"Remember us for life, O King Who desires life, and inscribe us in the book of life, for Your sake, God of life."

Throughout the Yamim Noraim (High Holidays) -- on Rosh Hashanah, on Yom Kippur and on every day in between --  this insertion, with its fourfold invocation of life, is the first seasonal adornment of every Amidah. Each of the four insertions that mark the Amidah, Judaism's quintessential prayer, during the Ten Days of Teshuva (repentance) include at least one mention of life, for we Jews are a life-obsessed people.

So familiar are the life-oriented prayers of this season that we seldom stop to ponder their significance. Rarely do we think about how these prayers reflect the fundamental value that the Torah places on life, a value so fundamental that  we set aside all but three prohibitions when human life is at stake. We understand full well that the Torah commands us to live by the mitzvot and not to die because of them. We know that it specifically commands us to choose life. So instinctive is our ingrained obsession for life that, most of the time, we take the primacy of life for granted.

But not this year. After watching in horror during the course of this past year as
fundamentalists of another religious tradition displayed their eagerness to sacrifice their own lives as long as they could take some Jews with them, we can no longer afford to take the primacy of life for granted. As the country in which we live prepares to commemorate the anniversary of the most heinous act of suicide terrorism in human history, we can no longer pretend to believe that the value we Jews place on life is shared equally by all peoples and all faiths.

By a calendrical coincidence, Rosh Hashana this year neatly bisects the anniversary of  the horror of September 11. That day on the Hebrew calendar -- the day which is the first yahrzeit of those who died at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and in the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania -- fell on Sunday, nearly a week before Rosh Hashana. But that day on the English calendar -- the day on which all Americans will pause to remember the horror of that fateful morning -- will fall a week and a half later, on the Wednesday after Rosh Hashana.

There's something strangely appropriate about that timing. Rosh Hashana, after all, is the most universal of our holidays, marking the day on which God created the world. The central bracha (blessing) that we recite on Rosh Hashanah -- in every Amidah, in Kiddush and following the haftarah -- acknowledges God first as the King over all the earth and only then as the One Who sanctifies Israel.

We who throughout this season will proclaim constantly that God is the King Who desires life must also recognize that we are only a part, albeit a critically important part, of His sovereign domain. The Torah charges us with the responsibility to be a mamlekhet kohanim (kingdom of priests), helping the other nations to serve God just as, when the Temple stood, our kohanim were charged with the responsibility of
helping us to serve Him.

The yahrzeit of those who died on September 11 is a powerful, agonizing reminder that our people has not yet succeeded in that task. Observing that yahrzeit just as we began the week of Selichot, our final spiritual preparation for Rosh Hashanah, can help to galvanize us for the task ahead, the task of helping the entire world to recognize what some have so noticeably forgotten: that the God Who is King over all the earth is also, and eternally, the King Who desires life. Only after we have renewed and revitalized our commitment as Jews to the unique covenant that binds our people to God and His Torah can we constructively join with our fellow citizens in commemorating the catastrophe that came about because some believed that God desires death rather than life.

If we renew this Rosh Hashanah our commitment to the Jewish people's eternal covenant, then perhaps we can help bring to the commemoration of September 11 the perspective of our tradition. Just as God desires life, we too must desire life. And the formula for expressing that desire, as enunciated by the Psalmist, is as simple to comprehend as it is difficult to implement:

"Who is the man who desires life, who desires years of good fortune? Guard your tongue from evil, and your lips from deceitful speech. Shun evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it." (Psalms 34:13-15, adapted from JPS translation).

May we this Rosh Hashana renew our commitment to bring ourselves, and the world, at least one small step closer to expressing and living out our overarching belief in the primacy of life and to recognizing the ultimate sovereignty of the King Who desires life.  And may we and all the people of Israel be inscribed in the book of life, that we may devote ourselves wholeheartedly to serving the God of life.

Ketivah vechatimah tovah.