On a day of indelible memories, it was one that stood out. In 2013, I was privileged to be inducted as the rabbi and minister of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in America. Shearith Israel has long been known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York, reflecting the unique liturgical traditions that its diverse membership has long preserved. About the storied history of the congregation—America’s oldest, featuring Jewish patriots who had encountered Washington, Hamilton, and other founders—I knew a great deal. I also knew that I faced a steep learning curve when it came to assuming the responsibilities of leading Shearith Israel in prayer. For this congregation’s minhag, its customs of prayer and worship, its magnificent liturgy, are above all rooted in the traditions of Spanish and Portuguese Jewry, on the civilization and culture known as Sepharad.

As one who had grown up within the Ashkenazi tradition, many of the liturgical traditions of the synagogue were new to me, and to many of the guests attending the installation that day. One prominent Jewish intellectual was in the audience, and, as I approached him to express my gratitude for his attendance, he quipped that he did not understand how I could embrace a tradition that “didn’t say Un’taneh Tokef.”

Since then, it has been twelve years that I have merited to minister at my congregation, and when I am asked to describe what it was like for one steeped in the Ashkenazi tradition to take on my particular pulpit, as I regularly am, it is to this moment that I turn. While the tunes at Shearith Israel used for the prayers during the week and Shabbat are different from those with which I was raised, the words are to a great extent the same, as those prayers were established in earlier periods of rabbinic Judaism. Instead, it is the High Holy Days where the liturgical differences make themselves most known—and in a profound, indelible, unforgettable way. It is not only the words and melodies of the piyyutim—the compositions created for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that are recited by Sephardi Jewry—that are different from those of the Ashkenazi world. It is that the very mood they conjure and create is fundamentally different.

In the last decade, these Sephardi prayers, of whose existence I had previously had nary a notion, have become an indelible part of my experience of the Days of Awe. And today, I myself open Yom Kippur—or as it is simply known at the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, Kippur—by leading Kol Nidrei, and bring it to a close by leading the Ne’ilah prayer, with very different tunes, than those with which I was raised. Of course, the memories of High Holy Days past, especially those experienced at my father’s side as a child, remain indelible as well, so that, in a sense, the two very different ways to experience these days of days are both very much alive in my mind. There is no longer, for me, a singular High Holy Day experience.

That, perhaps, is for the best. For this past decade has exposed me to new dimensions of the richness of Jewish tradition, and the different sounds, sights, emotions that it offers. And as Jews bid farewell to a year that has been unlike any other in recent memory, it is, in my view, the taking of both liturgical perspectives in tandem that can best capture our feelings as we pray for the year ahead.

I. Un’taneh Tokef

For many Ashkenazi Jews, the notion that half of the Jewish people experiences a Rosh Hashanah and a Yom Kippur devoid of the Un’taneh Tokef prayer, the prayer my friend quipped about, is not only a fact with which they are unfamiliar: it is a fact inconceivable to them. The very words with which the prayer begins—Un’taneh tokef k’dushat ha-yom, “let us proclaim the sanctity of this day”—define the Ashkenazi understanding of the meaning of the holiday. And it is the recital of the Un’taneh Tokef that marks the moment when the drama of the service—the drama of the holiday itself—abruptly descends:

On Rosh Hashanah the decree will be written
And on Yom Kippur it will be sealed.
How many will pass,
How many will be born
Who will live,
And who will die.

The emphasis is on the ephemeral nature of existence, made manifestly clear in Un’taneh Tokef’s succinct summary of mortality:

Man’s essence is from dust,
And his end is dust;
He is compared to a broken shard
Like a wind that briefly blows
And from a dream from which one awakes.
Whereas You are the living, enduring God and King.

