What would Aristotle make of Yom Kippur? He would probably struggle with the Hebrew, and be bemused by the strange ways of the Jews. But at the holiday’s apogee, during the recitation of the haunting Unetaneh Tokef, he would experience an unnerving moment of déjà vu—for its central message is precisely that of his own moral philosophy.
Unetaneh Tokef is one of the most sublime texts in the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgies. It begins with the trembling of guilty angels as God opens the Book of Remembrances. It continues with God inscribing people’s fates for the next year as they proceed before him. And it concludes with an entreaty for forgiveness and the exaltation of God’s name.
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