The High Holidays Scariest Prayer

The untold story behind 'Unetanneh Tokef'

Parsha Summary: It’s Rosh Hashanna and the New Year traditional communion centers on Abraham merrily decanting for a boy’s trip to Mount Moriah (Temple Mount). Isaac, giddy with excitement, requests to be strapped down so he can fulfill his 110-year-old father’s promise to be sacrificed to G-d. Abraham, a tad guilty for allowing his wife to give birth in her centennial year, and chopping his son’s penis when he was eight, pulls out at the last minute, one birth and a knife blade too late.

---

Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, the 11th-century German academic in need of a better PR machine, wasn’t about to yield to peer pressure. He was surrounded by turncoats all willing to sacrifice their virtues, and their beliefs, in the name of living. In medieval Germany, the Crusades were in fashion and torture was an acceptable practice for the motivated convert.

Still, the great sage of Mainz resisted until he could resist no more.

“Give me three more days and I swear, I shall make a decision by time the cows come home.”

Hands were shaken, heads were nodded and gentlemen's agreements were agreed and signed and most agreeable. Rabbi Amnon would sit in prayer for three days, offering his holiest of devotions to G-d, and at the end, he would convert to Christianity because the right god is the Christian god and the Christian god loves a jolly three-day prayer-fest.

As a delaying tactic, it was riddled with flaws.

The Archbishop would only accept an affirmative answer and the Rabbi knew, deep down, he would never convert. He immediately regretted giving the slightest hint of possible conversion to a foreign religion.

So the Rabbi prayed and prayed and prayed some more. He desperately hoped a solution would reveal itself or a miracle would save him. And, like most stubborn men of religion, he refused to flee the country. Rabbi Amnon believed the Archbishop was a pal, a friend, a learned colleague with whom he had spent many a long night discussing the finer details of sectarian violence and forced confession. They were brothers in faith and worship, what could possibly go wrong?

For safety, the Rabbi refused to leave his house to meet the Archbishop. Burying one’s head in the sand was a strategy that had unsuccessfully worked for millennia. Ignoring the problem was a guarantee it would go away.

The Archbishop was furious his tea-time date was canceled. His number one chef had prepared lobster tail broiled in garlic sauce as an entree and the finest stuffed swine in red sauce for the main dish. This was going to be a celebration of a coming of faiths. Having never tasted pork before, the Rabbi was going to be in for a real treat.

When news reached the Archbishop, he had no choice. He demanded the presence of the Rabbi and sent his heaviest of heavies round to collect. Forcibly brought to the grand palace of the Archbishop, a converted early-century townhouse upgraded to meet the requirements of an opulent taskmaster, the Rabbi refused conversion.

“Cut out my tongue for I have sinned against the one true G-d! For even thinking of conversion, I have strayed from my faith and deserve no less a fate!”

“Oh Reb, we’ll do that and a whole lot more. Nobody makes a mockery of our conversion process. We were super lenient allowing you three days to think about it and this is how you repay us? Take this Jewish fool away to the Chamber of Spiritual Rebirth at once!”

“Spiritual rebirth? That doesn’t sound so bad,” thought the Rabbi as he was led to the dungeon where he was greeted by a masked man wearing very little while wielding a very large axe.

The Rabbi’s left arm was the first limb to go. He was in too much shock when the axeman removed his second limb. Begging for mercy, the amputation continued with both his legs removed as punishment for not obeying his word and refusing to convert. With every limb, there was a pregnant pause. A natural interval in the procedure where Herald the Axeman could refresh before his next swing. He enjoyed the in-house buffet of assorted mocktails and pork scratchings.

Each pause would bring the same question.

“Are you ready to convert?”

And each time, Rabbi Amnon refused. It’s hard to concentrate when you’ve had a limb detached.

Limbless, the Rabbi was strapped to a donkey named Eric and sent home. His severed extremities accompanied him on a knight's shield.

There is simply no coming back from medieval amputation.

Sensing the end and not wanting to miss out on a final kiddush, Rabbi Amnon requested to be carried to his local synagogue. It was Rosh Hashanah and the Rabbi had been working on a special prayer for the occasion.

With his dying breath, he recited the original composition of Unetanneh Tokef. The shocked congregation fell to their knees in awe, though some reports suggest they fainted. It would take several days to scrub clean the trail of blood off the carpet.

Rabbi Kalonymus ben Meshullam feared he was next.

For three days he was unable to sleep and prayed for the safety of the Mainz Jews. On the third day, he succumbed and that night he was troubled by a vision so ghastly, so shocking, he knew it could only be a sign from G-d. In his dream, a limbless Rabbi Amnon begged him to transcribe the prayer and include it in the service for the high holidays. Lucky for the ghostly apparition of Amnon, the Rabbi was one of the great scholars and liturgists of the day!

From that day forth, Untanneh Tokef became a part of the standard liturgy for the high holidays.

Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who By Fire’ was inspired by the Unetanneh Tokef prayer.

---