Indeed, the power lies in the prayer’s simplicity. The lives of all humanity, on this day of days, hang in the balance, and only prayer and repentance can turn the tide toward a year in which “who will die” will give way to “who will live.” There are aspects of the composition that can be compared to Macbeth’s famous Act V soliloquy, reacting to the death of Lady Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

Macbeth says we are like a walking shadow; Un’taneh Tokef that we are, in Hebrew, k’tsel over. Macbeth speaks of us walking to a dusty death; Un’taneh Tokef tells us likewise: Adam y’sodo mei-afar v’sofo l’afar. For Macbeth, we are a candle blown out; for Un’taneh Tokef, we are k’ruaḥ noshevet, ka-ḥalom ya’uf, like a wind that blows, a passing dream.

But for all their similarity in describing the temporality of the human condition, Macbeth and Un’taneh Tokef lead in different directions. For Macbeth, temporality leads to nihilism. A man, in his words, is but

a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

Ian McKellen notes that part of the power of the scene is that as Macbeth compares humanity to an actor—a poor player—he draws in the audience, whose members realize that they are watching a play, and, as they do, the play spreads out to them and becomes life. This is not necessarily a welcome feeling: for according to Macbeth, all in life is set by the script, and we cannot change what is going to happen.

This is not a belief found in Un’taneh Tokef. The world, on the Day of Judgment, is not fated but contingent. Destiny will be determined by human action. Thus the congregation dramatically declaims:

And repentance
And prayer
And charity
Remove the terrible decree.

Moral freedom is therefore the deeper religious teaching of Un’taneh Tokef. But this does not bring pure joy. Because man is free, man bears an enormous moral burden, and that is why the central mood of the prayer is not exuberance but terror. We are instructed to proclaim the power of the day because the day of judgment is norah v’ayom, awe-inspiring and terrifying. The phrase “fear and trembling” comes to mind, and I use it not merely as a literary allusion to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s description of the binding of Isaac. No, fear and trembling are explicitly invoked in Un’taneh Tokef, in its description of the Days of Awe:

And a great shofar shall be sounded
And a still, small voice shall be be heard
And the angels will take flight
And fear and trembling will seize them,
And they will say:
Behold, the day of judgment!

Thus is Rosh Hashanah introduced, and Yom Kippur marked: as days that invoke terrified trembling not only for humanity, but even for the ethereal angels of the Almighty’s Kingly court. This is why my friend the intellectual made his remark: for Ashkenazi Jews, the spirit of Un’taneh Tokef simply is the spirit of the High Holy Days, so that to have the latter without the former seems nearly the same thing as having neither. But this is not the case. To borrow from Shakespeare again, there are more things in heaven and earth than Un’taneh Tokef.

II. The Sephardi Spirit

Encountering a new High Holy Day liturgy as a thirty-five-year-old neophyte was not only an interesting experience; it allowed me to see the spectrum of liturgical traditions with fresh eyes, and to experience it with fresh ears. Yet this realization was not immediate; the hard truth is that rabbis are often the members of the congregation least able to carefully ponder the prayers being said, as they are focused on their own professional responsibilities during a very busy season. It took time for the tunes to be learned, for the words to ingrain themselves in my own instinctive understanding of these sacred Days. Every year since joining Shearith Israel, a different aspect of the service has struck me, inspired me, suddenly attracted my attention, and in this process, my appreciation of Jewish tradition in general has been greatly enriched.

When asked by Ashkenazim to describe the experience of Rosh Hashanah at Shearith Israel, I often turn not to a moment from my own memory, or even to one from Sephardi history, but to another celebration of the Jewish calendar. Millennia ago, on the first day of the seventh month, the month of Tishrei, Ezra and Nehemiah gathered the Jews of Jerusalem at one of the gates of their city. Knowing that the denizens of the sacred city had abandoned observance of God’s commandments, Ezra and Nehemiah read aloud from the Torah. Hearing the many commandments that they ignored, the members of the assembled crowd suddenly became viscerally aware of their failures and started to weep.

This, one might assume, is a good sign; after all, the tears were surely an expression of repentance, of a desire for atonement. Yet the sobbing was seen by Ezra and Nehemiah and the Levites as inappropriate, and they informed the crowd that its wailing is forbidden, an assault on the sanctity of the day. Instead,

he said to them, “Go your way, eat fatty meat and drink sweet wine and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”  So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, “Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.” And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them. (Nehemiah 8:10–12)

Of course, the first day of Tishrei is known today—but was not known then—as Rosh Hashanah. What this seems to mean is that on Rosh Hashanah, the very holiness of the day is meant to inspire celebration rather than sadness, joy rather than fear. This is the mood that the Sephardi liturgy captures.

