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| Source: 99% Invisible |
Imagine going to the mailbox tomorrow and mixed in with all the junk mail and political leaflets you find a strange letter. It’s an invitation to help design a message that will be read by people ten thousand years from now. You would probably think it was a prank or an investment scheme, but this is exactly the invitation that was sent out in 1990 to a unique group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, and artists. An arm of the US Department of Energy was putting together an exclusive committee to accomplish one seemingly simple task: deliver a warning message to people ten thousand years in the future. The Department of Energy would place these warnings around the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a facility they were building deep in the earth under New Mexico to safely and permanently store leftover radioactive material. Such waste remains incredibly dangerous to humans for hundreds of millennia.
The fear was that someone thousands of years from now, who had never heard of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant would decide to go digging and unearth something radioactive. We saw in Raiders of the Lost Ark how digging up mysterious ancient materials can be deadly. It can melt your face. This risk is fairly easy to communicate to our children and grandchildren. A sign that says “Danger!” with the skull and crossbones and the radioactive symbol should do the trick. With that, we could be confident that people 100 years from now would get the message that this site is not a playground.
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| The WIPP Marker panel, November 1991. (Source: 99% Invisible) |
Some of the team members
suggested using symbols. Everybody knows the skull and crossbones is the symbol
of poison. That is until you learn that it originated in the Middle Ages when
it was associated with the crucifixion of Jesus[ii] and was a
symbol of both death and resurrection. It was only in the 1850s that it came
into use as the symbol for poison.[iii]
Even the language of symbols change. The committee had to consider this
question: Given these limitations, how could they communicate a message to the
future? They recognized that our descendants of ten thousand years will be as
foreign to us as the early farmers of wheat and barley seem now.
I love thinking about this
project.[iv] It pushes me to think on a
scale so far beyond where I normally reside. It’s hard to picture one hundred
years in the past or the future, let alone ten thousand. But I think even the
experience of trying to think this way is a valuable human endeavor. It’s an
attempt to understand our existence on the most global scale.
Why are we here? Not here on
earth, but why are we here today? Why do modern Jews continue to gather to
partake in this ancient ritual of Yom Kippur? What brought you here? What do
you hope to get out of this? Perhaps part of the point of the High Holy Days is
that they expose us to big ideas and big questions that we normally avoid. They
help us stretch and shape our brains to the ultimate questions of life and
meaning. Maybe, one reason you are here today is to practice a new way of
thinking.
The High Holy Days ask us to
think on a global scale. They scoop us out of the everyday and plunge us into
the big mindedness of the infinite and the eternal. We, who are used to
dividing our days into working hours and mealtimes, into classes and alarm
clocks, are suddenly shaken by the unsettling sound of the shofar into concerns
that are more cosmic. The Rosh Hashanah liturgy declares, “Today is the
birthday of the world” and calls our minds to the beginning of everything. And
on Yom Kippur we imagine God enacting a rehearsal of a messianic judgment of
the world. So on Rosh Hashanah we imagine the world’s beginning, and on Yom
Kippur we imagine its end. And suddenly we are thinking on an unfamiliar scale.
Like the members of the Department of Energy committee, who had to force
themselves to stop thinking in decades or centuries and teach themselves to
think in millennia, the High Holy Days are a lesson in thinking on the grandest
of scales.
We see this kind of thinking
play out in one of the most memorable and challenging prayers of the High Holy
Days -- Un’taneh Tokef. Over and over again on these High Holy Days we will
read these words:
On Rosh Hashanah it is written down, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:How many will pass on and how many will be created,Who will live and who will die.
We have come here to consider
our actions, to think back over this past year and to imagine how we might be
better in the next. And yet, we are constantly reminded by the Un’taneh Tokef
prayer that we are mortal creatures -- that our lives will end. If not this
year, then at some point. I came here to think about how I can be a better
student or spouse or friend, but this prayer keeps distracting me with the
troublesome reality that “nobody lives forever.”
And then the prayer makes it
even more specific. We don’t just wonder who will live and who will die. We
know that some will die by fire and others by water. Some will die by hunger
and others by thirst. No longer are we thinking about the abstract reality of
our own death, but the dark, intimate details of it. It’s difficult to read
these words this week, to hear “who by water” and not think of the countless
lives washed away by Hurricane Matthew. We know that this is a reality in our
world, even if it is one we spend most of our time trying to avoid thinking
about. Does the hurricane make these words more real? More terrifying? More
incomprehensible? More true?
This Yom Kippur, my heart goes
out to a family who belongs to a synagogue where I previously worked and who,
about a month ago, lost their house in a devastating fire. Thank God, nobody
was hurt, though they lost nearly all of their possessions. I cannot stop
wondering, how will their community read the words “who by fire” knowing that
it was almost them? For them, for all of us, the words of Un’taneh Tokef call
us to think on a scale we would rather not explore.
And one might get lost in that
kind of thinking. The fire or the flood could come at any time, so what is the
point in changing how I act? So if the message we have been told is that Yom
Kippur is about changing our daily behavior, why is Un’taneh Tokef constantly reminding
us that we’re going to die? On the cosmic scale of Un’taneh tokef, it’s hard to
see life’s meaning.
And yet, we do feel that life
has meaning. We cannot think only on a global scale because we see the person
sitting next to us who narrowly avoided the fire. And we can comfort them. And
we can rally around them, as my former congregation did, by raising money to
help them rebuild. Our lives seem short when we look at them from the cosmic
throne, but from where we sit now, they seem long and full of purpose. And,
when read closely, Un’taneh Tokef reflects this reality too. In order to fully
appreciate this subtler message, let’s take a moment to delve into the prayer’s
history.
