The Headless Guy Not of Sleepy Hollow

A little bit, I grew up in the nineteenth century. Not like my grandparents, obviously, all four of whom actually were  born in the 1800s. But even though I was born (barely) in the second half of the twentieth century, I was brought up to revere the great authors of the previous century as the true greats in our nation’s literary past. (I heard that, by the way, and, yes, all babies are born barely. But that’s not what I meant…and you know it!) And this appreciation extended beyond the well-known greats even to lesser-known and less-appreciated authors like James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. Today forgotten by most and dramatically underappreciated in terms of their influence on American culture as it developed during our nations tumultuous adolescence, in their day both Fenimore Cooper and Irving were responsible for creating the background against which the great and more famous mid-century writers—and particularly Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman—wrote the books that even today are considered almost canonical in terms of their importance and influence on American culture.

I liked the books of James Fenimore Cooper (and never quite understood Mark Twain’s almost savage dislike of them), but I write today to remember specifically Washington Irving, a man read these days by almost none but who was the most famous American author of his day—and by far—and the most influential. (He was also the first important American author to be widely read in Europe.) I was still a little boy when my father began to read me bedtime stories taken from Irving’s great collection of essays and stories known as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., and then to supplement the experience with occasional excursions to one or another of the places mentioned in the book, mostly to the towns in the Hudson Valley that were centers of Dutch cultural life before New Amsterdam fell to the English. I had (and have) many favorites…but “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was foremost among them. As a result, I was having nightmares about headless horsemen long before Tim Burton got around to making his terrific movie, Sleepy Hollow, in 1999. My father was an excellent reader!

I mention that specific story because Hoshana Rabbah, the last day of Sukkot, falls this Sunday. And it on that specific day that the Jewish version of the headless horseman steps onto the stage—except that he isn’t a horseman at all, just a Jewish everyperson facing the onset of the final day of the season of judgement. And here he is, as depicted in a Yiddish-language book of Jewish customs published in Amsterdam in 1661.

Who is this man? And where is his head? It’s a good question…and one I can make even more intriguing by adding that the man in the picture is standing—possibly unwittingly—at the confluence of two dramatically incompatible ideas that do battle with each other throughout the holiday season. I’ll explain. But first let add to the mix the intriguing side-notion that I was speaking precisely when I mentioned the man in the picture because, leaving out the man in the moon, there is only one person in the picture reproduced above: one person, that is, and his headless shadow.

Everybody who has ever attended synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur knows the best-known of all holiday prayers, Unetaneh Tokef, and its haunting refrain according to which the heavenly court opens its proceedings on Rosh Hashanah and remains in session until our verdicts are finally decreed and sealed on Yom Kippur. That image—of the gates closing at the end of Yom Kippur as the verdicts are sealed, the great Book of Life is shut closed, and the court declared no longer to be in session—is at the core of how most think of the day. But it wasn’t (and isn’t) the only theory regarding the way divine judgment works. An alternate notion, less well known and far less regularly mentioned, imagines the court closing down on Yom Kippur but the verdicts not being entirely unalterable until the court documents recording those verdicts are sent to the heavenly archive where such things are kept. And that process, this line of thinking imagines, is only complete at the end of Sukkot, eleven days after Yom Kippur.

The idea, unfamiliar to most in our day, lingers on in at least some quarters. Among the very pious, you can occasionally hear someone wishing a friend a guten kvittel, which Yiddish expression references that final document that contains the verdict decreed on Yom Kippur but not fully unalterable until formally received by the celestial archivists and entered into the record. (The Hebrew version, according to which one party wishes the other a petek tov, I’ve only read in books but never actually heard anyone say out loud. Of course, I haven’t been in Israel for Sukkot since 1983. And who knows if I was listening hard enough back then?) And that notion—that the really real end of the season of judgement comes on Hoshana Rabbah, as the last day of Sukkot is called—gave way in at least some circles to the strange idea depicted in the woodcut reproduced above according to which the way you can learn how things went when your case was tried in the heavenly tribunal requires only that you step out into the moonlight on the evening of Hoshana Rabbah to inspect your own shadow and to see if your head is casting the same kind of shadow in the moonlight that the rest of your body is. If your head is clearly sitting right there atop your shoulders, you can expect a new year of health and success. If it isn’t there, you should probably stop buying green bananas.

