On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

The musical theater fans among you have caught: I may have borrowed from Hamilton

For the uninitiated here – Hamilton is the hit musical that tells the story of founding father Alexander Hamilton. Written by Lin Manuel Miranda and premiering in 2015, Hamilton holds the record for most Tony Award nominations with 16 nominations, winning 11. It is awesome.

The musical follows Alexander Hamilton in his American-Dream/Cinderella/rags-to-riches biography, from his orphaned youth in Nevis, to becoming a revolutionary war hero, George Washington’s right hand man, the founding secretary of the treasury, and author of 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers. It’s a great story, with dreams and duels and romance and infidelity and ambition. And yet, until the musical became a hit, Hamilton was a relatively overlooked figure in American history. Despite his heroics, his successes, his immeasurable contributions to the American project, his story faded into the background.

In the musical’s final number, George Washington sings:

“Let me tell you what I wish I’d known, when I was young and dreamed of glory: You have no control – who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”

I said it as a bit of a joke at the beginning, but this line really does fit perfectly with our Yom Kippur liturgy.

B’rosh hashanah yikateivun, uv’yom tzom kippur yeichateimun – On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: How many will pass away from this world, how many will be born into it; who will live, and who will die… who will be humbled, and who exalted.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

Later today, we will tell the story of Jonah. Like Hamilton, Jonah is a great story, with action and prophecy and sin and even a big fish. But also like Hamilton, I’m not sure we give Jonah enough credit.

I’m willing to bet that if you asked most people to tell the story of Jonah from memory, they would give you some variation of this basic plotline:

God tells Jonah to go be a prophet in Nineveh, but Jonah doesn’t want to, so he tries to run away from God. He gets onto a ship, but God sends a storm and Jonah is thrown overboard. Jonah is swallowed by a whale, at which point he realizes the error of his ways and prays for three days from the inside of the whale. Jonah makes his way out of the whale and to Nineveh where he does what God wanted in the first place. The End.

Questionable translation of dag gadol – literally, “big fish” – aside, this isn’t a bad summary. Jonah is a reluctant prophet who eventually accepts God’s will from the belly of a giant sea creature.

But that’s not the end of Jonah’s story.

In Jonah chapter 3, when Jonah makes his way to Nineveh, he calls out to the people, “Forty more days and Nineveh shall be overturned!”

Shockingly, something totally unprecedented happens: The people listen to him. They proclaim a fast and put on sackcloth. Even the king sits in ashes and orders the entire kingdom to fast and pray. They immediately renounce their evil, violent ways. God sees their repentance and changes course, deciding not to destroy the city after all.

Never before had a prophet been so successful. When God tells Noah that there will be a flood, Noah does not advocate for the people or attempt to get them to repent. When God tells Abraham of the ensuing destruction of S’dom, Abraham tries but ultimately fails to prevent it. Even Moses, about whom the Torah says, “Never did there arise in Israel a prophet like [him],” was unable to convince all of the Israelites to trust him and leave Egypt. But Jonah, with one sentence, caused an entire society – one to which he did not even belong – to make massive change for the better.

Why do we think of Jonah as the reluctant prophet, rather than, arguably, the greatest prophet of all time?

Much like Hamilton, it’s about what happens at the end of his story. Despite his success in chapter 3, Jonah is beside himself in the 4th and final chapter.

The reason Jonah fled from God was that Nineveh was his enemy city. So despite having saved, as the text tells, one hundred and twenty thousand lives, he is angry, both at God and at himself. He feels guilty for the lives he saved. Jonah’s sin was not the reluctance that he overcame, but the regret that he did not.

Were the story to come from a Ninevite, they might see Jonah as the hero who saved the city. From Jonah, however, he is the villain.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

On this day, where we, as we have for thousands of years, afflict ourselves in the traditions and rituals of Yom Kippur, I invite us to think of the stories we tell from this past year. Are you the hero or the villain? And were a bystander to tell the story, how would they tell it?

