The Book of Life is Not in Heaven

“And who by fire, who by water? Who in the sunshine, who in the nighttime? Who by high ordeal, who by common trial? Who in your merry merry month of May? Who by very slow decay? And who shall I say is calling?” 

Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire” comes straight out of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, recited during the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). This year, as I stood in synagogue and heard the cantor chant those piercing lines, it struck me how deeply this prayer shapes our understanding of the High Holidays. 

As we recite these words, we picture God opening books of judgment, writing each person into the Book of Life or, God forbid, in the Book of Death. With the recent horrors of October 7 still burned into our collective psyche, the image of God weighing deeds, deciding who will live and who will die, is particularly powerful.

Still, I personally find this message unsettling. Are we simply helpless spectators to our own fate, waiting for a heavenly decree to fall upon us with a verdict from above?

The Sages teach: “Three books are opened on Rosh Hashanah. One of the completely righteous, one of the completely wicked, and one of the intermediate. The righteous are immediately written and sealed for life. The wicked for death. The intermediate remain suspended until Yom Kippur—if they merit, they are written for life. If not, for death.” 

What does it mean to be written in the Book of Life or the Book of Death? Are these literal books in heaven, where God’s secretary tracks the fate of every human being?

Writing in Italy seven centuries ago, Rabbi Menachem ben Binyamin of Recanti warned against the simplistic view of divine punishment: “Do not think that the punishments written in the Torah are like a king punishing one who transgressed his commands. No. They are natural consequences. Just as fire burns, just as water quenches thirst, so too each commandment carries within it a natural outcome for good when it is kept, or harm when it is broken.” In other words, reward and punishment are not handed down from outside. They grow out of the very actions we take.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel, explained: “Human morality and the world are interdependent. When man sinned, he corrupted divine knowledge and filled the earth with violence. This corruption brought the flood upon the world and erased its entire existence.” In other words, sin does not only damage the sinner—it shakes the entire framework of existence. Conversely, righteousness is not just personal virtue. It sustains creation itself.

This changes the entire picture. The High Holidays are not about waiting passively for mercy or judgment. They are about realizing that our deeds carve paths that lead to life or to death. 

With this in mind, let’s rethink the powerful image of the “three heavenly books.” These “books” are not external records kept in a divine safe deposit box somewhere in heaven, but rather exist within the confines of our own souls. Each year, a human being is inscribed by his own actions into his inner book. To be written in the Book of Life is to have a soul aligned with life, with holiness, with truth. To be written in the Book of Death is to have a soul that is disconnected, severed from its source. 

This reframes everything. The judgment of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is not an arbitrary sentence from above. It is the confrontation with who we have become and the inscription we have written into our own lives.

Human freedom is real. “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven.” God sets the stage of life, but the drama is ours to play out. Though we cannot determine the circumstances of life that we are born into, we are the ones who must choose to “fear Heaven.” To imagine that every detail of our fate is decreed from above is to sink into fatalism, which the Torah rejects. We must absolutely reject the pagan belief that life is governed by blind fate. The Torah insists instead that man is God’s partner in creation. Together with God, we determine our own future. 

The Sages teach that from the very beginning, God desired partners in His creation. A human being who shrugs his shoulders and says “Heaven will decide” abdicates the role for which he was created. The real meaning of repentance (teshuvah), the key focus of the High Holidays, is not pleading for a decree to be altered but seizing responsibility for one’s own life, recognizing that through free will we write ourselves into the Book of Life or the Book of Death. As the verse says:

When we stand in prayer during the High Holidays and hear the cantor chant Unetaneh Tokef, we should tremble – not because we fear a heavenly bookkeeper tallying our deeds, but because we realize that we are writing our own inscription. We are the scribes of our fate. The “Book of Life” is not stored away in heaven’s library. It is written in the choices we make, the way we treat our spouses and children, and whether we choose to hear God’s call. 

The High Holidays are not a season of helplessness. It is the moment when God offers us the chance to write the next chapter of our lives. We are not waiting for a verdict; we are holding the pen.