In this week’s parsha we find the following two verses, which contain a pair of words that appear nowhere else in the Torah, and whose meaning is not entirely clear:

You have affirmed this day that the Lord is your God, that you will walk in His ways, that you will observe His laws and commandments and rules, and that you will obey Him. And the Lord has affirmed this day that you are, as He promised you, His treasured people…. (Deuteronomy 26:17-18)

The repetition of the words האמרתand האמירך seems to suggest a reciprocity between God and Israel in which we affirm God and God affirms us, though it’s unclear how exactly this mutual affirmation takes place. The classical commentators offer a range of interpretations: Rashi argues that these terms refer to setting aside and consecrating; Ramban claims it refers to magnifying and elevating in status; Rashbam states that this term reflects the fact that each party caused the other to enter into a covenant. But it is also worthy of note that the root of this term is אמר, to say, which seems to suggest that we and God are somehow speaking the same language.

I came to a deeper understanding of what this might mean while reviewing Musaf for Rosh Hashana this past week. The bulk of Rosh Hashana musaf consists of collections of verses relating to three central themes: God’s kingship, God’s perfect memory, and God’s revelation at Sinai amidst the sound of the Shofar. We recite verses that span most of the Bible, from Noah to Abraham to Sinai to Isaiah. And so in our davening on Rosh Hashana, we speak to God using the language of the Bible, which is the language with which God spoke to Israel. In other words (so to speak), we speak to God using the very same words with which God spoke to us. Perhaps this is another way to understand what it means for us to affirm God.

את ה’ האמרת היום –

On Rosh Hashana, we affirm God by invoking God’s words to us. After all, how else could we coronate God, or speak to a being of infallible memory, or recall the transcendence of revelation? Surely our own language is insufficient, which is why we plead in our piyutim for God to open our lips in prayer and give voice to our supplications. When our own language fails us, we speak God’s language, כאשר דבר לך– as God spoke to us.

As we prepare to open our Mahzorim on Rosh Hashana, we hope that the echoes of divine speech will permeate our prayers to God and our exchanges with one another throughout the coming year.

I have spent the past few weeks practicing Rosh Hashanah Musaf, and so my interest was piqued when I read on a recent daf of masechet Avodah Zara (4b) that “a person should not daven Musaf during the first three hours of the day on Rosh Hashanah.” There is no chance that will happen in my minyan, where Rosh Hashanah Shacharit is interminable; but my husband, who will be leaving for shul at 6am, might run into trouble. And so I read on.

The Talmud explains that the reason a person should not daven Musaf early in the day is “lest his deeds be scrutinized and his prayer be rejected, since judgment is then proceeding.” In other words, since God is in judgment-mode on Rosh Hashanah morning, we don’t want to attract His attention, lest He judge us too harshly. The Talmud explains that Shacharit is less of a problem because everyone is davening shacharit in the morning, so God is not likely to pay special attention to any one person. Even if the individual has sinned grievously, he will be absolved on account of the collective merit of the community with whom he prays. This is a good reason to choose your minyan carefully, because if the ship goes down, you don’t want to be on it (unless there’s a Dag Gadol waiting to rescue you and belch you out beside a leafy Kikayon). It’s also a compelling argument for Tefillah b’tzibur: when we pray with others, we can ride on their coattails, like a lagging biker drafting behind the big guys in front. Or to invoke a more serious image: If prayer is truly uplifting, it lifts all of us up to a higher spiritual place than where we would otherwise stand alone.

This text would be a short and sweet message for Rosh Hashanah, if only it ended there. But the Talmud goes on to question whether God actually spends the first three hours of the day judging the world. After all, we have a baraita on the previous daf (3b) which tells us that “The day consists of twelve hours. In the first three, God sits and studies Torah. In the second three, God sits and judges the whole world. When he sees that the world deserves to be destroyed, he gets up off his seat of justice and sits on his seat of mercy. For the third three hours, God sits and feeds the whole world, from ram’s horns to lice eggs. During the last fourth of the day, God sits and plays with the Leviathan.” This baraita deserves Gufa-treatment in its own right, especially in light of a recent New Yorker article by Rebecca Mead about the history of playgrounds and the purpose of play. For our purposes, we note that the baraita states explicitly that God spends the first three hours of the day not judging the world, but studying Torah. (Apparently God is as compulsive as I am about daf yomi!) And so why does our source on 4b assume that God spends the morning in judgment?

