LOOK UP: Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5786

Warning: Spoilers Ahead...

Every summer seems to have its defining movie. This year, for me, and for millions of moviegoers, that was Superman. Most of us know the basic story: the baby from Krypton, raised in Kansas, who grows up to become Earth’s greatest hero. But James Gunn’s new film unsettles the familiar mythology. When evidence surfaces that Superman was sent not as a savior but as a conqueror, fear spreads. The very people whose lives he has saved turn on him, and, reeling from humanity’s rejection, he must decide whether or not to reject them, too.

In a poignant and pivotal moment, his adoptive father reminds him that for all his strength, he cannot control what his birth parents wanted for him or how humanity thinks of him. All that remains in his power are the choices he makes and the actions he takes.

Soon enough, Superman is put to the test. Millions of innocent lives are imperiled, and desperate people are calling for help. Choosing empathy over fear and duty over domination, Superman leaps into action and saves the day.

That choice, I think, is captured beautifully in the film’s short tagline: “Look Up.” Yes, it is a nod to the classic Superman trope of the wonder of seeing a man fly. But it also points to something deeper: when we are anxious and afraid, when the future feels uncertain, our instinct is to clench our fists and harden our hearts and guard what’s ours – to turn inward, to look down. Superman, however, doesn’t retreat into solitude or vengeance or the pursuit of domination. Instead, he looks up – holding fast to his values and choosing to act with kindness even when there is no guarantee kindness will be returned. In doing so, he models a different kind of strength — not control, but compassion. As he tells his nemesis Lex Luthor in a climactic scene, “I’m as human as anyone! I love, I get scared; I wake up every morning, and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can! I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And that’s my greatest strength! And someday I hope, for the sake of the world, you understand that it’s yours too.”

What makes the Man of Steel truly powerful, in other words, isn’t his superhuman strength, or his speed, or his ability to fly, but his humanity — his choice to care in an uncaring world. Even with all his powers, he cannot make the world completely and permanently safe. What he can do is decide whether to meet fear with callousness, or with compassion. 

That is our question, too: we can and must take reasonable steps to protect ourselves and each other, but we will never fully and forever eradicate all danger. The question before us is not “What can we do to be safe from all harm?” but “Who will we be in a world where safety cannot be guaranteed?”

Of course, because this is 2025 and we can’t have nice things, not everyone welcomed that vision. Some derided the movie as “Superwoke,” insisting that empathy is weakness in a perilous world. And, even as I would have liked to enjoy this movie free from our relentless culture wars, I have to be honest: the critics had a point. Empathy is risky; to love is to invite loss. To soften your heart is to expose yourself to hurt. When threats are real, closing ranks can feel like the only reasonable pathway to safety.

And yet, one of the great, if challenging, insights of Rosh Hashanah is that uncertainty and anxiety is a fact of life, an ever-present reality, though it is one we often try to ignore or avoid. The uncomfortable truth we all must face is that we live unpredictable lives in an unpredictable world. 

The insight is most powerfully and memorably expressed in the prayer known as U-Netaneh Tokef. 

U-Netaneh Tokef is a liturgical poem that introduces the Kedushah, the prayer acknowledging God’s sanctity, found near the start of Musaf. It is old — likely over 1,000 years old — the work of a gifted but anonymous poet. While we recite it on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, most scholars think it was written for Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment, when all creation is imagined to pass before God for review.

On its surface, the poem is terrifying. It pictures God presiding in judgment with uncompromising truth: every deed weighed, every life assessed, even the angels scrutinized. None of us, held to angelic perfection, could possibly be acquitted. Which is why the list of possible judgments tilts so heavily toward punishments — “who by fire, who by water…” all the ways a human life might end. If we were judged by perfect truth alone, none of us would survive.

But notice what is missing in the prayer: the verdict itself. The poet insists God judges us, yet only God knows the outcome. We are not told. We’re left in the dark. And here — forgive me — I’m just a simple country lawyer [tugs on imaginary suspenders], but in every court case I’ve ever heard of, the judge announces a verdict: guilty or not guilty. If guilty, the sentence is made known. But here? The judgment is hidden. What good is a verdict we never hear? Why would God judge us only to conceal the outcome? What is the poet trying to teach us?

The point, I think, is this: our lives unfold in radical uncertainty. Fortune can bless or disaster overtake us without warning and without obvious justification. From our limited human perspective, none of us knows what the next day, or even the next breath, will bring. “Who will live, and who will die? Who in their time and who not in their time?” These are actual questions, left unanswered. Like sheep passing under the shepherd’s staff, we never know when our turn will come, or why one lamb is taken and another spared. And, most hauntingly of all, U-Netaneh Tokef reminds us that, sooner or later, we all face the same sentence.

The deep, dark secret of life that U-Netaneh Tokef reveals is that we are all of us constantly walking through darkness and danger. The prayer lifts the veil on the precariousness and uncertainty at the heart of our existence, and in so doing, poses a question: how do we walk through a world where stability and security can never be guaranteed?

