A Yom Kippur Meditation on Compassion and Responsibility

Daniel Greenberg CB, for the Jewish Ethics Project

Here we are again, at the centrepiece of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, the “Unetaneh Tokef” prayer: the angels trembling in dread as all humanity passes one by one, like sheep through the gap, under God’s omniscient gaze as He decides what lies ahead for each of us this year.   

As a child, this was always the imagery of Yom Kippur that touched me most closely: a child can picture angels better than an adult, and sheep are the common currency of childhood literature.  As I grew older, the picture grew less poignant, retreating further and further into the mists of unreality each year.  I have lived a sheltered and privileged life in which drowning and starvation, beheading and stoning, and all the other horrors in this catechism of misery have seemed comfortably the stuff of melodrama, or the stuff of reality only for other places and peoples.

For various reasons, in recent years the imagery has grown closer and closer again to my mind and makes a terrified child of me again at least for the few minutes of this prayer as I contemplate the brutalities of what Kipling’s Tibetan Lama so constantly and movingly describes as “this great and terrible world”.  Last year, I thought for a moment about each and every one of the horrors recited in the text, and without difficulty I found their presence in the world around me.

Death by famine or drought has been so much in the news this year.  There is natural or man-made famine or food-poverty in most parts of the globe, including the developed world.  And of course as a Jew I think particularly of the sufferings of those in and around Israel: hostages starving in their subterranean misery; the displaced of Israel and surrounding countries struggling to survive; and of course innocent inhabitants of Gaza reduced overnight to dependency on survival handouts that too often do not reach them, and who in scenes reminiscent of the Tochacha (the Biblical prophetic passage of warning) are forced to watch in impotent misery as their children suffer the increasingly painful and lingering death throes of malnutrition. 

Public policy, and political and military strategy, necessarily drive decisions of politicians and soldiers: but they must not drive my own internal ethical narrative.  Compassion is an universal ethical imperative for each of God’s creations, and as I read the lines of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer again and wonder how to shape an appropriate ethical reaction, I think again of the Tzadik Reb Aryeh Levin who on learning that there was a famine in Africa initiated a collection to help relieve it: when asked whether one could contribute from ma’aser money (tithes) his response was firm: “No, you cannot – so give me some money that is not from ma’aser”.  His message was clear: compassion must never be reduced to the level of a mere ritual religious obligation; it must be experienced as a core human emotion, and translated through a feeling of humanitarian responsibility into constructive action.

And then I think about the misery caused by natural disasters: “those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation” (Conan Doyle) are shrieking louder and louder every year.  As I read “who will be empoverished … who will be cast down” I see myself watching cultures disappearing beneath the rising waters of the sea, livelihoods destroyed in a day through the raging of wildfires, and fishermen from thousands of years of fisherman stock staring at the last few sickly fish wriggling and struggling in the dry lakes.  If I look down on them from inside the comfortable bars of my first-world civilisation, without feeling a need to take some responsibility for human suffering in some real way, can I really claim to be part of the symbolic flock of sheep that is passing through the gap under the severe and unblinking scrutiny of the Lord of all creation today?

“Can I really claim to be part of the symbolic flock of sheep that is passing through the gap under the severe and unblinking scrutiny of the Lord of all creation today?”

And so it goes on through every couplet and every terror.  I pause briefly at the mention of torture and torment and remind myself that modern slavery appears to be growing not merely in quantity but even in barbarity compared to previous horrors the world has known. The Uighur Muslims, children, women and men of an ancient and delicate civilisation, suffering literally untold and barely imagined horrors of “re-education” and “medicine”, financed by forced labour the produce of which lands in our shops in the form of suspicious low prices from which we conveniently suspend our disbelief.

And my eyes cloud over again as I think of the women of Afghanistan, so recently tantalised by a glimpse of liberation and equality under the rule of law, being forced deeper and deeper into subhuman levels of oppression and degradation, debasing the currency of the virtue modesty in whose name these enormities are perpetrated. 

And so I come to the end, to the solemn reflection on the powers of prayer, repentance and charity, crowned as always by the joyful proclamation of God as Living King.  But this year it fails to provide a satisfying and triumphant conclusion in the way that it has: because it does not address the reality of the horrors I have lived for the last few minutes, and I feel no cleansing absolution while those horrors remain part of the world in which I live and I do nothing about them.

For today to bring a real feeling of atonement, I need to confront my own part of the collective responsibility for human sufferings caused, exacerbated or simply tolerated and ignored by “man’s inhumanity to man” (Robert Burns, Man Was Made To Mourn); I need to leave the Days of Awe this year having made some solid commitment to myself to harness the timeless values and teachings of Judaism in a way that makes a real difference to the ethical balances of world events today; so that I can see the recurring Yomim Nora’im vision of a world in which humanity joins together in the worship of a single beneficent Deity not as an unreal picture-book ending that absolves me from the need to think and act, but as a stirring practical inspiration for the year ahead.