It's a very old idea, one mentioned in passing by some of the greatest rabbis of medieval times, including Rabbi Eleazar ben Kalonymus of Worms, c. 1176–1238), Ramban (i.e., Rabbi Moshe ben Naḥman, 1194–1270), and the Recanati (i.e., Rabbi Menachem ben Benjamin Recanati, 1223–1290). The idea was clearly known to the author of the Zohar as well, and eventually became well-enough known among “regular” Jewish people for the author of the book of Jewish customs from which the woodcut reproduced above comes to include it in his collection of customs. Readers familiar with my own literary output will recognize the custom from the opening passage of Light from Dead Stars, my second novel and the one that begins in a sukkah on a roof in Rego Park on Hoshana Rabbah as the host’s guests prepare to step out into the moonlight to see what the future shall bring each of them in the year about to begin.

But there is another way to think about the concepts of atonement and repentance and that is the one according to which the gates of repentance are always open and it is always possible to forestall suffering the consequences of one’s own iniquity by repenting oneself fully of one’s sins and thus, at least theoretically, gaining forgiveness. And that notion—according to which there is no final judgment, no entry into the Book of Life that cannot subsequently be altered, no kvittel delivering an unalterable verdict to the celestial archivist in charge of human history—is also part of Jewish heritage, also a way to think about the relationship between the deeds of human beings and the consequences of those deeds.

Interestingly, the High Holiday prayerbook seems to have room for both approaches. Indeed, one way to read the Machzor is as an elaborate interplay between these two ideas, the one stressing the urgency of owning up to one’s own shortcomings without supposing that one will always have time later on to regret one’s misdeeds and the other imagining that the possibility of spiritual, moral, and emotional growth remains fully present in the human breast for as long as that person remains among the living.

And that brings us to Hoshana Rabbah itself. The two approaches mentioned above, the one about urgent need to seek clemency for one’s misdeeds and the other about the permanent possibility of seeking of divine forgiveness for those same misdeeds even in the last moment’s of one’s life, both those ideas sound right because they are repeated so often in our prayers. But, of course, they can’t both be right! Either the verdict is written on Rosh Hashanah, sealed on Yom Kippur and then entered into the celestial archive on Hoshana Rabbah or the verdict remains open to being revisited permanently should the individual in question find the courage to acknowledge his or her wrongdoing and to resolve to sin no longer in an act of what our sages called “complete” repentance, t’shuvah g’murah.

In my opinion, Hoshana Rabbah, existing as it does on the cusp between those two ideas—as the holiday season draws to a close and the rest of the year commences—is meant to celebrate the exquisite uncertainty all thinking souls must bring to the notion of divine justice. Are we always able to fix what we’ve broken? Is there a statute of limitations on high that eventually concludes the chance we originally had to make things right? Does this possibility of moral growth continue on throughout the years and decades of life no matter how long any of us lives? Are we ever done growing up? Or do we eventually reach the point at which we are stuck being what we ourselves have made ourselves into? These are the anxiety-provoking questions Hoshana Rabbah lays at our feet each year as we try to feel good about the season now almost behind us…but without actually having anyway to know what the Judge of all the Earth jotted down on our page in the great Book of Life or how long we have to do anything at all about it. If we can, that is, do anything.

Not all theological questions need answers. Some exist to be embraced as riddles, as ambiguities, as instances in which admitting that you don’t know is the truest version of knowing. And that is why Hoshana Rabbah means to me. Will you step out into the moonlight on Saturday night and see what your shadow looks like? It’s going to be a clear night…and the moon will rise at 9:53 PM. See you there. Maybe!