for the people on your screen, that moment was their last. People running through fields under a barrage of gunfire; jumping into a ravine; searching desperately for a bush to hide in. You hear stories of people holding their breath under piles of murdered friends hoping to be abandoned for dead; no idea if they’ll make it out alive. Stories of people hearing the terrorists coming into their homes, watching the handles on the doors of their safe room start to rattle, not knowing if they’ll survive one more minute.

Over the last year, the entire population of Israel - 10 million people - have had to contend with this existential terror - sometimes multiple times a day - as sirens go off giving them anywhere from 15 to 90 seconds to get to a safe room before a missile can hit. Two weeks ago, during the Iranian missile attack, my cousin and her young daughter were among the many who couldn’t make it to a shelter even in the 12 minutes they had and had to pull their car over to the side of the road, lie down on the asphalt with their arms folded over their heads, totally exposed, and simply wait, with no idea if they were going to suffer the impact or not. The trauma isn’t only in the physical destruction and human injuries and fatalities. It’s in the moments just before. In the terror of not-knowing.

Many feel the power of Yom Kippur in how it has us confront our mortality by ritually rehearsing our deaths. We don’t eat or drink. We wear a kittel which is like tachrichin, burial shrouds. We don’t bathe, we don’t perfume or adorn our bodies. In the safety of our “aliveness” we simulate not being alive. But I feel its power in how it has us confront not knowing what awaits us, especially not knowing when our life will come to an end. 

On Yom Kippur afternoon we read the story of the prophet Jonah who’s called by God to go to the non-Jewish, Assyrian city of Nineveh to tell its evil inhabitants to prepare to be punished. Jonah tries to avoid his task by fleeing to Tarshish on a ship. A great storm ensues and it’s discovered that he’s caused it because he was avoiding his god. At his own behest, Jonah is thrown overboard and swallowed by a great fish. From the belly of the fish Jonah prays to God who commands the fish to expel him. Jonah finally undertakes his mission. He goes to Nineveh and proclaims their imminent demise. But the people are moved to repent and their destruction is averted. Jonah becomes enraged.

He cries out to God saying that this is precisely why he didn’t want to take the job in the first place, fearing that God would be moved by the wicked Ninevites’ prayers for forgiveness and wouldn’t follow through with Jonah’s predictions. He asks God to let him die rather than bear this humiliating reversal.

Jonah sits outside the city to watch what will happen. God causes a large gourd to grow next to him to provide him shelter, for which Jonah is grateful. But the next day God sends a worm to desiccate the plant which withers, and a hot wind together with a burning sun cause Jonah great discomfort. Again, Jonah asks to die.

God challenges Jonah and says:  “You cared about the plant which you didn’t work for and which you didn’t grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. Should I not care about Nineveh, a great city with more than 120,000 people who don’t know their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well?” Thus ends the Book of Jonah.

The common takeaways are that God feels compassion for people who seek forgiveness and mend their ways, and that God is the god of all people, not just of Israel, and punishes or saves according to people’s deeds. For some, these ideas make the Book of Jonah an appropriate Torah reading for the Day of Atonement. 

But the biblical commentator, Aviva Zornberg, takes the lessons of Jonah to a whole different place, one where Jonah struggles to inhabit the terrifying ,yet unavoidable, space we straddle between life and death. If one of the messages of Jonah is the impossibility of fleeing the presence of God, Zornberg explains that what is truly inescapable is our confrontation with not-knowing how and when our fates will be sealed.

She points out that if the book ended after the Ninevites begged for forgiveness and were spared, we would understand that its message is the power of teshuvah, of repentance. But the fact that it proceeds with Jonah’s bitter remorse over averting Nineveh’s destruction is what reveals these insights into the human condition.

So disturbed by God reversing the decree against Nineveh, Jonah tries to run away from the bitter truth of life’s unpredictability. He begs to die, just like he attempted to descend to the depths of the sea earlier, in order to trade the uncertainty of life for the certainty of death. In the midst of the raging sea, the sailors had cried out to their god to no avail, while Jonah sank into a deep sleep. The captain of the ship approached Jonah and said, literally, “We’re standing between life and death, and you’re sound asleep?!” Facing the unknown, unnavigable, anguished space between life and death, the sailors cried out. Jonah, though, tried to escape into a death-like slumber. He avoided the tension by refusing to cry out. To flee from God is to refuse to stand between life and death; to ignore the essential vulnerability of life, to prefer, as Zornberg calls it, “the forgone conclusion” of death. 

