As posted on September 21, 2012 by Sam Blustin on Soup for the Neshama
“All mankind will pass before You like members of the flock. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall You cause to pass, count, calculate, and consider the soul of all the living; and You shall apportion the fixed needs of all Your creatures and inscribe their verdict.” -U’Netaneh Tokef Prayer (translation from ArtScroll Rosh Hashanah Mahzor)
The above image is a powerful one. Imagine looking down from a birds-eye view at a big long line, just close enough so you can make out the actions of each person in line. Each person in line is a live snap shot of the place they are in now, whatever they’re doing, in real time. Looking closely, one person is sitting down, playing with their kid. Another is davening, and another is helping an older person to cross the street. Another is throwing some trash on the ground. A lady is arguing with her husband. A father is hitting his child. All of it can be seen, and is seen. All of it viewed from above, simultaneously.
God counts everyone, and knows them by name. God knows if they’ve been naughty or nice, sinned or performed mitzvot. And God records it all in a book.
The above image serves as a powerful reminder that God is always around us and is always watching. God is a part of us, apart of everyone else, and apart of everything else. And what we have, or don’t have in life, all depends on God. It can take only a moment for us to lose everything, or gain everything.
It all starts by how we treat others in this world. Rabbi Hillel once said, when asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot, that the Torah teaches to “Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is mere commentary. Now go and learn.”
What does this mean? Treat others the way we want to be treated? Sure, maybe that’s part of it, and that’s a good start, but that is not the whole. We are made to naturally be selfish in life, to have our own needs and wants, and to put our own well being before anyone else’s. When we are able to love our neighbor, and even more so the stranger, as much as we love ourselves, we will have realized the purpose of Torah, and life. And it’s not easy to do. How do we justify giving something of our own to another, a stranger, a beggar on the street, when we believe they’re not going to use it to make this world, their world, our world, a better place?
I like to imagine the people I come across are my best friends, or the people I care about the most, or my family (non-exclusive, by the way). Would I not give some food to a friend who is in need of a meal, or money to someone I love, to help them get back on their feet? Would I not lend time and moral support to those I love and care about? These things are easy to do for those closest to us. Harder to do for those we’ve never met. But yet we must try. Try because the world we live in is not just our world, it’s their world too, and they exist in our world. Pretending they’re not there doesn’t make them go away. It makes the problem worse.
Where to start? Anywhere. Pick somewhere. Give someone a few bucks. Console the person crying on the bus next to you. Congratulate a stranger or a random acquaintance on something you enjoyed that they did. Lift up someone’s day. Do anything that helps bring a little more light into this world.
On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed. Which book do you want to be in?
