In the new Year prayers the supplicant asks god to take care of their enemies. It is a strange request that is born out of the Hebrew love of life, one of the great pillars of Judaism and two thousand years ahead of its time in the Western world. When you love life, you respect other life and you take pleasure in existence but you know, despite all the belief and hope, that it is up to god if this life continues after one is dead. So to all intents and purposes death could be the end of the universe for all of us. As the poet Houseman writes:
Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives,
That cost me eighteen pence.
I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky,
And earth’s foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.
Knowing this we think about death and who in all the world can bring death to us faster than anyone else but our neighbours and enemies. Reading Judges you see the repeated phrases ‘and the people were oppressed’ ‘ and they oppressed them hard’, for ten, twenty, sixty years. It is because we have enemies that we ask god to quiet them, even bring an end to them, because without them, ironically, we can exalt in life all the more.
Shana Tova