The morning of Jan. 1 is when the counting of calories recommences: We join Weight Watchers; we splurge on gym memberships. Rosh Hashana requires a deeper kind of counting. That process is called “heshbon hanefesh,” literally an “accounting of the soul.”

The stocktaking requires serious reflection on the past year, which is why Rosh Hashana is also referred to as Yom Hazikaron, or the Day of Remembrance. The remembering is not just a private act: We are required to ask for forgiveness for those we have hurt during the past year. Some rely on mass emails, but we are meant to be as specific as possible, to make the apologies personal and precise. It’s like the ninth step of A.A. But every year.

The idea here is that you can’t just ask God for forgiveness; you aren’t saved by belief. God can’t make a broken relationship whole. For that, you need to meet another person face to face. This is the essence of Judaism — a religion focused on this life, rather than the next, on this world rather than the world to come.

The unburdening is cathartic. To see it enacted more literally, on Rosh Hashana afternoon, stop by your local river. There you’ll see Jews performing the ritual of “tashlich,” in which we empty our pockets of crumbs and throw them into the water — a symbol of emptying our souls of sin.

Another name for Rosh Hashana is Yom Hadin, the Day of Judgment, and the metaphor, repeated in prayer after prayer, could not be clearer. God is the judge and jury. We are all, every one of us, on death row. And God alone decides whether or not we get written in the Book of Life.

The liturgists who wrote many of the prayers we recite talk of trembling before God — and for me, around the age of 10, when my Hebrew finally got good enough to understand what we were saying, that verb couldn’t have been more apt. If I wasn’t sincere enough, if I didn’t sufficiently ask for forgiveness, if I didn’t genuinely change my ways, I believed I wouldn’t live to see the next year.

I no longer believe that I’m going to be struck down by a punishing God. But as I’ve gotten older and more aware of the fragility of life, the metaphor has only become more urgent, even as the question of who is really doing the writing in that Book remains unanswered. Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s former national poet, helped me reimagine it: “I want to be written again/in the Book of Life,” he writes, “to be written every single day/till the writing hand hurts.”

Amen.