The most well-known part of today’s liturgy, made popular by, among others, Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire,” is the litany of manners of death: fire, water, sword, beast, hunger, thirst, earthquake, plague, strangling, and stoning. Interestingly, the natural events (which might be called “acts of God”) — fire, water, beast, earthquake, and plague — are mixed in, seemingly randomly, with acts of humans, or at least things that humans could prevent — hunger, thirst, sword, strangling, and stoning. This again confuses who has the power to cause or subvert death. Who lives, who dies?

Today, we pray that we will be sealed in Sefer Chayim Tovim – The Book of Lives Well Lived. “B’rosh hashanah yikateivun uv’yom tzom kippur yeichateimun” – “On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed.” Both verbs in this phrase are rendered in the passive voice – it is written, it is sealed – emphasizing our powerlessness in the situation. The prayer suggests we neither write nor seal our own fate. Interestingly, however, the text here does not claim that God is writing or sealing. In fact, God is absent from this entire section. In this way, we are presented with a cosmic mystery of the universe — who has the power? Who tells our story?

I want to call attention to one of those causes of death in particular: Mi bacherev — who by the sword?

The word for sword, Cherev, comes from the root chet-resh-vet. Other words that come from this root include charba — waste or desolation, lacharov — to destroy, and Choreb — the mountain at which Moses saw the burning bush, which we later call Mount Sinai. Har Choreb, the mountain of destruction, is also Har Sinai, the mountain of revelation, named for the bush that is not destroyed despite burning before Moses. Though these possibilities of death are all inarguably extraordinarily negative and painful, our tradition teaches that there is the possibility of redemption and revelation within destruction and chaos. It all depends on how we tell the story.

Rabbi Ben Bag Bag is quoted in Pirkei Avot saying, “Turn it over and turn it over again, for everything is within it.” It is based on this mindset that, every year from Sinai to today, we continually read and reread and study and discuss and dissect the wisdom of our textual tradition. Every time we turn it over, we find something new.

Jonah prayed from the belly of the fish, saying, “I cried out in my distress to the Eternal, and God answered me” – Karati mitzara li el Adonai, vayaaneini.

Karati mitzara li. Mitzara. I translated this word as “distress,” but a more direct translation would be “narrowness.” Jonah literally cried out from a physically constricted space, but even moreso, from a narrow mindset. He had his blinders on, not thinking through the logic of running from an omnipresent God, not appreciating the humanity of his enemy, not seeing the whole picture. When he recognized his limited perspective, it was at that moment that God redeemed him. He made his way to Nineveh, he saved the city. But in the end, he regretted it. Even after all he had been through, he could not expand his perspective.

In truth, we are limited. Jonah’s prayer is echoed in Psalm 118, verse 5: Min hameitzar karati Yah; anani vamerchav Yah – “From narrowness I cried out to the Eternal; the Eternal answered me in vastness.” We will never be able to see the full depth of another person’s story, fully understand the course of events that led us to this moment, or completely see the winding road ahead. All we can do is recognize our own moments of narrowness and call out for a wider view.

In the very next verse of Pirkei Avot, just after Ben Bag Bag’s flipping the script, a sage with a similarly funny name, Ben Hei Hei says, “According to the labor is the reward.” When I say that we should try to see the world through different perspectives, I know that it’s so much easier said than done, but the benefit, I assure you, is more than commensurate with the effort. It is hard work, sometimes impossible even. But that does not mean we do not try. As Rabbi Tarfon teaches, “You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to ignore it.”

Jonah, our reluctant hero, tried to ignore the work. He did not want to see the Ninevites as worth saving, much less be the one to save them. It took a storm and big fish to push him out from his narrowmindedness. For Aaron Burr, Hamilton’s killer – that’s not a spoiler, he says it 4 minutes into the start of the show – it took tarnishing his name, forever spoiling his legacy as the killer of a founding father. As he said, both in real life and in the show, “I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”

What will it take for us to expand our worldview? Or even just recognize that we do not have the full picture?

On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed.

I do not believe that our story is written for us. I do not believe that our fates are sealed.

I do believe that, on this day, we are called upon to lift up our eyes, to see stories we have told, the stories we still wish to tell, and recognize that there are those we will never hear. We cry out from our individual narrowness, and God responds in vastness.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.