The Talmud, after first trying to play around with God’s schedule a bit (ahem, no dualistic double-booking! There is just one Reshut in the heavens!), ultimately concludes that the baraita is correct – God does indeed spend the morning studying Torah, and only later does He begin judging the world. And then the Talmud offers a surprising take on the nature of these activities: “Torah has ‘truth’ written in it, as it says, ‘Buy truth, and never sell it.’And so while occupied with Torah, the Holy One, blessed be He, will not overstep the line of justice. But when sitting in judgment, which is not designated as ‘truth,’ God may overstep the line of justice.” In other words, in quite a revolutionary reading, the Talmud is suggesting that the person who is being judged has more to fear when God is studying Torah than when God is judging the world. How so?

The Talmud explains that so long as God is judging, God is likely to “overstep the line of justice,” that is, to go lifnim mishurat hadin. This phrase, which is often translated as “going beyond the letter of the law,” appears throughout rabbinic literature, usually to describe a person who goes above and beyond the call of duty. For instance, in Bava Metzia (24b) we are told that Shmuel would return a lost object even if it did not have any identifying signs. Technically a person has to return a lost object only if it has such Simanim. Rav was surprised, but Shmuel explained that he was acting lifnim mishurat hadin. In one other instance that I can think of, we are told of God going lifnim mishurat hadin. This is in the Sifrei to Dvarim, in a commentary on the verse, “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Rabbi Haggai comments: “God says: Not just have I given two paths, but I have gone lifnim mishurat hadin and said to you: Choose life!” In other words, God not only gives us a multiple-choice test, but He tells us the right answer! Certainly this is above and beyond the call of divine duty.

And so this source suggests that an inherent characteristic of justice is the ability to transcend what is just, and to go above and beyond what the law requires of us. But this is not true of Torah, which is described as Emet, truth. With Torah, we cannot go beyond the letter of the law, because Torah is the law. When studying Torah, we can’t smooth things over. Talmud Torah demands our strict attention to the finer points and nuances of the text. The goal is to figure out the truth of the text—what the text is trying to tell us—and not to offer a compassionate or forgiving interpretation when reading a harsh prophetic rebuke or a story that instills fear and trembling. When dealing with human beings, as we know from a famous midrash in Breishit Rabbah, God may opt to cast Truth to the ground. But not when studying Torah.

This text speaks to me as I work on my own Cheshbon HaNefesh during this month of Elul. All too often, I hold myself and others to the standards of strict justice, unable to overstep its line. I do not allow myself to go to bed until I have answered all the emails in my inbox, writing long and detailed responses to anyone who has written me in search of advice or emotional support; only to find myself resenting those people who do not, in turn, respond to me in a timely and thorough fashion. Likewise, I always make sure that all my work is finished before I leave the office, only to grow frustrated with my colleague when she leaves early for a weekend trip. I force myself to hold to a specific pace when swimming, only to get annoyed when one of the floating old ladies breaks my stride. Instead of viewing myself as just another member of this endearingly fallible human race, I become embittered and self-righteous, holding my stiff neck high as I summarily clear my inbox, lock the office door, and cut through the water.

In the catalogue of my own faults, I think not just of how I judge others, but also of how I study Torah. When I am learning or working—activities which constitute about 90% of a typical day—I find it very hard to break away from the text in front of me to attend to humanity. If the phone rings while I’m learning, my first instinct is often to be annoyed, rather than to be grateful that I have friends who want to spend time speaking with me. I can think of many other examples, but I’m too ashamed to share them here. Suffice it to say that all too often, I am in Emet mode, bent on figuring out the truth even at the expense of the living, loving human beings around me. I fail to remember that those human beings—and indeed all of humanity—would not have been created if God Himself had not once cast the angel of truth aside.

