On Yom Kippur we wear an imitation shroud, for several reasons. One is to emphasize that this day, or any day, may be our last, and therefore the confessions we make today should be treated as deathbed confessions - are your moral accounts up-to-date? Have you hugged your loved ones today?

But as Rabbi Lew explains, no matter how prepared we think we are . . . . on a deeper level, we are not in control:

The title [of his book] to me describes the essential transformation that is part of the holidays. The phrase "completely unprepared" really strikes a deep chord. It names something deep and pervasive in the human psyche. Although we're not often in touch with this feeling, deep down we all feel unprepared. If we look at our lives honestly, the events that really shape us, that really make us who we are, are the events we didn't prepare for, or we couldn't prepare for, like a serious illness, the loss of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, or God forbid the loss of a child. Or suddenly a child appears surprisingly, or we fall in love. These are the things that really shape our lives.

We spend most of our lives preparing like crazy--we prepare for our professional lives, we prepare for our health by doing exercise, we do self-improvement, we always anticipate tomorrow, but the mounting evidence is that what we anticipate almost never occurs tomorrow. We live life like a kind of Maginot line--the line of defense that the French built to ward off the Germans and they ended up coming from a completely different direction. Our life is like that--it comes at us from a different direction than we think it's going to. It circumvents all our defenses and leaves us feeling very unprepared.

All of this is at the heart of the High Holiday journey, this journey of the soul that we go through every year at this time. It's built into the liturgy: the service that we do on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is taken almost word for word from the prayer service that went along with the public fast. Public fast was something practiced during Rabbinic times, the time of the Talmud, for public emergencies, the kind of things you couldn't prepare for--drought, a ship lost at sea, a city under siege. It's a liturgy for a spiritual emergency, for an urgent desperate matter you can't prepare for. The shofar is like the ancient alarm--it was something that we blew at a really desperate, urgent time.