Thread by @Delafina777

And this prayer (also from our Yom Kippur prayerbook) is so incredibly Jewish and I love it:

Hey, Clockmaker--
I was looking for You.
Builder of the machine,
You lost interest, I guess, and walked away--
but I was looking for signs of You.
I saw accidents,
mutations...

...disasters unpredicted and unexplained;
pretty sloppy work, if You ask me.
Hey Clockmaker--
praised by Your name
and the names of Your mechanics.

"praised be... the names of Your mechanics"

is such a sly, angry, defiant, and accepting reference to the idea of tikkun olam, that we--humans--are repairers of the world.

It's echoed a few pages later in a poem that takes our traditional hymn of praise, "who is like you among the celestials (eilim)?" and changes one letter in the Hebrew to get, "who is like you among the silent (ilmim)?" :

"Who is like You
among the silent?
Mute and inscrutable
You witness our pain...

Ever-silent, hiding out in history,
You have Your reasons--or so they say.
You left us on our own, so let us give You leave:
withdraw into Yourself,
withhold Your saving power...

"And we will live on memories of joy;
and stubborn and stiff-necked, we'll cling to hope;
and gather strength to fight the Pharaohs when we must.
And hold fast to freedom, and celebrate in song--
and vow that we will never be
among the silent."

And I'm glad that our practice also makes this space--among all the Yom Kippur confession of all the ways *we've* failed--for us to be furious about the ways it feels like we've been failed by forces greater than us.

And that it reaffirms our commitment to act in God's stead when God fails humanity.

An interesting (and difficult) poem by Abba Kovner--a Jewish resistance fighter who formed a group called Nakam (Hebrew for vengeance) that proposed killing 6 million Germans, but later settled down to become a poet, speaks of God (or maybe himself) as an anxious accountant...

..."not very strong, neither at spiritual accounting nor any other kind."

He labors to come up with a final analysis, a sum total:

"but in the last analysis,
what does it matter!"

He goes on:

"Life--if he could,
what he would like to tell you is this:
life is what is left of it
is hard to give up
hard
even now."

The prayerbook goes on with the Untaneh Tokef, the ancient prayer that acknowledges that we don't know who that stands here with us today will not be here next year, that some of us will die.

It's a hard prayer that lingers almost morbidly over all the ways we might die.

And then, seeming to respond to Kovner's insistence that what God (or Kovner) would want to tell us is that

"life is what is left of it"

and we should want to live

the prayerbook goes on (anonymously, and so, collectively, rather than in the voice of an individual rabbi):

"The words are old and the language was theirs,
but the call is real and the message is ours:
Take hold of your life
while you still have the chance;
for your story will end
and it might be this year
in a way you don't know.
Take hold of your life
make things right while you can

"...and don't miss the call of the Day of Dread."

A bit later, we come on the words of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg:

"All that we Jews can know about ourselves is that every tragedy we have always made new beginnings...

Jews exist to be bold. We cannot hide from the task of making the world more just and decent."

Which reminds me of a line from Laurie Zoloth's beautiful essay on cloning, "Born Again: Faith and Yearning in the Cloning Controversy," which I dearly hope the next edition of the Yom Kippur prayerbook will excerpt:

"It is the way that Jews answer death, with the passionate search for justice."

"Resolute, doubtful bearers of stories of grace and loss... the slow work of repair [falls] to us, bewildered, freed slaves holding the Law in our hands, meaning, not in the narrow place, but on the vast plain of the possible, set free with much to do."