As I work on both my davening and my teshuva in preparation for the Yamim Noraim, I feel relieved that Musaf will not start until at least 11am. I would not want to be judged by a God in Emet mode, because I’m not always proud of the truth of who I have been. I hope that the new year will be filled with Torah study—with close and careful readings of the book of law that God gave us. But I hope, too, that this will be a year when we are all able to go beyond the letter of the law to be present for the people we care about, to forgive ourselves and others, and to take part in a religious community that lifts us up and brings us ever closer to the God in whose image we are created.

I have long been baffled by the choice of Torah reading for minchah on Yom Kippur. Why do we read the long list of prohibited sexual relations on the afternoon of the holiest day of the Jewish calendar? Yom Kippur is a day when we are commanded rise above the physical needs of our body. We do not eat or drink, and we dress in white like angels. Moreover, this is the one day of the year when sexual relations are explicitly prohibited by the Torah. Why then do we proceed to read about all those individuals whose nakedness we are forbidden to uncover?

Apparently I am not the only one troubled by this question. The new machzor from the Conservative movement, Lev Shalem, offers two possible Torah readings for minchah on Yom Kippur – the “traditional” reading about sexual unions, and an “alternate” reading that consists of the holiness code at the beginning of parshat Kedoshim. The latter choice is a compelling one, both because it dovetails with the shacharit reading from Acharey Mot (since these two parshiyot are consecutive and are often conjoined), and also because, as the editors of the machzor explain, “this passage has been called the holy of holies of the book of Leviticus” (and Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year). In defense of the traditional reading, the editors note that “in pre-modern societies, privacy in the family rarely existed. A public recitation of the rules that define and protect the family was deemed important on this day, when the entire community gathered for prayer and reflection.” They go on to surmise that the choice of Torah reading may have been associated with the custom of young men and women going out into the fields to arrange marriage proposals on Yom Kippur in the days when the Temple was still standing.

If these reasons seem too historically specific for our timeless tradition, they are at least more satisfying than the traditional explanations, cited in commentaries to Megillah 31a, where the rabbis establish the Torah readings for the various holidays. The Talmud states without elaboration, “On Kom Kippur we read Acharei Mot and the maftir is Ki Choh Amar Ram v’Nisa; at Minchah we read the Arayot (forbidden sexual relations) and the maftir is Yonah.” Rashi comments that “We read the Arayot – so that anyone who is sleeping with someone forbidden to him (literally: who has Arayot in his hands) will separate from them, because Arayot are a prevalent sin, because man’s soul enjoys them and his evil inclination wins him over.” According to Rashi, then, the minchah Torah reading is intended as a warning against this particular sin. The Tosafot offer a rather anti-feminist alternative to this commentary: “We read the Arayot—because women dress up in honor of the day, and so we need to warn the men not to fall into their trap.” The women are wearing their new white dresses and their holiday finery, rendering them particularly seductive. I might add that since Yom Kippur is a fast day, the women don’t need to be in the kitchen but can actually set foot in shul, for a change. Caveat gever! According to the traditional commentators as well, then, the minchah reading serves as a warning against sexual sins — even though these are the sins that are supposed to be furthest from our minds on Yom Kippur.

This summer, when learning Masechet Shevuot, I was reminded of a rather startling connection between Yom Kippur at the Arayot. The second chapter of Shevuot deals with Yediot HaTumah, that is, with a person’s awareness (or his lack of awareness) that he is impure, or that he is entering a place of purity. There are several ways in which a person can sin in this regard. He or she may become impure but forget that he is impure and enter the Temple; or he may remember that he is impure but forget that he is in the Temple (apparently this was more likely the case for Babylonians, who did not have as strong a sense of Israel’s geography, and were therefore more likely to suddenly find themselves—oops!—in the Temple, of all places!); or he may forget both that he is impure and that he is in the Temple. In all such cases, the offender must exit the Mikdash by the shortest route possible and later bring a Korban Oleh V’Yored, that is, a sacrifice whose value depends on his financial state.