The answer, according to the prayer, can be found in the following line:

וְּתשוָּבה וְּתִּפָלה וְּצָדָקה ַמֲעִּביִּרין ֶּאת ֹּרַע ַהְגֵׂזָרה, 

But repentance, prayer, and righteousness avert the severity of the decree.

Before I explain what this line is saying, let me first explain what it is not saying: it is not saying that if you repent wholeheartedly enough, or pray sincerely enough, or perform enough righteous deeds, God will necessarily overturn a guilty verdict God has rendered against you. The poet isn’t asserting that repentance, prayer, and righteous living enable any of us to avert our death sentence, because to be human is to be mortal; to be alive means, ultimately, that one day, whenever that day may be, our lives will end. 

Repentance, prayer, and righteousness don’t enable us to avert the decree. Rather, they enable us to avert the severity of the decree. They may not lengthen our days, but they will enliven whatever days we have; they may not grant us certainty about our fate, but they can imbue each of us with clarity of purpose. By engaging in those three acts — repentance, prayer, and righteousness — by living lives dominated by those deeds, we can overcome the anxiety and the fear, the paralysis and the despair, the resignation and the recklessness and the rage, that we might otherwise experience traversing a world where stability and security are never certain. 

Teshuvah, usually translated as repentance, more literally means to turn. It implies not only turning back toward God – looking up toward our highest ideals – but also turning back toward each other – reconciling with one another, and restoring our broken relationships. 

Tefillah, prayer, is not only speaking to the Divine – looking up toward the aspirations that are greatest beyond us – but standing together in a community of seekers, holding one another’s questions, fears, and longings. 

And though tzedakah is often translated as charity, implying a voluntary act of kindness for someone in need, it actually means justice, fairness, or equity. Tzedakah is about enacting our ideals – rooted in the belief that all human life is equal in value and infinite in dignity, we work to level our society’s playing field, ensuring that no person suffers want, discrimination, persecution, or oppression. 

Teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah are ultimately not about changing the decree but about shaping how we live under its shadow; about how we respond to the threats that we know will never fully disappear. When life is dangerous and unpredictable, what do we do, and how do we live? 

Though we may be tempted to turn in and close ranks, this prayer tells us, instead, to look up – to hold fast to our highest ideals even when others go low; to act with kindness and generosity, even when others are callous and cruel – to choose to care, even in an uncaring world. 

Parker Palmer, the educator and author best known for his work on courage and leadership, puts it this way: all the world’s wisdom traditions, for all their differences, converge on one exhortation — “Be not afraid.” That doesn’t mean we can escape fear. Fear is part of being human. What it means is that “we do not need to be the fear we have.” True, he teaches, “We have places of fear inside of us, but we have other places as well – places with names like trust and hope and faith. We can choose to [live] from one of those places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with the fault lines of fear, to move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety.”

The unfortunate truth is that – at least until the messianic era, that future age for which we pray today, when our tradition teaches the world will be perfected under the sovereignty of the Divine, when inequity and enmity are ended, and danger and death are destroyed forever – some dangers will remain with us no matter what we do. 

The painful reality is that we inhabit an imperfect world, filled with imperfect people, in which our safety is, sadly, never guaranteed. That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t take reasonable steps to protect ourselves and one another from predictable and preventable harm; our tradition insists we are obligated to do so. But it does mean we ought to weigh those actions against our highest ideals and aspirations, recognizing the limits of our ability to control life’s outcomes and refusing to let our fears turn us into people we don’t want to be. 

Our response to today’s reawakened antisemitism is a prime example. As Deborah Lipstadt reminds us, antisemitism is not just dislike of Jews as individuals, but a conspiracy-laden worldview: the fantasy that Jews secretly manipulate greater powers for our own benefit, usually at the expense of others. That lie has worn many costumes across history, but its essence has never changed. It is why the gunman at Tree of Life believed Jews were orchestrating the “replacement” of White civilization, and why the person who firebombed the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro a few months ago thought Jews controlled the world’s levers of power.

The endurance of such conspiracies is their elasticity. They can absorb contradictory evidence and adapt to new crises, offering dangerously simple explanations for complex problems. That is why antisemitism has resurfaced again and again, especially in moments of upheaval. It mutates, it adapts, it never really disappears. And because it is rooted in lies about us, not in anything we have done, there is likely nothing we can do to erase it forever.

But what we can do is decide how to live in its shadow. Yes, we must name and resist antisemitism wherever it appears, defend ourselves against the violence it inspires, and guard our communities from its threats. But the question is not whether we can build an impregnable fortress around ourselves — we cannot. What we can do is decide who we will be in a world where antisemitism persists. Will we be a people who cling to a fantasy of absolute safety, even if it means hardening our hearts and narrowing our vision? Or will we be a people who reject the false choice between, on the one hand, our community’s welfare, and, on the other, the democratic ideas, norms, and institutions that have enabled us to thrive in this country as nowhere else in our history? Will we define ourselves only in opposition to those who hate us — clenched and reactive, thereby letting hatred dictate our identity? Or will we instead choose to live Jewish lives of purpose, covenant, solidarity, and joy? Will we be our fear? Or will we choose, instead, to look up — to hold fast, despite the danger, to our highest ideals, advancing a world of inclusion and justice that affirms the equal and infinite dignity of every person?