Unlike the Ashkenazi literature, the mood invoked for the New Year (and also to a great extent on Yom Kippur) is not, by and large, fearful.  Of course, during the opening of the silent prayers of the Days of Awe, all traditional Jews, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, beseech the Almighty that he “place the fear of You on all that You have made.” But this theme does not really make itself manifest in the Sephardi High Holy Day piyyutim. It is not only that Un’taneh Tokef does not appear. What is striking, especially for an Ashkenazi Jew experiencing the Sephardi liturgy for the first time, is that the themes captured by Un’taneh Tokef make no prominent appearance at all in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy. Even on Yom Kippur, when a sense pervades even more deeply that all hangs in the balance, the most memorable Sephardi compositions reflect faith in forgiveness, in repentance and repair. There is little in the liturgy linked to Spanish Jewry that comes close to reflecting the fearfulness of Un’taneh Tokef.

Why should this be? If a perusal of the Torah reminds us of our failings—as it must and it inevitably does—then is not the Jerusalemite reaction criticized by Ezra and Nehemiah appropriate? If, as the Talmud teaches, and as Un’taneh Tokef tells us, the holiday marks the moment of the Yom Hadin, the Day of Judgment, when, in the words of the rabbis, “the books of life and death” are open before the Almighty, then how can we not cry?

The answer, perhaps, begins with the fact that the very freedom that lies at the core of atonement—the freedom denied by Macbeth and emphasized by Un’taneh Tokef—leads us to an understanding of the moral capacity granted to humanity. “Thou hast separated man from the very beginning,” we proclaim to God in the closing Ne’ilah prayer, “and hast recognized man as worthy of standing before thee.” There is something inherently hopeful in these words, a hope on which Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in his classic theological work Halakhic Man, memorably reflected:

What is the whole nature of the holiness of the day, that holiness which bestows atonement upon us? Why should we be confronted at all with the concept of sin and iniquity on the one side and the obligation to repent on the other? Indeed, the Halakhah set man at the very center of the world, and the Day of Atonement attests to this. . . . In the blinking of an eye the lowliest of creatures turns into the noblest of creatures, whom the Holy One, blessed be He, elected at the very inception and recognized as worthy of standing before Him. Standing before God! What self-esteem is present here!

If this is the case, then we can well understand why not fear but joy, not trembling but hope, might well pervade the Day of Judgment.

This understanding is doubled by the context of Ezra and Nehemiah’s rebuke of the Jerusalemites on the first of Tishrei. As Ezra exhorts the sinful Israelites that the “joy of the Lord” shall be their strength, we must surely take note of the location in which this scene unfolds. A Jerusalem razed by Babel has been rebuilt; a Temple burned to the ground now stands once again. In contrast to the many civilizations destroyed forever by Assyria and Babylon, the redemption and return proclaimed by Isaiah and Zachariah has, at least in part, been fulfilled. What the Jews see before them is a sign of the mysterious immortality of Israel, a sign of providence in the middle of history. The knowledge of Jewish eternity, and therefore Jewish chosenness, is another source of faith and hope on the High Holy Days, when we recognize the God of history. The theologian Michael Wyschogrod said it best:

this vision of a sinful Israel has penetrated deeply into the consciousness of Christianity. It has, of course, also penetrated deeply into the consciousness of Israel. . . . The emphasis on the need for repentance, the return to Hashem, is pervasive in biblical and rabbinic thought. But in spite of this, the self-loathing of condemned sinners is not common among Jews. . . . While sin is a reality, the eternal election of Israel is a greater reality. However catastrophic the consequences of sin are—and they are frequently catastrophic—they do not bring about an ultimate change. They do not sever the bond between Hashem and Israel. They do not change the ultimate outcome of history, which moves toward the redemption of Israel and all mankind. The bond between Hashem and Israel is eternal and cannot be severed by the deeds of Israel.