The Mishnah draws an explicit analogy between the way in which the impure person must exit the Mikdash, and the way in which a man must withdraw from a woman who becomes a Nidah during intercourse. In both cases, a space is entered under the assumption that this space is permitted, but it soon becomes clear that it is in fact prohibited. However, whereas in the case of the Mikdash, the person is expected to take the shortest path out, this is not the case in sex. There a man sins if he withdraws immediately, because to do so would render “his exit to be as enjoyable as his entrance.” Instead, as the Talmud goes on to relate, Rava advises that the man caught in such a situation should “stick his fingernails into the ground until it dies, which is good for him.” This is followed by a series of warnings to B’nei Yisrael to separate from their wives close to their menstrual periods. The Talmud cautions that “Anyone who does not separate from his wife close to her period – even if he has sons like the sons of Aaron, they will die.” (This is particularly interesting because as we read in the Torah reading at Yom Kippur shacharit, two of Aaron’s sons do in fact die young.) Conversely, “Anyone who separates from his wife before her period will have male children.” (The same consequence ensues if one makes havdalah, the Talmud goes on to say, underscoring the notion that separation is good.) This in turn leads to a consideration of the bizarre case of a man who is sure that he committed a sexual sin, but cannot quite remember whether he slept with his sister, or with his menstruating wife. This last case, of course, brings me back to the Arayot.

On Yom Kippur, the day we read the Arayot, much of the liturgy focuses on Temple ritual. This is especially the case during the Avodah service, which re-enacts the high priest’s activities on this day by quoting from the Talmudic tractate Yoma. Seven of the eight chapters of this tractate deal with every single step taken by the high priest as he prepares to enter the holy of holies, the innermost sanctum of the Temple. The fifth chapter relates that the high priest would penetrate two levels of curtains, the outer and the inner (who says the rabbis didn’t know female anatomy?), and then heap incense on coals and wait until the whole house became full of smoke. Only after this climactic eruption did he withdraw from the Temple spent and triumphant, corresponding to the exuberant singing of “Mareh Kohen” in the Avodah service’s re-enactment.

In light of the analogy from Shevuot—in which entering the Mikdash is compared to penetrating a woman—the Yom Kippur leyning takes on a new level of meaning. The purpose of entering the Mikdash is to bring a Korban, that is, to be brought close (Karov) to God. This intimacy is analogized to sexual union. In this sense, the story of Nadav and Avihu’s death (on account of their coming too close to the altar when not in the proper state to do so) in the shacharit reading is analogous to all the improper sexual unions described in the minchah Torah reading. Entering the Temple when impure is like entering a woman who is forbidden, and in both cases, the consequences are dire. Moreover, the person enters into the Ezrat Nashim, an area named for the fact that women could not go beyond this point, but perhaps also significant because the whole Temple, with its nested chambers and vessels, was a very feminine space.

While these readings are my own, I am not the first to notice the analogy between the Holy of Holies and the womb. Bonna Devora Haberman, in her brilliant article “The Yom Kippur Avodah in the Female Enclosure,” offers a reading of the Avodah service as an erotic encounter: “The high priest may be understood as the symbolic instrument for attaining union of the Jewish people with the One…which culminates in orgasmic penetration into the holiest space.” Haberman argues that the incense is the aphrodisiac of the Avodah; and the sprinkling of blood offers atonement in much the same way that the shedding of menstrual blood allows for a new start, with the goat to Azazal cast off like a discarded egg. In learning Masechet Shevuot, I was struck by how Haberman’s reading of the Avodah service may be applied to other aspects of Temple ritual, including an ordinary person’s entrance into the Temple to bring a Korban—that is, to achieve closeness (Kirva) and intimacy with God.

The rabbis famously say that since the destruction of the Temple, our impulse to worship idols has been replaced by the sexual impulse. Instead of the temptation to enter into places of worship that are off limits, there is the temptation to sleep with those forbidden to us. The Minchah leyning about the Arayot is thus the contemporary counterpart to the Shacharit reading about entering the Temple in purity. In a nod to the psalm for Elul, the month of “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” both Torah readings remind us what it takes to merit to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of our lives.