Adath Jeshurun

Teach Us to Num­ber Our Days

Rosh Hashanah 5771

Rabbi Laura Metzger

I know some­one who’s dying. Don’t look around and try to fig­ure out who I’m talk­ing about. She’s not in syn­a­gogue, she’s not Jew­ish, and you prob­a­bly don’t know her. But I know her. I know she’s dying. She knows she’s dying. And I admire how she’s living.

The diag­no­sis came last year — can­cer had metas­ta­sized; it was in the liver and through­out the brain. With the diag­no­sis, she knew the rea­son for the headaches and weari­ness. And once she’d com­pleted surgery, she was feel­ing a lot bet­ter. Except for star­ing death in the face.

Here’s what I know about a death sen­tence: It’s ter­ri­fy­ing. Here’s what I know about my friend. She’s not ter­ri­fied. Not now. She was, and she’s absorbed the knowl­edge and made deci­sions. She’s fac­ing death, knows where she is going, and knows just what she wants out of the time she has while she’s still mobile and feel­ing OK.

Now this is an extra­or­di­nary woman. We don’t all have her strength or deter­mi­na­tion. When she came home from the hos­pi­tal after her brain surgery, she began remod­el­ing the bath­room. She ripped out the old tile and laid new tile. She’s been repaint­ing the din­ing room this sum­mer. So far she’s fin­ished the upper part, and she fully intends to do the bot­tom part soon. She went on a fam­ily vaca­tion to the beach, directly from the hos­pi­tal after a series of chemo treat­ments. Along the way, she slept. Once there, she played on the beach with her grand­kids. She’s at church every Sun­day, and at every lit­tle league game on Tues­day. And though she’s reduced her hours at work, a nurse to the core, she’s still car­ing for patients.

What I admire is how my friend knows what’s impor­tant to her — her fam­ily, her work, her church. She knows what she loves to do and she’s going to keep doing it as long as she can. She’s going to live her life, her way, as long as it is hers to live.

The begin­ning of this story is the story of all of us. We are all going to die. Some­day. As we well know, but don’t want to, life is a ter­mi­nal con­di­tion. On the High Holy Days, we’re forced to face it. When we come to the prayer Une­taneh Tokef, a focal moment in our liturgy, we’re faced with the real­ity that not all of us will be here next year at Rosh Hashanah. Even the angels trem­ble in awe and fear, because the future is unknow­able. We face divine judg­ment, and our des­tiny is decreed. Who will live and who will die. Who in the full­ness of years and who before. With this prayer, we are made to face our own mor­tal­ity, and to the depths of our souls, we want to be more than we have been. We want the wis­dom to live our lives fully.

This is a long­ing expressed in Psalm 90: “Teach us to num­ber our days that we may attain a heart of wis­dom.” It’s only when we know how brief our lives might be that we gain the wis­dom to live them well.

How we want to under­stand our mor­tal­ity and to make the most of the time we have!

Une­taneh Tokef isn’t only about fear­ing death. It’s about choos­ing how we live in this next, new year. Will we live the way we want to? Will we love our fam­i­lies, take care of our work, enjoy our hob­bies, bask in nature? Or (not)?

We oh so casu­ally throw that phrase around, “spend­ing time”. Let’s take the words seri­ously. We have only so much time (though we don’t know how much that is). When it’s spent, it’s gone.

With our money, we know what we have and what we do with it. If we have a lim­ited amount, and most of us do, no mat­ter how much, we take it seri­ously and avoid over­spend­ing, stay away from scams and rip-offs, and save for what mat­ters to us.

By com­par­i­son, we treat time care­lessly. Do we even know what we’re doing all day? How much of the time is mean­ing­ful, how much friv­o­lous, or worse, damaging?

Mas­ter teacher, Rafe Esquith, teaches his 5th graders to pay atten­tion to how they use their time. Every Fri­day after­noon, before the week­end, he has the kids esti­mate how much time they’ll spend sleep­ing, eat­ing, doing chores and fam­ily activ­i­ties. Then he helps them real­ize that even if they want to spend a huge chunk of time just play­ing, they’ll still have hours in which to get a head start on read­ing a book or prac­tic­ing an instru­ment or help­ing a neigh­bor. They learn by doing what is taught by the wiz­ard Gan­dalf in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “All you have to do is decide what to do with the time given to you.”

So sim­ply said and so enor­mous a respon­si­bil­ity. In that is the fear and awe –
hav­ing the respon­si­bil­ity to use our time. It’s on us. Yes we have work and fam­ily and pets and school and com­mu­nity oblig­a­tions. We’ve made choices in the past with which we have to live now. Still, we have so much that we fill our time with. Is it feed­ing us? Is it feed­ing our spirit, our soul, our deep­est self?

Rabbi Elyse Gold­stein writes:

It hurts so much to live in the face of death that … we want Une­taneh Tokef to be a metaphor. We want the inevitable ques­tion of who was here last year that isn’t here now and who is here this year that won’t be here next year to be a poem, or a para­ble. It’s not. It’s a wake-up call; it’s a sho­far blast of warn­ing. No one knows when the gates will close for­ever so while we are inside them we had bet­ter love pas­sion­ately, fight pas­sion­ately, learn pas­sion­ately, live passionately.

Une­taneh tokef kedushat hayom, ki hu norah v’ayom. Let us declare the holi­ness of this day, because it con­tains an awful truth. Une­taneh tokef kedushat hayom. Let us declare the holi­ness of this day, because it is the only day we have for sure.

This is what I have learned from my friend. She is fac­ing death. And she is liv­ing life, her life, with awe and pas­sion. May these Days of Awe give us this gift of the aware­ness of time. May we learn to num­ber our days, account for our time, make the lives we desire in the time that we have. And may every day of this new year count.

L’shanah tovah tikateivu.