What is Yom Kippur?
It is about no longer punishing oneself, torturing oneself. It is about letting go.
What is Yom Kippur?
It is about forgiveness.
Including, forgiving oneself.
What is Yom Kippur?
It is about humbling oneself, inflicting enough pain to work up the courage to ask forgiveness from people whom one has hurt, even perhaps especially among ones family.
What is Yom Kippur?
It is about yizkor, remembering.
Remembering the Yankeles and Rivkalehs and Hersheles and Blimelehs and their one million siblings unimaginably murdered . . . in the Holocaust.
Remembering the flesh, the smile, the laughter, the sweetness, the good times father or mother, or son or daughter, or spouse or sibling, who is no more.
Yizkor remembering our living friends, too, to be written in the Book of Life.
What is Yom Kippur?
It is Kol Nidre. That chant.
It is Baruch Shem . . . Blessed is the Name of His Glorious Kingdom. . . That out-loudness.
It is for the sin we have committed . . . Saying it together.
It is the High Priests service. That sense of transport, back to ancient Jerusalem, to the Temple.
It is Aleinu. On the floor.
It is Jonah, inside a whale. No escape.
It is Neilah. Open the gate, even as the gate is closing.
What is Yom Kippur?
Holiness.
Gift of all gifts.
Other worldly. Ethereal. Transmundane.
What is Yom Kippur?
Mundane in the extreme: an acute focus on social justice.
On Prophet Isaiah. On his words, recorded in Yom Kippurs haftorah: Clear the way of injustice . . .
What is Yom Kippur?
It is about the scapegoat, dispatched to the wilderness, bearing our sins, so that we may go on.
Sin? Does anyone admit to it anymore? Yet, for the sin we have committed when . . . We cursed an insignificant defeat. We condescended. We gluttoned. We selfished. We ignored. We wasted. We justified and rationalized away our . . . our sin.
What is Yom Kippur?
Spiritual ecstasy.
That is, clarity.
There is no joy like the resolution of doubts.
What is Yom Kippur? Resolving the doubts of our life.
What is Yom Kippur?
Freedom from desire, and from quenching desire. Foodless, waterless, leather-shoeless, intimacyless, ointmentless.
Rather: Focused, perceiving the One G-d, and the potential oneness, in and of our lives
What is Yom Kippur?
It is about the martyrs.
About Rabbi Akiva, of the time of the Romans.
About the Mordechai, of the time of the Crusades.
About the mother in the Spanish expulsion, her children killed, who, in anguish and love, turned to G-d to thank him without (she said) the slightest side motive.
It is about those who fasted in Auschwitz (this time voluntarily).
What is Yom Kippur?
It is the kittel.
The whiteness.
The kapparot.
The atonements, one per person, and one per fetus, that it, too, may be written in the Book of Life.
What is Yom Kippur?
And everything aspires, longs, yearns, according to a pattern that is adorned with holiness and girded with beauty. For this life of yours is not a meaningless phenomenon. . . . [A. I. Kuk].
What is Yom Kippur?
It is as clay in the hands of the potter.
. . . in the hands of the stone mason.
. . . hands of the craftsman.
. . . of the glassblower.
. . . the draper.
. . . the smelter.
It is we in the hands of G-d.
What is Yom Kippur?
Teshuvah. Repentance.
Regretting the bad steering job we have have done in our life. Or on the lives of others.
Or both.
Teshuvah.
Admitting. Owning up. Facing. Facing ourselves.
Resolving. Digging deep. Trying. Determining to change.
What is Yom Kippur? The last of the ten days of teshuvah.
The last chance.
What is Yom Kippur?
Prayers.
Very long. Very demanding.
And it is tzedakah. Reducing our possessions, so that we may acquire something greater.
What is Yom Kippur?
Hunger.
And the thirst for more hunger more time like this, more hours like these, more honesty, more closeness to G-d, more yearning, more inner peace.
Yom Kippur is hunger.
What is Yom Kippur?
The Isaiah of the haftorah:
It shall be well, well with the far and the near said the L-rd and I will heal them.
What is Yom Kippur?
It is Avinu Malkenu. Our Father, our King.
Our Sovereign.
Ours.
What is Yom Kippur?
It is the shofar.
The one long blast.
The concluding blast.
Everything about our Rosh Hashanah, recapitulated.
Everything about our struggle, our ascent, our uniqueness, our oneness as individuals, our oneness as a people, our One G-d one long blast.
Turning us into warriors for good, warriors for holiness.
What is Yom Kippur?
G-d gave us the framework.
Now, Yom Kippur is what we make of it.
