Who will live? And who will die? Who by fire? Who by water?
If you get a quiet moment during the Days of Awe and listen close, you will likely hear these stark questions around you.
It could be from the chazan during Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur prayers. It could be from the sound system, where music is playing. It could even just be in the air as at the end of summer, in this season of reflection and atonement, a profound awareness of mortality is all around us.
Perhaps the most famous contemporary version of these questions is found in the Leonard Cohen song, Who by Fire, with its spare melody and dark, edgy musing over death.
And who by fire, who by water,
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry merry month of May,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?
And who by brave assent, who by accident,
Who in solitude, who in this mirror,
Who by his lady’s command, who by his own hand,
Who in mortal chains, who in power,
And who shall I say is calling?
In his book Who by Fire, Mati Friedman explores Cohen’s time in Israel during the Yom Kippur War leading up to writing the song, Who by Fire, as well as others that eventually appeared the following year on the album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, 1973, Cohen was living on the Greek island of Hydra. He traveled to Israel and joined musicians performing for Israeli soldiers in the Sinai. The concerts were improvised and sometimes took place remarkably close to the fighting. Thousands were killed in that war and the experience profoundly affected him.
There is no doubt Cohen’s songwriting from those days was filtered through his experience growing up in a Jewish family in Montreal and the Jewish ideas he likely absorbed about mortality, judgment, and fate. And though as Friedman said, Cohen had “dismissed the Jewish community that raised him as a vessel of empty ritual,” clearly he heard the Unetaneh Tokef prayer and it left an imprint.
Unetaneh Tokef, the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur prayer, had of course long before preceded Cohen in turning mortality into a terrible catalogue of questions and possibilities…
On Rosh Hashanah they are inscribed,
and on the fast day of Yom Kippur they are sealed.
How many shall pass away and how many shall be born;
who shall live and who shall die;
who shall live out his allotted time and who shall depart before his time;
who by water and who by fire;
who by the sword and who by a wild beast; who by hunger and who by thirst;
who by earthquake and who by pestilence;
who by strangulation and who by stoning;
who shall be at rest and who shall wander;
who shall be tranquil and who shall be harassed;
who shall enjoy well-being and who shall suffer tribulation;
who shall be poor and who shall be rich;
who shall be humbled and who shall be exalted.
The famous and grim origin-story behind this Unetaneh Tokef prayer – in the 13th century work Ohr Zarua, written by Rabbi Yitzchak of Vienna, as told to Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn – describes the pious Rabbi Amnon of Mainz in 11th century Germany, during the cruel times of the Crusades.
For a while Rabbi Amnon had a friendship with the Duke who ruled the land. One day, the Duke asked the rabbi to convert to Christianity. Rabbi Amnon refused. At first the Duke accepted this, but he persisted in asking him over time, and eventually lost patience. Finally, he gave Rabbi Amnon an ultimatum: convert or suffer the consequences.
Under pressure, the Rabbi asked for three days to respond – though he never actually considered conversion. After getting home, he regretted even the appearance of thinking it over and lost himself over the coming days in praying for forgiveness for this.
Once the three days passed and the rabbi never appeared, the Duke had him brought to him. He was furious that not only did he refuse to convert but he also disobeyed and did not come to him when he was supposed to. As a vicious punishment, the Duke had Rabbi Amnon’s legs cut off.
The rabbi was carried home in his suffering, and the next day happened to be Rosh Hashana. He asked to be brought to synagogue and in front of the holy ark itself, through his agony, he recited the questioning words of Unetaneh Tokef before he died. And in this way the prayer appeared to Rabbi Kalonymus in a dream, so as to pass it onward – according to the legend that persisted for centuries.
But then came the Cairo Genizah…
The Cairo Genizah was a repository of discarded Jewish manuscripts accumulated for centuries in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. In the 1890s, the Genizah started to be sorted and studied. Among its extraordinary holdings were fragments of Jewish liturgy, one of which contained Unetaneh Tokef. And it was discovered that versions of the prayer in the Genizah material substantially predated the medieval Rabbi Amnon legend.
If Unetaneh Tokef was already composed centuries before the martyrdom of Rabbi Amnon, perhaps he had simply heard it before and was, at the end of his life, transmitting it to his community?
Either way, the scraps of prayer from the 8th century embody the liturgical style of the Byzantine period and connect not to the Babylonian Talmud, but to the Yerushalmi Talmud. This leads scholars to believe that the words were actually composed, in the 6th century in the Land of Israel, by Yannai, a famous poet of the time – or perhaps even earlier by unknown writers.
The technicalities of each version may get lost in the murkiness of time, but the questions nonetheless strike a chord within each period – Byzantine culture or Crusader cruelty, or if we return to Leonard Cohen, a sense of our current state.
Who in your merry merry month of May…
Cohen’s line resonates ironically, conjuring up contemporary poetry, film, and even a 1970s novel.
And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate…
He evokes a reckless culture of sex and drugs – but also a modern brand of loneliness.
And who shall I say is calling?
This most evocative line is repeated throughout the song. It seems to also place the responsibility of death onto people – departing from just the traditional course of introspection or looking heavenward – and also seeking answers in the earthly powers-that-be.
The questions at stake have had a long journey, morphing from different versions of old stories into prayers into modern song. And in the end, they can’t really be pinned down. But it is this endurance and evolution that point to their central mystery – transcending any author or form or era.
They are simply the questions that humanity has grappled with since the start of time: What is our fate? And when is death coming for us?
