One of the most daunting themes of the High Holydays is the idea that God has a book in heaven in which all our deeds are recorded.

The metaphor has its origins in the Bible when Moses declares that if God refuses to forgive the people for the sin of making a golden calf he wants to be personally ‘wiped out from your book’. The image is expanded in the Talmud which describes how God has three books, one for the perfectly righteous (a thin ledger), one for the totally wicked (presumably also a slim volume) and one for those in between (further volumes still in the process of publication). God opens them all on Rosh Hashanah, inscribes our destiny according to our deeds, and seals the decree on Yom Kippur.

A more disturbing idea would be hard to grasp. I don’t take one word literally. I don’t believe in a god who physically writes; I don’t believe in books in heaven; I don’t believe that people receive their just deserts in life; I don’t believe that everything which happens to us is a precise reward or punishment for our deeds.

And yet I do believe in those books in which our actions are remembered. Only they’re not in heaven. Our behaviours, words are moods are recorded in the hearts and minds of everyone with whom we interact. Think of how children tell each other, ‘Don’t go into the kitchen now because daddy / mummy is in a bad temper’, or how pupils comment, ‘I don’t think our maths teacher had a good evening last night’.

Nothing we do has no consequences. I believe even the animals and trees somehow know us; the dog is often better at sniffing out my mood, the very quality of my consciousness, than I am myself.

I believe that in this way God knows us too, because God is present in all living being and therefore the totality of the effect we have on everything that lives somehow impacts on God and so, in some tiny but not completely immeasurable or irrelevant manner, affects the very world.

But I don’t think it’s just God who reads that book of our deeds. The most important reader is we ourselves. What have I done to those I profess to love and care for? What have I not done to those for whom I might have cared? What do I seem like to all those with whom I interact? It’s not about assessing our image, but our essence: who are we what are we doing with our lives?

We can assess ourselves cruelly, or with kindness. We should always opt for the latter, which isn’t the same as making excuses for everything we do. Rather, it’s about remembering that life is resilient and offers much love. It shares with us its wonder in spite of our faults. That’s humbling, and guides us to be equally generous with ourselves.