The Mystery Tucked Inside a Powerful High Holy Day Prayer

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Apart from Kol Nidrei, no High Holy Day prayer is better known than the piyyut or liturgical poem Un’taneh Tokef, which is recited in the musaf services of Rosh Hashanah and, in most synagogues, Yom Kippur. Traditionally ascribed to a Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, a probably legendary medieval figure said to have composed it after being tortured for refusing to renounce his Jewish faith, it has been shown by textual analysis to go back to an unknown Palestinian poet of the talmudic period. Far more than the words of Kol Nidrei, whose dry legalism is at odds with their emotional impact, the language of Un’taneh Tokef is powerfully moving in its own right.

Un’taneh tokef k’dushat hayom, ki hu norah v’ayom, the piyyut begins, “Let us relate the holiness of the day, for it is full of awe and terror.” From there, the poem proceeds to describe the fearful commotion in heaven and on earth as God prepares to judge His creatures, who pass before Him like sheep beneath a shepherd’s staff; rhetorically asks who of them will live in the coming year and who will die, and who of the latter group will succumb to natural causes and who to “fire or water, hunger or the sword, earthquakes or plagues”; and ends with the haunting lament that humanity in its frailty is “like the jar that breaks, and the grass that withers, and the flower that fades, and the shadow that passes, and the cloud that melts, and the wind that blows, and the dust that is blown, and the dream that is gone.”