In the essay I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter, Meir Soloveichik meditates on the absence of the Ashkenazi prayer Un’taneh Tokef, with its dramatic refrain about “who shall live and who shall die,” from the Sephardi liturgy. Matt Austerklein makes a different contrast: between Un’taneh Tokef and the Catholic hymn “Dies irae,” whose title, “Days of Wrath” sounds a lot like Days of Awe. Indeed, the similarities between the words of both prayers led one scholar to argue (unconvincingly) for mutual influence. (The truth is rather that both were composed in a Byzantine milieu and likely drew on similar biblical themes.)

While Austerklein, a cantor, goes as far to borrow from the Mozart’s famous musical setting of “Dire irae” in his Requiem Mass when performing Un’taneh Tokef, he finds the differences between the two hymns more interesting than the similarities:

The High Holy Days are an annual apocalyptic rehearsal. . . . We don’t have to wait for the end-of-days to live with the raw truth and meaning of our last days on earth.

This is why Un’taneh Tokef begins with apocalypse and ends with perseverance: “repentance, prayer, and good deeds make the evil of the decree pass.” The evil does not cease to exist—it is that we recognize it from last year’s apocalypse, and that we can, and will, move forward.

But what is more is that we do not go it alone. The main character of the entire High Holy Days is God, Who sees us all of the truth and mess and yet loves us and keeps faith and presence with us.

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.