The opposite of fleeing from God is to stand one’s ground between life and death, to cry out, to pray.  Standing is the posture of prayer. Quoting the English poet William Empsom, Zornberg writes, “The heart of standing is you cannot fly”, and of course points out the paradox that Yonah, the “dove”, attempts to do just that – to fly, to flee, in the effort to deny his own fear.  

Many people try to flee the harsh truth of our not-knowing. Many seek shelter in faith; some in fatalism. Many have caused great harm to others in their search for certainty amidst what is inevitably uncertain. After all, the risks of uncertainty can be serious. For some they can be fatal. 

On October 7, nine-year old Tamar Torpiashvili and her family had to run to their safe room in their apartment in Ashdod seventeen times. They had 45 seconds each time the sirens sounded to make it to safety. For the next two weeks Tamar and her family had to outrun sirens almost every single day, often several times a day, to get to their safe room and wait for the possible destruction that was heading their way. The anxiety was weighing heavily on Tamar. Her parents called a public hotline for guidance on how to counsel their daughter. They tried to play down the threats for her. She continued to suffer. On October 20th, at 12:02pm, a siren blared and Tamar ran to the safe room. When her mother ran in, she found Tamar writhing on the floor, and then Tamar became unconscious. A neighbor heard the mother’s screams and rushed over to perform CPR. An ambulance in the area staffed by a Canadian doctor who had just arrived in Israel to volunteer raced her to the hospital where she languished for a week. On October 28, nine-year old Tamar was declared dead. The cause was cardiac arrest suffered during a siren warning of incoming missiles. 

[As you consider your continued support of Israel at this time, there is great need to support the expansion of mental health services for children like Tamar and people of all ages who are suffering terribly from anxiety and PTSD.] 

It’s no wonder people seek certainty, even if it’s the certainty of death. When Jonah asks the sailors to throw him overboard, he says, “I know that because of me this great storm has come upon you.”  But to him this is knowledge to die by, not to live by. He wears his knowledge angrily, using it to justify his flight and his death.

In contrast to Jonah’s knowledge which masks his fear, we encounter the not-knowing of others: the Ninevites who “don’t know the difference between their right hand and their left” and their king who charges them to repent saying “Who knows if God might turn and relent?” The sailors who urged Jonah to pray saying, “maybe God will be kind to us and we won’t perish”. These are people who know that they do not know.

To Jonah, the success of his mission to move the Ninevites to repent and Nineveh’s subsequent survival is proof positive of life’s arbitrariness, of God’s unknowable, capricious kindnesses.  Zornberg imagines Jonah wondering: “How can God allow three days of theatrical repentance to outweigh a long and evil history?”

To Jonah, surviving a threat or succumbing to one are totally random experiences. And because of their randomness, both unleash emotional and theological trauma. While it seemed that God forgave the Ninevites because of their teshuvah, in the end God explains that what was more touching was their vulnerability. As Zornberg puts it, God felt “a strange appreciation for their ignorance”, as if to say that God was moved by their not-knowing. 

Last weekend, 100 of us gathered up north in the autumnal kaleidoscope of changing foliage - an evocative backdrop to our season of inner transformation. For the third year now, our Laurentian community convened on Shabbat Shuvah amidst immense natural beauty for an opportunity to reflect on the High Holy Days’ call for teshuvah, for return. This year, coinciding with the one-year marking of the horrors of October 7th, our focus was on remembering our devastating losses on that day and since, and on our indefatigable hope.

Alongside us as the braided havdalah candle shone upon our linked arms and bounded hearts, as we hiked the leaf-strewn trails searching for a path forward, and as we solemnly summoned the memories of the murdered, the bereaved, and the captive, were five young Shinshinim - Israeli high school graduates doing a year of service in Montreal before entering the army. Over the course of our gathering they shared their personal stories of terror and loss from October 7. They told us about their friends who remain hostage to Hamas in the dungeons of Gaza. One performed a dance in the woods that she had choreographed from trauma. They're only teens, but in the last year they have lived a lifetime of suffering. It has bequeathed them wisdom we wish they had not yet come to possess; the heavy wisdom of not-knowing.

Ya’arah told us about her harrowing time in the safe room with her family as terrorists swarmed her kibbutz. She was texting with her best friend next door hiding in her own safe room who told Ya’arah that her father had run to their kitchen to bring knives and a heavy frying pan into the safe room in case they needed to defend themselves. Ya’arah turned to her own father and urged him to do the same, so he quickly went to their kitchen and brought back knives and a pan. Ya’arah turned to him and asked, “Abba, will these things protect us from the terrorists?” He looked at his daughter and confessed, “I don’t know.” 

