Tonight is considered the beginning of the holiest day of the Jewish year. New Years 5784 was nine days ago. Tomorrow dawns as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the tenth and final day to make amends with people we’ve hurt before the Big Guy upstairs closes the Book of Life, after reviewing our deeds and inscribing our fate for the year. He seals the book at the very last moment of Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and praying, before everybody in temples everywhere rushes home to break the fast.

This Book of Life is a poetic conceit from hundreds of years ago when it was conceivable, in a preliterate age, that an actual Creator of the universe, with a long white beard, sat on a heavenly throne and personally looked over everyone’s deeds (in the manner of Santa, now that I think of it) paging through a gigantic accounting book with a page for every human. Depending on the humility, honesty and goodness of each, the Holy One wrote out the indelible karma of each person for the following year.

Down here in the world of free will and dirty human affairs, even the most disinterested Jew pays at least some attention to Yom Kippur. Sandy Koufax, a completely secular Jew, famously sat out a World Series start that fell on Yom Kippur. After Koufax shut the Yankees down the following day, Mickey Mantle asked his teammates if there wasn’t maybe another “Yom Koufax” before the end of the Series.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass for the rituals of my religion but I take its moral values seriously. I take the main theme of Yom Kippur seriously — I try my best to make amends with those I’ve hurt, extend forgiveness to those who ask me for it. I always fast on Yom Kippur, along with millions of Jews, religious and secular, worldwide. My rationale for fasting is that with so many billions hungry every day, many starving to death, I should be ashamed if I can’t go without food for one twenty-four hour period every year.

There is an extra chill to solemn Yom Kippur for me this year. The group of old friends, who always gather to break the fast together, the place we’ve gone every year for thirty years, has made it clear, after we narrowly got a last minute invite last year, that I am fucking dead to all of them and to their children. DEAD. No conversation is possible with a stinking cadaver, which is what I am to them, their friends and their children. Nothing this accursed zombie has to say can be heard, according to the ancient, sacred doctrine of “I know you are, but what am I?”

One among them, a long time good friend of ours, was recently diagnosed with stage four cancer. My gestures of friendship are awkward, I was told, my tears are not welcome at his funeral, unless I heal the damage I’ve somehow done to two people too damaged to acknowledge their own destructiveness, and to the rest of the group, also unforgivably hurt on their behalf. Don’t I understand how excruciatingly painful it is to everyone for me to stubbornly refuse to pretend that none of the destructive behavior they reflexively engage in ever happened?!! Apparently not.

Hopefully the implacable, perfect First Couple’s first born is out of the psychiatric ward and doing much better now. Hopefully my old friend with the terrifying prognosis will get some blessed medical news. Hopefully the good thoughts of a dead man will be taken to heart by an imaginary all-powerful, all-merciful, infinitely just and loving Big Guy as He hunches over the gigantic Book of Life tonight and tomorrow, making His final notations, before He seals everyone’s fate for the year.

May you be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for the year you deserve, y’all.