NO HALLEL ON ROSH HASHANA Rabbi Abahu said: The ministering angels asked the Holy One, blessed be He, why Israel does not sing songs of praise [Hallel] on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. He replied, “Can a King sit on the throne of judgment with the books of life and death open before Him, and Israel sing songs of praise?” (Rosh HaShana 32b) Another reason: Hallel is a response to God in history: the exodus on Pesaḥ, the giving of the Torah on Shavuot and the forty years in the wilderness on Sukkot. Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur are not festivals of history. They are about the eternal questions of life and death, good and evil, sin and atonement, judgment and forgiveness. Some say that Avinu Malkenu stands in place of Hallel.

חָטָֽאנוּ לְפָנֶֽיךָ We have sinned before You. Even though we knew we were before You, and that You see all we do, still we sinned (Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, Shela).

AVINU MALKENU – OUR FATHER, OUR KING Once, during a drought, Rabbi Eliezer stood before the Ark and recited the twenty-four blessings for fast days but his prayer was not answered. Rabbi Akiva stood before the Ark and said: “Our Father, our King, we have no king but You; our Father, our King, for Your sake have mercy upon us,” and rain fell. The rabbis suspected Rabbi Eliezer of being a lesser figure than Rabbi Akiva, but a Heavenly Voice was heard proclaiming, “The prayer of this man, Rabbi Akiva, was answered not because he is greater than the other man, but because he is always forbearing and the other is not.” (Ta’anit 25b) It was the genius of Rabbi Akiva to juxtapose two ideas – God is our King and we are His subjects, yet God is also our Father and we are His children – and with utter simplicity pray that God see us with the love of a parent before considering our lives with the detachment of a king. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr who devised complementarity theory in quantum physics – the principle that you cannot chart simultaneously the position and the velocity of a particle – said that the idea came to him when his son confessed to having stolen an item from a local shop. He found that he could think of him with love as a father, and with justice as a judge, but not both at the same time. Rabbi Akiva’s formula was used as the basis of this longer prayer, which exists in different forms among different rites, some as short as twenty-nine verses long. Ours has forty-four verses. The prayer bears the marks of having been added to at various times. Its basic structure mirrors the central requests of the weekday Amida. Other verses were added during periods of persecution and martyrdom, poverty and plague. The fivefold reference to the “books” of good life, and so on, are peculiar to the Ten Days of Repentance. Avinu Malkenu is not said on Shabbat since it was first said on a public fast day, and no public fast can be ordained on Shabbat.

סְתֹם פִּיּוֹת מַשְׂטִינֵֽינוּ וּמְקַטְרְגֵֽינוּ Close the mouths of our adversaries and accusers. A reference to the multitude of false accusations leveled against Jews: the Blood Libel, charges of poisoning wells, spreading the plague, and so on throughout centuries of hate. Some anti-Semitic myths survive to this day. Anti-Semitism, the “oldest hatred,” is ultimately dislike of the unlike – the fear, mutating into hate, of the stranger. It is for this reason that the Torah commands us thirty-six times to love the stranger. Anti-Semitism, though it begins with Jews, never ends with Jews. It is the paradigm case of the hatred of difference. And since difference is constitutive of our humanity, a society that has no room for Jews has no room for humanity. It must be fought in the name, and for the sake, of our shared humanity.

עֹשֶׂה הַשָּׁלוֹם בִּמְרוֹמָיו He who makes peace in His high places. Rabbi Shmuel Salant, who often spent time resolving family disputes, was once asked how he made peace between the warring parties. “What do you do,” he asked his questioner, “when you say the words Oseh shalom bimromav?” “I take three steps backward,” the man replied. “That,” said Rabbi Salant, “is how peace is made. Each party has to take three steps backward.” To make peace we must sacrifice a little of our desire for the sake of someone else’s desire. Those who are unable to step back are unable to make peace.