It’s hard to trace the origin
of Un’taneh Tokef. Its history is shrouded in a medieval legend, according to
which, this prayer was written at a time of Jewish persecution and distrust
between Christians and Jews. But the prayer was actually written much earlier,
in the 7th century, probably by a liturgical poet named Yannai. Yannai’s story
is the opposite of the medieval legend. He lived under Byzantine rule of the Promised
Land, at a time of great religious creativity and cross-pollination between
Jews and their Christian neighbors. We find, in fact that Un’taneh Tokef is
very similar to a Christian prayer, composed around the same time. Perhaps
Yannai heard one of his Christian compatriots reciting this beautiful poem, and
he thought that he would compose a uniquely Jewish version. But he had some
work to do to translate the Christian theology. You see, their version deals
with the end of days -- the Final Judgment. There is no way out for the reader;
no exit hatch when judgment comes. But this seemed absurd to Yannai. He believed in daily repentance, and
a yearly Yom Kippur -- a time for both judgment by and also return to God.
Thus, the last line of the Hebrew prayer was added to the Christian version.
For Jews, the prayer would be incomplete without “u’tshuvah, u’t’fillah,
u’tzdakah ma-avirin et roah hagezeirah -- but through repentance, prayer, and
acts of justice, we can transcend the harshness of the decree.” The Jewish
message is that human beings are capable of t’shuvah, t’fillah, and t’zdakah.
Despite the fact that our lives are short, despite the fact that we know we will
die, we still repent, we still pray to God, and we still engage in acts of
goodness and justice in the world. We can see the cosmic scale and still we
choose a different path -- a path of upright action and care and compassion.[v]
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| Source: lucindaa likes type |
In a few minutes, we will pray
the words of Un’taneh Tokef together. What would it mean to pray it with these
thoughts in mind? To know that it is reminding you that you will die someday.
But also to know that it is asking you how you will live. It is asking you to
stand up in face of cosmic truths and declare that you have an important story
to tell.
After we pray these
challenging words together, we will read from the Torah. We will read that all
the Jews stood gathered to affirm the covenant. The text says that the covenant
was made not just with the Jews who were there that day, but even the ones who
weren't, with every generation that would follow. And so the Torah reading
calls us to think again on a gigantic scale. Now, rabbis like to look for a
keyword in a text, a word that is repeated in a passage and hints at its
meaning. There is one word that is repeated over and over and over in the Yom
Kippur Torah reading -- Hayom -- today. It appears 12 times. This is a covenant
for all time -- a cosmic event -- but it is also for us, today. Jewish scholar
Deborah Lipstadt explains, “We do not control life and death, but we can
control the kind of life we lead. The choice is up to you -- HaYom -- this
day.”[vii] She encourages us not to
get lost in “who by fire and who by water” and forget that what matters is what
you do with today. While we can think about the biggest time scales, all we can
really shape is haYom. Or, as America’s favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse
Tyson, says “While you are invited to reflect on the past, and imagine a
future, do not lose sight of the fact that we are prisoners in the present,
forever transitioning from our past to our future.” What he is saying, what the
High Holy Days are saying, is to think cosmically, but act locally. With all of
the past and future to get lost in, we can only shape today. What story will
they tell of today?
Think back to that eclectic
committee trying to design a message to last ten thousand years. They came up
with wild proposals. They talked about reshaping the landscape to look
threatening. They talked about genetically engineering cats to change colors near
nuclear material. But the plan that the Department of Energy ultimately decided
to go with was simply to erect large granite monuments with warnings in seven
languages. And why? Well, partially, how can we possibly know the future? After
all, Nils Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's
about the future.” But also because of Hayom -- because of today. Building a
warning sign that can last ten thousand years is expensive, and there are
people alive today who are at risk of exposure to our country's nuclear waste. Towns
like Apollo, PA, where cleanup of the discarded nuclear material could cost as
much as $500 million dollars.[viii]
We don’t have to look ten thousand years into the future to find people
affected by our actions. All we have to do is look around. Hayom -- today.
Wanting to protect our grand children’s great, great, great grandchildren is a
noble and worthy effort. But we cannot let it distract us from the work we have
to do today to care for those less fortunate and those who feel the immediate
impact of our choices. The High Holy Days call us to think on two scales
simultaneously - We must think on the grandest, cosmic scale, while at the same
time not losing sight of today.
Rabbi Danny Zemel reinterprets
the last line from Un’taneh Tokef.[ix] He reads it as “but
repentance, prayer, and charity, help the hardship of the decree to pass.” Our
actions are not a cure, a salvific way to change the decree. They are a comfort
in the face of what we know is true. We know our lives our short. Some
tragically so. But the comfort, the strength, the purpose, comes from knowing
that in the meantime, what we do today matters. Hayom -- today. What story will
you tell?
[iv] I
first learned about this project from my favorite podcast, 99 Percent
Invisible: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
[v] I am
grateful to my teacher, Larry Hoffman, who shared this teaching with our Tisch
Fellowship cohort. A version of this material is expanded upon in his book on
Un’taneh Tokef, Who by Fire and Who by Water from Jewish Lights Publishing.
[vi] Who
by Fire, Who by Water, ed. By Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. Page 66.
[vii] Learn
Torah with 5756 Torah Annual: A Collection of the Year’s Best Torah, ed. By
By Joel Lurie Grishaver, Stuart Kelman. Page 372
[ix] Who
by Fire, Who by Water, ed. By Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman. Page 79.