I know of no better way to describe the way the Sephardi liturgy of the High Holy Days unfolds. Rabbi Soloveitchik himself described his surprise when, as a young man experiencing Yom Kippur in Berlin for the first time after having spent his early life in Poland and Imperial Russia, he found the mood more optimistic than what he was used to, an optimism that extended even to the reciting of the complex confession known as the Al ḥet. This, he understood, reflected a confidence in God’s love for his people:

Knesset Israel—and each and every Jewish community is considered to be a microcosm of the whole of Knesset Israel—confesses out of a sense of confidence and even rejoicing, for it does so in the presence of a loyal ally, before its most beloved one. In fact, in certain Jewish communities (I myself heard this in Germany) it is customary for the whole congregation to sing the Al ḥet confession in heartwarming melodies.

If this explains some aspects of German-Jewish practice, all the more so does it explain the attitude of those whose traditions are linked to Sepharad. Indeed, it is only with Soloveitchik’s observation in mind that we can make sense of the fact that for Jews whose liturgy is linked to the Middle Eastern “Edot ha-Mizraḥ,” one of the most exultant moments in the penitential prayers comes during “Adon ha-S’liḥot” (“Lord of Forgiveness”), when the crowd exultantly exclaims words that one would have expected to have been said in sadness and fear:

Glorious in wonders,
Eternal in consolations,
Who remembers the covenant of our forefathers,
Reader of all our hidden parts.
We have sinned before you
Have mercy on us.

The hope for forgiveness is bound up with a faith in the God who remembers the covenant, so that the scene is one of the most joyous in the pre-Rosh Hashanah penitential prayers attended by multitudes at the Western Wall:

A similar scene unfolds on Yom Kippur, after the recital of the Un’taneh Tokef-less Musaf service. This features a prayer, “Yah Sh’ma,” composed by the greatest of the many great Sephardi poets, someone whom I believe to be the greatest poet in Jewish history after David himself: Judah Halevi. God, addressed as “Yah,” has the congregation imploring:

Yah, hear your poor people;
That seek your presence;
As our father, to your children,
Do not turn your ear away.

Those wishing to experience the rousing nature of the song and the sheer absolute exuberance with which it is sung in the Spanish-Portuguese musical tradition can listen to this version recorded by Shearith Israel’s sister synagogue in London:

A parallel, more Middle Eastern version, sung by Mizrahi Jews, is so scintillatingly exciting that the Shas party placed it at the epicenter of an Israeli election advertisement:

Whatever one’s political proclivities, one cannot help noting the sheer exuberance with which the song is sung, the sheer joy with which the Almighty is beseeched for forgiveness. This is not to say that there are no parallels to this joy in the Ashkenazi tradition. But as one watches these videos one is perfectly aware of one thing: Un’taneh Tokef it is not. The appeal is captured well by Dov Abramson, an Israeli artist who, like myself, came upon it with the eyes and ears of an outsider. As he wrote in 2011:

In the past few years, during which I adopted the small synagogue of North African Jews on the street I live in for the Yom Kippur prayers, I encountered the beautiful liturgical poem “Yah Hear your Poor People“ (Yah Sh’ma Evyonekha) by Rabbi Judah Halevi, that is sung with great force at the beginning of the minḥah (afternoon) prayer. The liturgical poem opens with a direct appeal to God—an almost informal appeal. . . . The words in this verse of the poem reflect our deep need—the poor servants appealing to God—to get the Creator to listen to us. We therefore appeal to Him any way possible—in prayer, in liturgical poetry, in song—and, just in case, also in body language, that is presented here in the word “Yah,” that is expressed in sign language. The signs reverberate the tags that appear above the biblical letter. . . . We sing and beg like a child who incessantly pulls the edge of his father’s garment in an attempt to get his attention—“our Father, do not turn Your ear away from Your children” (Avinu, l’vanekha al ta’alem oznekha).

