Pagan Rosh Hashanah

One of the things I miss about Jerusalem is the sense of living in a land where even the paganism is Jewish. What do I mean by paganism? I mean an entirely un-mediated relationship with the cosmos, one that does not require the intercession of a Temple sacrifice, let alone negotiating a maze of halakhic guidelines. Visit Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon and you can feel the sheer energy of the entire city buzzing as people rush about their preparations for Sabbath. I’m not talking about haredim, or Modern Orthodox, or secular—I’m talking about Jews, period, everybody running around as the sun starts to tip. The same goes for those who indulge in what seem to me the rather dubious outskirts of a monotheistic faith – going to lie on the graves of “righteous ones” or holding celebrations of the talmudic rabbi Shimon bar Yohai at Mount Meron: this, too, is for me the pagan underbelly of the country, and this, too, is Jewish in Israel.

Where I live now, in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, the pre-Christian and pagan element is again palpable, in this case in the way people still speak and relate to each other. Ted Hughes, the late British poet laureate who was born and raised in the adjacent village, credited the local dialect for his personal connection to Anglo-Saxon English, a bawling and blood-stained language, if ever there was one, through which to address and view the universe.

To me, that bawling view of the universe is much closer than is contemporary Judaism to one of the main liturgical centerpieces of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy. I am speaking of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, recited in Ashkenazi synagogues during the morning’s supplemental (musaf) service. To illustrate my point, I’d like to present two translations of the piece: first my own, in which I’m attempting to convey what I consider the horror of the piece, and second a version by the singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen. If readers suspect me of playing a parlor trick, I ask their indulgence and mention only that I was first introduced to Leonard Cohen’s version during the alternative Rosh Hashanah service at my United Synagogue shul in London, led by the present head of the London School of Jewish Studies.