Sermon for Erev Rosh haShana 5787 ~ September 11, 2026

I was recently sitting in a waiting room of a doctor’s office, waiting to be called for one of those required screenings one needs at a certain age.  The TV was tuned to an episode of the Andy Griffith show, which was shown in black and white. Then the commercials came on.  There was this one that was advertising a Survival Food Kit, where you could “Claim a 3-Month Food Supply and Get 2 Months FREE! While Supplies Last.”    

I was intrigued.  I went to my phone to find out more details: the website said:
Now — more than ever — we need to be ready to look out for our own.
Our kids, grandkids, parents & neighbors. Because the truth is, you’re probably going to need it.
Some People Think a Disaster Won’t Happen to Them.
Most folks think a bad storm, blackout or food shortage won’t hit close to home.
So they don’t prepare, and the results are devastating.
In a true emergency, 4Patriots survival food becomes… #1 Item to Hoard in a Crisis!
So Tasty, You Wouldn’t Know It Was Survival Food.”

It’s actually not a bad idea. We may scoff at people who stockpile survival food or build underground bunkers, but natural disasters seem to be increasingly frequent and devastating. We worry about the climate crisis. We wring our hands about the state of our government and the future of our planet. We donate to help when disasters strike.  But how many of us have emergency plans at home? 

We don’t like to contemplate such questions, but we never know when disaster may happen to you.  Are you ready?  What is your plan?

Climate change may be a newer crisis, but as a rabbi I can tell you these questions are not new. Consider the words of Unetaneh Tokef, the central prayer of these Days of Awe, which dates back to the 11th century:

Who will live and who will die?
Who will die at his predestined time and who before his time?
Who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast?
Who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm?
Who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning?
Who will rest and who will wander?
Who will live in harmony and who will be harried?
Who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer?
Who will be impoverished and who will be enriched?
Who will be degraded and who will be exalted?

Many of you are probably very grateful that this doom and disaster liturgy is sung in Hebrew. But facing our vulnerabilities and mortality is precisely what we do during the High Holidays! We ask ourselves – are we prepared for whatever may come?  We confront the unsettling truth that we don’t get to decide what the coming year will bring.

So, if that’s true, perhaps we should simply enjoy life while we can. As the saying goes, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” How many of you know where this quote comes from?  If you thought Shakespeare, well, so did I.  But it actually comes from the Torah—or, more precisely, it’s a combination of two biblical verses. The first is Ecclesiastes 8:15: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.”  The second is Isaiah 22:13, “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.” 

I have to admit, I find this philosophy pretty appealing. If tomorrow we may die, perhaps tonight is a good night for dessert. Or maybe a glass of wine and Netflix. Or maybe staying up a little too late talking with people we love.

But we also encounter a very different “life is uncertain, eat dessert first” kind of teaching from our rabbinic sages. In the Talmud, in Tractate Shabbat, “Rabbi Eliezer says: “Repent one day before your death.” His students asked him: “But how does a person know on which day he will die?”  He replied: “All the more so is this a good piece of advice, as one should repent today lest he die tomorrow.”

You know, if someone could just give me a little advance notice—“Just so you know, Tuesday is going to be your last day”—I could get a lot done.  A deadline is a great motivator!

I could make some important phone calls. I could apologize to a few people. I could finally organize the photos on my phone. I could even clean out my inbox. Well… maybe not my inbox. At some point, we have to accept that there are emails that will simply die with us.

But…why go there? Why mention death?  Why couldn’t he just have said “repent every day?” Was it really necessary to bring in a worst case scenario? 

In a word: yes. Death gives us a deadline unlike any other. We can postpone a work project. We can put off cleaning the basement. We can tell ourselves we’ll deal with that difficult conversation next week.  But having a brush with death reminds us that there are some things we cannot postpone forever. But Rabbi Eliezer’s point is that we don’t get that information. We don’t know which day will be our last.  