It was only on pondering “Yah Sh’ma” that I realized, with a bit of surprise, that not once in Un’taneh Tokef does the theme of divine father and human child appear. The concept, of course, appears throughout the rest of the High Holy Day liturgy; throughout the penitential season, the Almighty is invoked as Avinu Malkeinu, our Father and our King. But if the Ashkenazi High Holy Day season is synonymous with Un’taneh Tokef, the themes of paternal love and childlike reliance suddenly fade. The theme, instead, is entirely cosmic: in Un’taneh Tokef, humanity stands before God, “like sheep,” with our every deed divided between mitzvah and sin. The bond between God and His people—so central to nearly all other prayer—goes strikingly unmentioned. The human being stands before God in his or her frailty, as an individual, knowing that only repentance can avert the decree.

I can well understand, given its terrifying power, why for so many Un’taneh Tokef defines the High Holy Days. But after ten and more years, I can also now understand that for some Jews, who have never encountered it, the mood it invokes is not only unfamiliar, but also the opposite of the way the High Holy Days are supposed to be experienced.

III. The Appearance of Fear

There are, it is true, places where the literary theme of fear appears in a popular Sephardi Rosh Hashanah prayer. These can be found in a piyyut by the 12th-century poet Judah ben Samuel ibn Abbas of the Moroccan city of Fez, whose Jewish community had deep and abiding ties with Spanish Jewry. This poem, titled “Et Sha’arei Ratson,” is sung by Sephardi Jews immediately before they blow the shofar.

It was this poem, and the way in which it is sung, that marked my first startling introduction to a very different High Holy Day liturgy. On my first year in Shearith Israel, I sat in my seat as the words of the piyyut suffused the room. Initially, my mind was not on the poem at all, but on what would follow, namely the shofar blasts, which are prompted and overseen by the rabbi, a role which is perhaps the most important rabbinic responsibility of the day. It was therefore only in the middle of the singing that I suddenly thought to myself, what am I hearing? What is this utterly unfamiliar, and incredibly sublime, piyyut? I then summoned myself to attention, to focus not on the imminent shofar ritual but on the powerfully present poem. It was then that I understood that I was encountering a masterpiece—one which, as for Ashenazim and Un’taneh Tokef, the Sephardi experience of Rosh Hashanah would be unimaginable without.

The refrain of “Et Sha’arei Ratson” celebrates “oked, v’ha-ne’ekad, v’ha-mizbeaḥ”—Abraham, who offers his son as sacrifice, Isaac, who allows himself to be offered, and the altar placed atop Mount Moriah, which will ultimately become the Temple Mount and the locus of Jewish spiritual aspirations. Abbas gives us an Isaac who is exquisitely aware of what is about to occur, but who thinks not of himself but of the pain that his death will bring his mother:

Let my mother know that her rapture is gone.
The son whom she bore at ninety is victim of knife and flame.
Where shall I find her comfort, here?
Woe, woe is me for a mother sobbing and weeping.

Isaac asks further of Abraham that his father take what is left of his ashes as a final scent, reiaḥ, of her son: kaḥ imkha ha-nishar mei-afari/ v’emor l’Sarah zeh l’Yitzḥak reiaḥ/ oked v’ha-ne’ekad v’ha-mizbeaḥ. The haunting lyrics of “Et Sha’arei Ratson” are utterly unknown to Ashkenazi Jews, but beloved by Sephardim. Indeed, throughout the centuries, it became their version of Un’taneh Tokef, in the sense that it is the piyyut without which the marking of the New Year was impossible to imagine:

Yet here too, it is the themes of familial love, of father and son, that prevail. Instead of stressing the cosmic themes of Ashkenaz, of the world standing in judgment before the divine, of “who will live, and who will die,” ibn Abbas emphasizes the heartbreaking story of a father commanded to kill his son, and a son willingly accepting his father’s actions on faith. And we can well understand why, for the descendants of Spanish Jewry, Isaac’s willingness to die as well as his reference to his own ashes might have conjured up images of their own ancestors, of the auto-da-fe of the Inquisition. (Here I am unable to resist speculating whether Rembrandt himself—who painted the binding of Isaac with brilliant insight into its psychology—might have been informed by the Portuguese Jews among whom he lived about the poem that embodied the summit of their High Holy Day experience.)

