What if we believed that, one day, we were going to die? What if we could imagine our final moments?
Most of us don’t really believe our lives are finite. But on Yom Kippur we are forced to admit the essential fact of this life: that it will end.
Yom Kippur challenges our comfortable pieties about Judaism as a this-worldly religion. It is our annual summons to abandon name/ face/personality/achievements and inhabit our death-bed. An out-of-body experience that urges us to relinquish what will someday be taken from us, so that we can live the time allotted us with greater moral clarity and spiritual intensity.
If we experienced Yom Kippur as an invitation to deeply imagine our final moments, how would we judge the ambitions that have defined our lives? Which of our dreams would shame us, which would we wish we hadn’t pursued? What memories would give us strength?
If we could carry something of that subversive experience into the rest of the year, “remember” those moments before leaving the body behind, how would we order our priorities? What flaws in our being would we more vigorously confront? What grudges would we surrender, what severed friendships restore, what suppressed apologies resurrect, what regrets concede? How much more unconditional love would we force ourselves to summon?