Five years ago, we commissioned a new Sefer Torah for our congregation, and we searched for a fitting scribe to do this job.  We found Linda Kaye, who was across the world in New Zealand, a woman who found scribal arts later in life and had never scribed a whole Torah.  But she was certain she was ready, and her mentors vouched for her.  She was 70 years old, and didn’t want to wait to fulfil the mitzvah of writing a Torah.  And so we granted her that opportunity.  She experienced health issues toward the end and needed others to carry her across the finish line, but she did it.  Sadly, Linda passed away suddenly a few weeks ago.  And now, every time I open up her Torah and see the Hebrew she so lovingly penned, I feel her presence.  Linda’s Torah is here in the world because she didn’t wait.  Our Torah was her chocolate cake.

So don’t wait. Don’t wait to make amends. Don’t wait to forgive. Don’t wait to ask for forgiveness. Don’t wait to tell someone you love them. Don’t wait to become the person you keep saying you want to become. We think we have tomorrow, but tomorrow is never guaranteed.  That is the sobering truth. 

But, that is a pretty inconvenient truth.  We have so many daily responsibilities and commitments that feel a lot more real and pressing which are not hypothetical. 

And this is precisely the whole point of the High Holidays. They are engineered to help us face all the inconvenient truths we’ve avoided over the past year.

Rosh Hashanah is, in many ways, about renewal. We celebrate the birthday of the world. We imagine creation beginning again. We crown God as Sovereign. It’s sort of a Pinterest vision board for the person and the world we wish to design.

On Yom Kippur, we strip away many of the things that ordinarily ground us in everyday life. We don’t eat or drink. We set aside professional responsibilities and physical pleasures. And, we practice letting go and the art of dying. We grieve the past year and loved ones we’ve lost.  We grieve lost opportunities and examine the meaning of our lives.  We confess our mistakes. We wear white, the color of purity, the color of a burial shroud. In a sense, Yom Kippur asks us to imagine our lives stripped down to what really matters, a spiritual Konmari process if you will. 

Over the next ten days, we’re going to spend quite a bit of time looking back and reflecting: What did I do wrong? Where did I mess up? Whom did I hurt?

Those are important questions. But teshuvah is also forward-looking. Which brings us back to our two sayings: “Repent one day before you die.” And: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” Which is it?

Both sayings begin with exactly the same realization: We’re going to die, maybe even tomorrow. They just give us different answers to the problem of our potentially imminent demise. One says: If life is short, enjoy it. The other says: If life is short, don’t leave anything on the table. Maybe these Days of Awe are asking us to hold both ideas at the same time. We don’t know how much time we have, so what do we do with that knowledge?

One response is: Have another piece of cake. And, frankly, sometimes that is excellent advice.

But the other response is: Don’t wait. Don’t wait to tell someone you love them. Don’t wait to call your parent. Don’t wait to forgive.  Don’t wait to ask for forgiveness. Don’t wait to take the trip. Don’t wait to say thank you. Don’t wait to tell someone that what they did mattered to you. Don’t wait to become the person you keep saying you want to become. 

And—stock up now, while supplies last! Claim your three-month food supply and get two months FREE!

But seriously, if you knew you had only one year left, what would you do differently? Who would you spend more time with? What would you stop worrying about? What would you let go of? What would you make room for? What is one thing you don’t want to put off anymore?

We cannot safeguard the future. We cannot know what storms are coming, or what joys, losses, surprises, or blessings the coming year will bring. But we can decide what we do with the time we have. The rabbis didn’t say, Repent when you get your life together. They said: One day before you die. Which, inconveniently, might be today.

So perhaps the deeper wisdom behind Rabbi Eliezer’s strange advice is not that we should spend our lives preparing for death, quite the opposite.  But it’s when we realize that life is finite, we can pay better attention to life while we are living it.

Judaism asks us, simply, to live. To “choose life.” To celebrate. To laugh. To eat together. To tell stories. To sing badly. To dance badly. To love the people who are here. To enjoy the absurd and beautiful fact that, for reasons we don’t entirely understand, we are here.

So maybe we don’t need to choose between repentance and celebration. Maybe the Jewish answer is: Do both. Make things right–and eat the dessert. Say you’re sorry–and stay up late talking with someone you love. Think about the year ahead–and enjoy the year you have.  Because we don’t know how much time is left, but we know we have this moment. 

And, for now, that is enough.

Shana tovah.