Rosh Hashanah - 5780

Rosh Hashanah - 5780

Rabbi Hal Miller

Remember us for life, King Who desires life, and write us into the book of life, for

Your sake, living God.

Who is like You, merciful Father, who remembers His creations with life in mercy.

And write for life all the children of Your covenant.

In the book of life, blessing, peace, and good livelihood, may we be remembered

and written before You, we and all Your people the house of Israel for good life

and peace.

From Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur, we add these to the first two and last

two blessings in the Shemoneh Esrei. What are these additions for?

First, let us ask where they came from. They appear in virtually every edition of

the Rosh Hashana machzor, and in the regular weekday/Shabbos prayer book

for use during the ten days of repentance, Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur.

The Shulchan Aruch addresses them only briefly, in 582:5: "If one did not say

zochreinu and mi chamocha we do not require him to go back." The Mishneh

Berurah explains that this is since it was the Geonim who tell us to insert these

four lines at the places we see them, rather than any commandment from

earlier times. Rama expands the Shulchan Aruch's wording to include the last

two as well as the first two, and Mishneh Berurah expands it further to include

the "u'v'chein tein" (and so too) paragraphs added to the Rosh Hashana and

Yom Kippur service. Thus it appears that these all are additions by the sages

and come with leniencies.

So what do they mean or accomplish? Why did the Geonim give us these?

The Mishnah in Rosh Hashana tells us, "At four times the world is judged: on

Pesach for grain, on Shavuos for fruit of the tree, on Rosh Hashana all who

come to the world (all mankind) pass before Him...and on the Festival (Sukkos)

they are judged for water." Clearly from this, every human faces heavenly

judgment at this time, not just Jews, not just adults, not just the wicked, but

everyone. Much has been written about individual teshuvah, return to God, and

how that is the crux of this auspicious time. But the Geonim are telling us that

there is something more here.

Note that in the Mishnah, it doesn't say "your grain", in the singular, rather grain

in general. It doesn't say the fruit of your tree, but fruit of trees in general. For

Sukkos it specifies "they are judged for water", not you. And on Rosh Hashana,

it is explicit about "all" of us. Note too, that the verses that the Geonim added for

us are all in the first person plural: "write us", "His creations", etc.

Talelei Oros says that "Remember us for life" is not a personal request since it

comes before the confessions of wrongdoings, thus we must be praising God as a

nation. R'Yisroel Salanter explains that our request here is actually on behalf of

others, not ourselves, since we by nature assume that we will personally survive

the judgment to continue living.

The Geonim by these verses are teaching us that, in addition to the teshuvah

each one of us must do on our own, we must remember that the entire community

as a whole is being judged too, in fact the whole world. We are part of that too. It

is as much our responsibility to pray for the entire world as it is to pray for

ourselves.