(Delivered September 11, 2026)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah!

On the morning of August 7, 1974, a young man with a bold vision pulled off one of the most spectacular victimless crimes ever. For six years prior, he had been methodically planning and setting the pieces in place: bow and arrow, riggings, steel wire. He and his accomplices studied blueprints and weather patterns, structures and elevator schedules, all in the service of whimsy executed at an epic scale.

The young man was Philippe Petit, a French aerialist who dazzled Lower Manhattan for 45 minutes that day, as he walked, danced and even lay down on a tightrope suspended between New York City’s iconic Twin Towers. On that summer day, a mesmerized crowd gathered in the Financial District, hushed, watching, worrying, gasping, applauding in wonderment. High above, Petit dreamed with his body and his soul, magicking into being a world of joy and reverence suspended between life and death, a world where imagination could flower in a hundred directions, where space was unlimited, where gravity didn’t count.

Twenty-five years ago today, Petit’s dreamscape became a nightmare as those towers crumbled, destroyed by terrorists. Something broke on that awful day. Any notion of safety and justice lay twisted in the rubble. The suspension between life and death seemed forever decided, the delicate cord permanently snapped.

I say “seemed” because the tightrope between life and death ultimately remains eternal, something our tradition has been reflecting about for millennia, something we call into our souls deeply at this time of year.

A series of tales from the rabbinic period goes on flights of speculation to rival any modern-day fan-fiction, around the question of what lies beyond the boundaries of the known world. One such midrash, from Breishit Rabbah, chapter 4, reports an encounter between Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Shimon ben Zoma. 

וּכְבָר הָיָה רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן זוֹמָא יוֹשֵׁב וְתוֹהֶא
It happened that Rabbi Shimon ben Zoma was sitting in contemplation

R. Yehoshua passes by and asks how he is, once then twice, with no answer. On the third try, ben Zoma startles. Rabbi Yehoshua asks insistently: “Are you OK? What’s going on?” 

Ben Zoma emerges from his reverie, only slightly.

The secret his contemplation reveals? There’s very little distance between the heavens and the earth. The רוח אלהים—the breath of the divine—that hovers over the waters in the Creation narrative, is interpreted by the Rabbis of this Midrash, to pass through a space smaller than your hand.

The space between earth and heaven, between life and death, is at once an unbridgeable chasm and a span no wider than a whisper or the flutter of a hummingbird’s wing.

As we enter these Ten Days of Teshuvah, we are suspended in this unfathomable yet delicate space between life and death. 

After months of reflection, soul-searching, חשבון הנפש—taking the soul’s account—we arrive tonight at the starting line. Over the course of the coming week and a half, we will pin ourselves down in the crucible of our own lives, daring ourselves not to look away. This season, equal parts mounting dread and sweet hopes, days of bulky, complex, alienating liturgy and festive reunions with dear friends and family… The whole shebang invites us into the holy work of telling ourselves the truth.

And while we are each taking our soul’s account, tradition holds that God is working the other side of the ledger. The Talmud teaches on Rosh Hashanah 16b that God keeps track of humanity through three books, and during the Ten Days of Teshuvah opens them for review. There’s the book of resha’im gemurim (the thoroughly wicked), and the book of tzadikim gemurim (the thoroughly righteous), and the book of the beinoni’im (the in-betweeners). For people in the first two categories, God’s work is simple: the wholly wicked are summarily written and sealed for death; the wholly righteous are immediately written and sealed for life. But we, the beinoni’im, flutter between life and death for these Reverent Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, while God examines our lives, to discern a final decision about the year ahead. 

We walk the tightrope between life and death. If we take them seriously, these days of reflection demand that we acknowledge our worst moments without excuses, and open ourselves to judgment both human and divine. We picture ourselves facing the judgment of our Creator, as we catalog all that we have done wrong throughout the year. The urgency of teshuvah is matched only by our vulnerability. The machzor reminds us of life’s fragility and brevity. It teaches that our lives are short, shorter than we may think. Unetaneh tokef imagines the many ends that could await us: 

מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת
Who will live and who will die
מִי בְקִצּוֹ וּמִי לֹא בְּקִצּוֹ
Who in a good time and who untimely
מִי בַמַּיִם וּמִי בָאֵשׁ
Who by water, and who by fire

And yet in the same breath, it reminds us:

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה
Return, reflection, and righteousness can soften our harsh fate. 

Into this liminal space between life and death, between thriving and emptiness, words from Isaiah, chapter 40 flow:

כָּל־הַבָּשָׂר חָצִיר וְכָל־חַסְדּוֹ כְּצִיץ הַשָּׂדֶה׃
יָבֵשׁ חָצִיר נָבֵל־צִיץ
All flesh is grass, and all its chesed like flowers of the field
Grass dries out, and blossoms fade

It’s worth pausing over the metaphor, for within its almost nihilistic view of human insignificance is tucked a glimmer of divine hope. Our physical beings and our deeds are like grass and flowers that become parched and die. But remember, flowers shed seeds. If human chesed is like a flower, it has the potential to endure, even as the bloom fades. The seeds of our kindness continue to blossom in the souls of others. Every act of caring we engage in, every mitzvah we fulfill, plants a seed for more chesed in this world. 

On this thin thread between life and death that we dare to contemplate at this season, the choices we make form both the substance of our lives right now and what we will be remembered for after we’re gone. What we do in this one and only life, including the ways in which we reckon with our own failings, will become our legacy. Death is inevitable but while we walk the tightrope of life, let us strive for righteousness and love, in the hopes that when our time of flourishing ends, we have planted seeds that will continue to flourish. Our tradition is to say, זכרונם לברכה—may their memory be for a blessing—when someone dies. I can think of no more important aspiration than to live in such a way as to make our memory a blessing, when memory is all that’s left of us. 

And so as we enter this period of intense reflection, may we find inspiration in the image of that space between life and death—Philippe Petit’s tightrope, ben Zoma’s delicate membrane. May the fragility of it all inspire us to plant the seeds of lovingkindness with our every deed. And at the times when inevitably we miss the mark, may we draw on the season’s invitation to conscience to realign our steps and write our way into the book of life. 

Shanah tovah!