Our lives will always be lived in the shadow of risk and uncertainty. The only question for us, therefore, is this: in such a world, who will we be? 

This summer, I took my son Akiva to Disney World. On our first day in the parks, he begged me to buy him a special balloon — one of those oversized, clear globes with a bright blue Mickey balloon floating inside. “The best balloon in the world,” he declared. And I, a sucker, looked at this child’s face and could not resist. So I bought him the balloon. Sorry, let me clarify: I bought him the $17 balloon. Sorry, let me clarify, I bought him the $17 balloon that we had to schlep with us all over the park for the rest of the day. Sorry, let me clarify – I bought him the $17 balloon that we had to schlep with us all over the park for the rest of the day and that was never, ever going to be allowed on the airplane home. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t until our last morning that reality set in. There was no way we were going to be taking this big, beautiful, blue $20 Mickey Mouse balloon home with us. Akiva was not going to be able to keep it, no matter how much he wanted to, or how hard he tried.

And so he had a choice. He could pop it and cling to the scraps. He could try to smuggle it and watch it be taken away by the TSA. Or — and this was the harder choice — he could give it away. 

You could see the storm inside him, the instinct we all have when we know loss is inevitable: clench tighter, dig in, hold on. But then he took a breath, looked up, and saw another little kid staring in wide-eyed wonder at the balloon. At first, he hesitated and resisted. But eventually, he loosened his grip, walked over, and said, “Hi – do you want my balloon?”

It didn’t make the loss go away. He was still sad. He still misses that balloon. But he also came to understand that while some pain is beyond our power to prevent, we always have the strength to choose who we will be in those moments.

So too with us: we cannot control every danger, we cannot secure every desired outcome. But we can choose who we will be in a world where risk and loss are unavoidable.

Teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah do not erase the decree. They don’t promise immortality or guarantee safety. What they offer is a way of living in the shadow of danger without being consumed by it — a way of looking up rather than down, choosing to live out our highest ideals even when the world tries to drag us low.

But here is the deeper truth: these practices are not only about surviving in an unpredictable world. They are also about transforming it.

Teshuvah — turning — heals what is fractured, drawing us back to God, to each other, to our truest selves.

Tefillah — prayer — binds us together, lifting our eyes and our voices in community, so that no one bears their fear alone.

And tzedakah — not charity, but justice — teaches us that the best defense against danger is not isolation, but solidarity. When resources are shared fairly, when dignity is protected universally, when power is used to lift up rather than to dominate, everyone’s safety increases. The sociologist Heather McGhee calls this “the sum of us”: the recognition that zero-sum thinking leaves everyone worse off, while shared goods lift us all. Ensuring that every person has health, safety, and dignity is how we actually build a world where dangers are diminished, a world closer to perfection.

We have recited U-Netaneh Tokef on these high and holy days for a thousand years, facing the terrifying truth that life is precarious, the future is hidden, and death is a destination that none of us can escape. The poet does not offer control. He offers a path:

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה

“Teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah avert the severity of the decree.”

Not the decree itself — not the danger, not the inevitability of loss — but its severity: the fear that can hollow us out, distort our vision, and corrupt our action. These practices don’t guarantee survival; they shape us into the kind of people who choose to live generously even when survival is not guaranteed — and, just maybe, they are also how we build a world in which danger is actually diminished.

Perhaps that’s why the story of Superman has stayed with me these past few months. His greatest strength was never being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It was the decision, again and again, to look up — to hold fast to his values, to choose compassion even when compassion is not returned, to be human in a world that often forgets its own humanity. 

In that climactic line to Luthor — “that’s my greatest strength… and someday I hope, for the sake of the world, you understand that it’s yours, too” — I hear a charge to us as well.

None of us, of course, is Superman. We are human, and this Holy Day comes to remind us that to be mortal is to be vulnerable. But, like Superman, we can also come to see being human as our greatest strength, for to be human means that we can choose who we will be, despite our fragility and finitude. It means we can choose to meet fear with open hands, rather than clenched fists. It means – rather than looking down and in, we can choose to look up and out. 

Teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah train us for that choice. They don’t spare us from mortality. They don’t promise danger will pass us by. Instead, they transform us into people who can face danger without being deformed by it — people who walk through an unpredictable world with courage, generosity, and open hearts. 

And perhaps — perhaps — they reveal the paradox that what looks like vulnerability may in fact be our greatest strength: that living generously is not only the right way to live, it may be the only way we survive.

So as we enter the new year:

May we look up when fear tells us to look down.

May we reach out when anxiety tells us to pull back.

May our turning mend what is frayed, our prayers bind us in hope, and our justice lighten the burdens our neighbors carry. 

And may the Holy One strengthen our open hands and soften our guarded hearts, so that in the year to come we will choose kindness over callousness, compassion over contempt, and courage over control — becoming the heroes our world so desperately needs.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.