September 9, 2026
The logic of divine punishment in Unetaneh Tokef feels foreign to our reality. Despite our liturgical warning every year, there is no cause and effect relationship between personal sin and mortal danger. Far from the righteous living on and the wicked being stuck down, inequality is much more predictive of life and death than moral character. In fact, those wicked who make fortunes from human exploitation and environmental degradation usually live the longest.
Rather than its literal threat of punishment, it is the imagery of Unetaneh Tokef’s most ostentatious language that feels the most real to me. The prayer calls to mind scenes of holy vengeance in Tanakh, like Korach swallowed by the Earth or Sodom and Gomorrah engulfed in flame. There is an eerie resemblance between these biblical moments and the awe-inspiring progression of the climate crisis. As the viral formulation goes, “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” If there is no link between personal sin and individual mortality, the causation between collective sin and mass death is clear. For our destruction of the planet’s natural balance, and for building an economic system that perpetuates it, the excesses of Unetaneh Tokef have come alive.
Who by water and who by fire? Last month in Nepal, a hydropower worker watched as one power station after another disappeared from his monitor until his own station was washed away in a climate-related flood that killed 1,400. In Canada’s Northwest Territories this June, a pilot and two firefighters died when their plane crashed while battling a forest fire from the air. Who will be at rest and who will wander? In 2025, over 90% of Tuvalu residents applied for visas out of the country as the island nation is subsumed by rising sea levels. Even who will be poor and who will be rich? is made vivid by the climate crisis. Fossil fuel companies are making record profits as global carbon emissions hit record highs. Meanwhile, climate change is pushing tens of millions into poverty.
This Rosh Hashanah, the new year’s sweetness is mixed with a bitter dread because we move one year further into a hot and unforgiving future. As we endeavor to shift God from the throne of justice to the throne of mercy, I pray for the mercy of more time. More time to avert the worst warming scenarios, more time to organize against the billionaire oligarchs steering us toward catastrophe, more time to experience the world as I know it.
