What Will You Do With Another Year?

By: Rabbi Efrem Goldberg

Imagine for a moment that your heart stops beating. With no pulse, no breath, suddenly you’re no longer in control of what happens next. A woman in our community experienced exactly this while celebrating a birthday dinner. Suddenly, she collapsed and her heart stopped completely. The restaurant called an ambulance and—miraculously—while they were waiting for help to arrive, her heart started beating on its own. But when she got to the hospital, she flatlined and literally died. Her husband stood there, terrified and helpless, with nothing he could do, so he began to daven with an intensity he had never felt before. He said the words countless times before, but never like this, never with his wife’s life hanging in the balance, as he begged Hashem to “Mechayeh Meitim,” to literarily resurrect the dead. Baruch Hashem, after what seemed like an eternity, her heart began beating again.

Today she is alive and well, with a pacemaker and a completely different perspective on life, thinking often about how easily the story could have ended differently. It could have happened while she was driving, she could have been alone, or she could have been somewhere without help, but instead Hashem gave her another chance. People who go through a near death experience often divide their lives into two periods: before and after. Because they don’t, and can’t, simply recover from an episode like that. In some sense they are reborn. Perhaps that is exactly how we are supposed to feel on Sukkos.

The Torah tells us, “And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of the majestic tree, palm fronds, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before Hashem your G-d for seven days.”

We don’t simply pick up a lulav and esrog, we shake them and move them in every direction. The Rambam describes bringing the arba minim forward and back, up and down, again and again, and there is a noticeable energy and movement to this mitzvah that begs the question of exactly what we are expressing and why we express it specifically now.

The Rosh, Avudraham, and Beis Yosef point us to a Midrash Tanchuma that explains that on Rosh Hashanah we stand in judgment and don’t yet know the outcome, but when Sukkos arrives, we emerge holding our lulavim like someone walking out of a courtroom having received a favorable verdict. According to this image, the lulav is a symbol of victory, and there is something powerful and compelling about that idea, particularly after the intensity of the Yamim Noraim. Yet, there’s also something about it that has always bothered me. Is that really how we should emerge from our days of awe (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur)? Triumphantly celebrating that we won and publicly displaying the favorable judgment we received?

There’s another Midrash that offers a very different image, one that I find incredibly moving. Tehillimsays, “A nation that has been created will praise Hashem,” and Vayikra Rabbah explains, “These are people who were destined for death and Hashem creates them anew, and what are they supposed to do after receiving this new life? They take a lulav and esrog and praise HaKadosh Baruch Hu.”

According to this Midrash, the lulav isn’t a victory flag at all, it’s what you hold when you realize you’ve just been given your life back. Think about what we have just experienced on Yom Kippur, which in so many ways is a dress rehearsal for death. Men wear a kittel, a garment that is like a shroud. We say viduy, just as a person does at the end of life. We don’t eat or drink, and we remove ourselves from physical pleasure and comfort. For one day, we try to transcend our bodies and live almost entirely as souls, not because Judaism is obsessed with dying, but because it’s obsessed with living, and sometimes we need to confront death in order to appreciate life.

Then Yom Kippur ends, and we eat again, drink again, build a sukkah, pick up the daled minim, sing, dance, and celebrate because our heartbeat has come back. Sukkos is the celebration of another chance, another year, another opportunity to get it right. The joy of Sukkos isn’t only that we were inscribed for life, it is the realization that life itself has been handed back to us.

There’s even a remarkable halachic expression of this idea. The Gemara in Berachos says that if you haven’t seen a friend for thirty days, under the appropriate circumstances you recite Shehecheyanu, but if you haven’t seen someone for twelve months, you recite the berachah “Mechayeh Meitim.” At first glance, that sounds a little dramatic, because while it’s certainly wonderful to see someone you haven’t seen in a year, why should that invoke the resurrection of the dead?

The Maharsha gives an extraordinary explanation. If twelve months have passed since the last time you’ve seen this person, then he has gone through another Rosh Hashanah and another Yom Kippur, stood in judgment again and passed through another “who will live and who will die” judgement. When you see him now, you aren’t simply seeing an old friend whom you haven’t seen in a while, you’re looking at someone who has been given life anew, that’s why “Mechayeh Meitim” is precisely the appropriate berachah. Perhaps that’s how we’re supposed to look at each other after Yom Kippur, and perhaps that’s how we should look at ourselves.

On October 7, IDF soldier Itai Sagi was fighting with his elite Maglan unit near the Gaza border when his unit came under attack, with gunfire coming from every direction and grenades exploding around them. Six of his friends were critically wounded almost immediately, and Itai understood that he had to keep fighting, if only to buy time for the others, until a grenade exploded near him and suddenly, he was on the ground. He later described feeling as though his soul had left his body and he could see himself lying there, while for a few moments he experienced a strange feeling of peace. Then he began to see flashes of a future he had not yet lived, the home he hoped to build, his family, his niece’s face, and a whole life that might never happen, and something inside him began screaming that he had to breathe to fight his way back.

His friends managed to pull him to safety; he underwent lifesaving surgery, and he survived, but survival changed him because it wasn’t simply that he had escaped death. He understood that he had been given a new life. And when you understand that your life has been given back to you, the obvious question becomes: What are you going to do with it? This may be the real question of Sukkos.

The Torah calls the first day of Sukkos “the first day” and perhaps after the experience of Yom Kippur, it really is the first day: the first day of the rest of your life. Hashem tells us: “Take for yourselves, take hold of this year, take hold of the people you love, take hold of your relationship with Hashem, and take hold of the things you keep promising yourself you will get to one day.” There are phone calls we need to make, relationships we need to repair, learning we need to do, changes in our davening we’ve been postponing, and people we love who need to hear what they mean to us. We reflected on and davened about these things for ten meaningful days, and now we have been given life, and the challenge is not simply to remain alive but to truly live.

Then we go sit in a sukkah, a flimsy and temporary structure with a roof that reminds us how little in this world is actually permanent. Our homes aren’t permanent, our possessions aren’t permanent, our bodies aren’t permanent, and we aren’t permanent, and right there, surrounded by fragility and impermanence, the Torah tells us to be happy. Perhaps it isn’t despite the fragility that we’re happy, but because recognizing how fragile life is allows us to finally appreciate how precious it is.

We sometimes think that being “inscribed for life” means that we successfully avoided death, but perhaps it means much more than that. We’ve been entrusted with life. Hashem has handed us another year and asked what we’re going to do with it. There are relationships to repair, apologies to offer, grudges to release, Torah to learn, tefillos to say with more focus, children and grandchildren to enjoy, people who need our help, dreams we keep postponing, and ordinary moments we keep rushing through while waiting for something more important to happen. The truth is that these are the important things, and this life, this day and this breath are the gifts we often fail to notice.

The woman whose heart stopped knows that, Itai knows that, and anyone who has stood at the boundary between life and death knows it in a way that the rest of us can only imagine. Sukkos challenges us not to wait until we almost lose our life to appreciate that we have one. We pick up the lulav and wave it with everything we have, not as a victory flag announcing that we won, but as an expression of overwhelming gratitude to HaKadosh Baruch Hu for giving us our life back. Thank You for another heartbeat, another breath, another yomtov, another year, another opportunity to love the people around us, another chance to become what we’re capable of becoming. 

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg is the Senior Rabbi of the Boca Raton Synagogue (BRS), a rapidly-growing congregation of over 850 families and over 1,000 children in Boca Raton, Florida.