If we take our prayers and beliefs seriously, Rosh Hashana is the Day of Judgment. According to Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashana is when God evaluates every individual, determining their fate for the coming year. All are accounted for; nothing escapes God’s judgment.
Our prayers in these High Holy Days remind us of the seriousness of this judgment; life and death hang in the balance:
מי יחיה ומי ימות – Who will live, and who will die?
The weight behind these words is heavy at these highest of stakes; we fear death, and rightly so. So we pray, cry, make amends, and hope. Every year, we do teshuva, often making the same promises, pledging to improve, and striving for transformation.
While our prayers reflect a deep fear of death, the statistical reality suggests that for most of us, life will continue.
Data from the 20th century shows that around 40-50 million people died each year, and in the early 21st century, the number rose to over 50 million annually, according to global health statistics.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a temporary noticeable increase that quickly normalized. During the pandemic, death felt nearer, and those painful announcements and phone calls came more frequently. In our circles and in our times, something like October 7th and its aftermath are also unusual, which is a major contributing factor to how we can be so shocked.
But outside such exceptional circumstances, people don’t die as often as we might fear. The data suggests that less than 1% of the worldwide population will die in a given year, and advances in healthcare and longevity research will probably continue to reduce this rate.
The scariest and most irreversible outcome – death – has a remarkably low rate of occurrence, and most of us will make it through the decades and grow old, at least in today’s world. What this tells us is that life, more often than not, goes on. Statistically speaking, around 99% of us will be here next Rosh Hashana.
Given these numbers, it becomes clear that the most common outcome isn’t death but survival. And if survival is the norm, perhaps our focus should shift from fearing the end to examining how we live. This is not to diminish the seriousness of death in any way, but rather, it calls for us to shift our perspective. If most of us are likely to survive, what are we really afraid of?
If God, as our prayers assert, forgives abundantly, then perhaps our anxiety should not center around survival. After all, what’s God going to do with all that forgiveness if not offer it freely? If God is merciful and forgiving, maybe we can spend less time worrying about whether we will be here next year and ask a far more uncomfortable question.
What if God has already accepted our teshuva?
Perhaps the issue isn’t whether God forgives us, but whether we allow ourselves to accept that forgiveness and act on it. Because if we genuinely believed that God readily accepted our repentance, what excuse would we have left for staying the same? If our sins are forgiven, and the slate is wiped clean, then what’s holding us back from real change?
We often say we’ll change, but deep down, we cling to our past failures as a shield. Maybe we fear that if we accept God’s forgiveness, we’ll have no excuses left for not becoming the people we aspire to be.
This leads to a difficult realization: Maybe it’s not that we doubt God’s forgiveness, but that we resist accepting it. The Rambam teaches that God’s forgiveness is immediate once repentance is sincere. If God forgives instantly, the challenge shifts to us: we can no longer attribute our stagnation to divine judgment but must face our own resistance to change.
If God forgives, we can no longer blame our shortcomings on our inability to earn divine mercy. The truth may be that we don’t always want to believe we have been forgiven. If we accepted it fully, we’d lose our scapegoat—the one thing we can point to as holding us back. We’d be left with only ourselves to confront.
And so, we hide behind disbelief. It’s easier to assume that God hasn’t fully accepted our teshuva—that way, we can explain why nothing changes year after year. We cling to the idea that we haven’t yet been forgiven because if we knew we had been, the responsibility for our lives, our transformation, would squarely rest on our shoulders.
So, what would be possible if we lived as though we had been forgiven? If we truly believed in the power of our prayers and the reality of our resolutions, how much more meaningful could our lives become? Instead of fearing death, what if this year, we feared stagnation—the possibility of a life lived without growth or change?
An essential part of teshuva is learning to forgive ourselves. While God gives us a clean slate, we often cling to our old narratives and patterns. But if God has already wiped our slate clean, what stops us from doing the same? Frequently, it’s our own harsh self-judgment, an inner voice that refuses to let go of past failures.
We are called upon to emulate the Creator; just as the Creator is gracious and compassionate, we must act with grace and compassion – מַהוּ חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם אַף אַתָּה חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם. As R’ Shlomo Twerski highlights, if the Creator forgives us after teshuva, we must forgive ourselves as well.
Self-forgiveness demands that we confront our flaws head-on, taking full responsibility for our own growth; without it, we remain stuck in old patterns of behavior, unable to grow or change. Jewish tradition teaches that teshuva is not just a return to God but a return to our true selves. If God wipes our slate clean, we, too, can free ourselves from the chains of self-condemnation.
The scariest possibility isn’t that God won’t accept our repentance; it’s that He already has – ויאמר ה’ סלחתי כדברך. If we accept this truth, then we must confront what comes next: our responsibility to change. Now, with no excuses left, we are left only with the question of whether we have the courage to act on it.
What if we stopped using disbelief as a shield and chose to live as though we were forgiven?
What if this year, instead of fearing death, we feared the true danger: a life without change? The only question is whether we can live up to the gift of forgiveness by finding the courage to rise to the occasion and taking the opportunity to transform.
What if we started now?