Eat, drink or repent -- for tomorrow we die!

In the lead-up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, repentance is in the air. Jews all around the world talk about it, write about it and sometimes even think about it -- but the object of the exercise is to do it.

Some people like to save up all their repentance for Yom Kippur and make it special. There's no need to do this, though. In Avot 2:15 Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus reminds us: "Repent one day before your death". His students are puzzled by this, for who knows when they will die? And that is precisely the point: every day is ripe for repentance, so why put it off till the Big Day? The standard Jewish Amidah prayer, ideally recited three times every weekday, has been drafted in order to facilitate exactly this objective.

Curiously, not knowing the day of one's forthcoming death is also the trigger for a spot of self-indulgence, hence the popular motto “Eat, drink, and be merry—for tomorrow we die!” The message of the motto is clear: you may as well enjoy yourself and live for the minute, since each minute might be your last and, once you die, the story of your life comes to an abrupt end: there’s nothing left but oblivion and the loss of any capacity for personal enjoyment.

This message is plainly at odds with the teaching of Rabbi Eliezer, a man who would certainly have shared with his fellow Sages a deep belief that there was a better life ahead in the World to Come, a life for which repentance provided an important element of preparation and was certainly more efficacious than a pre-mortem spree.

Some people assume that “Eat, drink, and be merry—for tomorrow we die!” is a Biblical verse. This is not the case, though it is unsurprising that the verse has a Biblical ring to it because it is a conflation of two genuine Biblical sayings. The first, from Ecclesiastes 8:15, is part of a soliloquy on the apparent futility of life when the righteous suffer and the evil are treated as being righteous:

Then I commended enjoyment, because a man has no better objective under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry ….

The second, from the prophecies of Isaiah, (at 22:13) puts words into the mouths of the inhabitants of Jerusalem who, when called upon to repent, failed to get the message, responding:

Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.

We don't know our future, but repentance is about relating our present to our past. Right now, while we are still alive and kicking, we can ask ourselves some pertinent questions about whether we are truly the sort of people we believe we should be, and how best we can step back from past failings, build on our experiences and make ourselves the best folk we can be, Meanwhile, bon appetit!