There is another piece of information about “Et Sha’arei Ratson” and its author that it conjures up, a piece that even Sephardi Jews are often unaware of. Ibn Abbas’s son Samuel became one of the most famous apostates of the late medieval era, converting to Islam and embarking on a career as Abu Nasr, an Islamic polemicist against Judaism. As extraordinary as the listener may find this poem, it is made exponentially more powerful by the realization that this version of the Akeidah has been given to us by a Jewish father who lost his own son: a father who pens a poem about another father on the brink of losing everything, but whose son at the last minute is miraculously restored to him.

There is, thus, one moment in which fear and sadness intrude on the Sephardi liturgy; but even in that moment, the Akeidah story becomes a template for the way in which we are to see Rosh Hashanah: it becomes for the future, the salvation of Isaac becomes a template for the forgiveness of sins, and the angels of God’s court, themselves overcome with terror, are suddenly assuaged. The English translation of “Et Sha’arei Ratson” cannot come close to the Hebrew power of the poem:

A voice called to Abraham from the Lord of heaven;
Stretch not thy hand against one of the three luminaries
Return in peace, O angels;
For this day is one of merit for the children of Jerusalem
On it, the sins of the sons of Jacob shall be forgiven.

In the love of Abraham for Isaac, we are supposed to sense the covenantal love of God for his chosen children. And we are intended to look at our own children and see in our love for them a reflection of God’s love for us.

V. The Divergence

What are we to make of these differences between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi moods? The historical development of both traditions, and the story of their respective origins, is beyond the scope of this essay, and beyond the expertise of this author. While many have tended to begin the story of the divergence between the two by emphasizing the role of Babylonian Jewry, and its two most famous academies, in forming the minhag of Sepharad and of the Holy Land that of Ashkenaz, most recently, the renowned historian Haym Soloveitchik has published a series of fascinating essays arguing for the existence of a separate “third Yeshiva” of Babylon in which Ashkenazi intellectual history is rooted.

What is clear is this: as these two separate traditions emerged over the course of the Middle Ages, both Ashkenazim and Sephardim added numerous and different piyyutim to their liturgies, especially on the holidays and most of all on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This no doubt evolved over time, with the Sephardim drawing on both lesser-known paytanim as well as the literary figures who remain at the top of any list of the greatest literary geniuses in Jewish history—above all, Judah Halevi and Solomon Ibn Gabirol. It is all too easy to suggest that the Ashkenazi emphasis on fear in its prayers flows from the unique traumas of Ashkenazi existence, while the Sephardi piyyutim embody a lack of similar disasters. The truth, however, is that traumas of different sorts mark the historical experience of both communities and traditions, histories that are more similar than different. Just how similar is worth a moment of recounting.

Un’taneh Tokef, for example, is a piyyut with a dramatic story told about its creation. According to one medieval Ashkenazi tradition, the prayer was composed by one Amnon of Mainz, who was tortured and mutilated for refusing conversion to Christianity, and who saw in his suffering a punishment for his hesitation when first proffered the possibility of conversion. He is said to have composed this prayer before the ark with his dying breath and then posthumously taught it to Rabbi Kalonymos ben Meshullam in a dream.

It is true, of course, that archival evidence has established that Un’taneh Tokef existed as a prayer long before any Amnon of Mainz lived. But the very existence of the story is noteworthy. Although the prayer makes no explicit mention of persecution, the Jews who recited it associated it with the darkest episodes of Ashkenazi history: with torture and martyrdom.

Yet traumas afflicted the Sephardi world as well, and with this we turn back to “Et Sha’arei Ratson” and Judah ben Samuel ibn Abbas. I have already mentioned ibn Abbas’s loss of his son to conversion. One of his foremost contemporaries, the Sephardi poet and commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, likewise had a son who became a Muslim. One of Maimonides’ most famous epistles addresses a community that was overcome with guilt for the choices it made. The specter of conversion returned after another wave of persecution, now at the hands of Christians, swept Spain in 1391.