As a mother the one thing I know I have to do, the one thing I’m committed to doing in any way I can, is to protect my children. I cannot conceive of what it must have felt like for Ya’arah’s father to look into his child’s eyes and admit that he wasn’t sure he could save her; that there was simply no way of knowing what would happen next. My heart ached when she shared that story. Thankfully she lived to tell it.

Ya’rah’s father’s words, “I don’t know”, are among the most heroic I’ve heard. His not-knowing echoes classic Jewish responses to the inscrutability of our destinies. When Moses seeks forgiveness for the people’s sin of building the Golden Calf, he says, “אוּלַ֥י אֲכַפְּרָ֖ה בְּעַ֥ד חַטַּאתְכֶֽם/Perhaps I’ll win forgiveness for your sin!!” When Mordechai tries to convince Esther to intervene with Achashverosh to save the Jewish people from Haman’s murderous plot, he says מִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת/who knows if this is the very reason your destiny was to become Queen!?” In the end, Zornberg says, “forgiveness and survival are a matter of God’s chessed; a gratuitous gesture that cannot already be known.” And so the words “Perhaps”, “who knows?”, and “I don’t know” become the most powerful declarations of humility and hope. 

Recall how in the last line of the book God asks,  “Should I not care about Nineveh, a great city with more than 120,000 people who don’t know their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well?” God pleads here with Jonah, and through him with us, to surrender to our existential ignorance about our fates. By ending the dialogue with Jonah on a question, God summons Jonah not to solve the mysteries and enigmas of life which so frighten and frustrate him, but to bear them. As Zornberg says, “God invites him to stand and pray.”  

To pray, להתפלל, is a reflexive verb which means to do something to ourselves; to consider deeply how we’re living during the time we do have to be alive; even during moments of fear and trembling. Only from within such a posture can chessed - generosity and kindness to oneself and to others - become possible. Only when we set aside our frenzied demand for certainty that too often leads us away from one another instead of towards one another, can we accept the reality of not-knowing with love and compassion. Only when we can stand and cry out in that place between life and death will we be able to withstand the insecurity it unleashes and comfort one another through it.

Think of all the stories of civilians jumping into their cars and heading straight into the attacks on October 7 in the chance that they could save someone’s life. Many lost their own lives this way. Think of the stories of how Israelis open their safe rooms to complete strangers who are far from home when the sirens go off and are frantically looking for somewhere to shelter. In their moments of ultimate, traumatic not-knowing, Israelis know exactly what to do. 

We’ve spoken about the deadly effects of PTSD, but in Israel they also speak about PTG: Post Traumatic Growth - the ability of people under duress to do great things. On Kibbutz Kerem Shalom near the Gaza border, every time a missile or shrapnel falls on their property and leaves a gaping hole the members gather to plant a tree in it. “Where the enemy has sought to cause death”, they say, “we bring life and growth.”

The question mark that ends Jonah’s tale suggests that the existential mystery of human life will never be solved. There is no God-given resolution with which we can close the book and draw a long, satisfying breath. The breath we draw at its close is one that we need to gird our strength to live within life’s mysteries and ambiguities; to rise and stand on the shaky ground that spans our beginning and our end.

During these Days of Awe, when we chant the words of the Unetane Tokef, מי יחיה ומי ימות/who shall live and who shall die”, we are asking neither God nor ourselves to answer what deep down we know is an unanswerable question. We are standing and crying out in the face of our utter not-knowing, and asking for the strength to endure it with courage and dignity. 

During these particular Yamim Noraim, I remain in awe not only of our Israeli kin to endure the sacrifices they make over and over again, but of their bravery to face the daily onslaughts of not knowing: running for safety at the sound of an alarm; sending a child off to the army; even waiting for a bus. All for the sake of making sure that the story of the Jewish people coming home to Israel to establish a land of safety, of integrity, and of peace continues to be written. All in the courageous effort to stand and pray, to survive in the universal sanctuary of not-knowing.

When we gather next year, will the war be over? Will the hostages be home? Will the hate that targets us in the streets and on campuses have relented? Who among us will be here? Who among us will no longer be?

We don’t know. But we know how to live in the space of not-knowing. Stand up to hate. Support the Jewish State and the Jewish people. Love each other. Support each other. Forgive each other. Respect each other. Hold each other. Make each other’s lives matter. Give each other hope.

You know what to do.

Hatimah tovah.