And then, of course, there are the Jews who stayed in Spain after 1492, and those who were forcibly converted in Portugal in 1497. It was descendants of the latter who founded the Spanish-Portuguese community in Amsterdam, and then parallel communities around the world. These Jews had relatives who lived as crypto-Jews and who had known of Jews who, when faced with a final choice, chose death over baptism. As Alan Corre reflected:

The impression that these martyrdoms made on the Sephardim was tremendous. Maimonides in his Code declares that one who, in the presence of a religious quorum of Israelities, dies as a martyr for due cause, namely the refusal to engage in idolatry, bloodshed, or immorality, belongs to a category of saints than which there is none higher. To this day prayers are recited for martyrs in the Amsterdam Synagogue, their names being preceded by the honorific ha-kadosh (the saint) and followed by the chilling words ha-nisraf ḥai al kiddush ha-shem (who was burned alive for the sanctification of the Name). Elegies were written in their honor.

If we understand “Et Sha’arei Ratson” as linked in some way to the conversion of the son of its composer, and if we take “Un’taneh Tokef” as capturing the feelings of Jews who had suffered terrible persecutions, we have two exemplary pieces of High Holy Day liturgy that reflect, each in its own way, the respective traumas of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewry. The point is not that only one medieval community had to face horrors, but that each chose to react to them in different ways.

As we Jews are having similar difficulties today, as national trauma weighs again this year on every Jewish heart, both traditions still have something to say.

IV. No Contradiction

It is my view that the difference—indeed, at times, the emotional chasm—between these two liturgies on the holiest of Jewish days ought not to be seen as an irreconcilable contradiction. Rather, as the Talmud famously declares regarding rabbinic debates, “these and these are the living God.” As in so many other aspects of Jewish life—food, music, poetry—contemporary Judaism has been profoundly enriched by the interaction between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions. Indeed, this interaction has become so rich that it could be said to reflect the beginnings of a merger between the two worlds. It would have been unimaginable in my childhood that an Israeli of Algerian Sephardi descent—Ishay Ribo—could sell out Madison Square Garden for a crowd of largely Ashkenazi American New York Jews, but that is precisely what will occur two weeks before Rosh Hashanah this year.

This merger of spirits and of moods has already been a step forward for Jewish wisdom as well as Jewish unity. This year, it is profoundly necessary. There is no question that this year, Un’taneh Tokef will resonate deeply for those who say it. The fragility of human life that the tale connotes will be read in all its rawness in a post-October 7th world, and the graphic phrase describing death—“who will live and who will die, . . . who by fire, . . . who by sword, who by strangulation”—will conjure contemporary images in our mind’s eye. There is no denying that it has been an Un’taneh Tokef sort of year.

At the same time, if this has been one of the most traumatic and difficult times in recent Jewish memory, it has also been one of the most inspiring. Many have been shocked into awakeness by the awful events of the year, shocked into pondering the mysterious nature of their own Jewish identity and of Jewish existence, just as the Jews of Jerusalem were forced to do in Ezra’s age.

As I look back on the last year, the most indelible memories from Israel for me were those joining parent and child, chosenness and history. I think of a soldier, mobilized on October 7th, watching on his phone as his son is circumcised and named; of another, in Gaza, with his family far away from him, engaging in the ritual of the redemption of the 30-day-old firstborn; and of countless parents blessing their adult children as they were mobilized. I look in wonder at these scenes, pondering the fact that Jews still live and fight in the sites where they did thousands of years ago, knowing that the bond between generations is meant to remind Jews of God’s love for us. It is of this that I will be thinking this year, when I exultantly sing the words of Judah Halevi, words I did not know existed until a little over a decade ago, asking Our Father to grant a year of blessing to His children. It is then, I hope, that the feeling of God’s love for us will be most deeply felt, and the past year’s terror transmuted into joy in the year ahead.