YOM Kippur, the gift of a day that comes to the Jewish people once a year.
Every week there is Shabbat, a sacred pause to the week. But once a year there is Yom Kippur, Shabbat Shabbaton, an even more sacred pause in our lives that comes but once every a year. Its haunting and beloved melodies alone, especially the defining melodies of Kol Nidre and Unetane Tokef and Avinu Malkenu, are truly so very impacting and move us so.
Yom Kippur itself is spiritually endowed with the essence of forgiveness.
It is the day the Jewish people re-entered the covenant with G-d after they sinned with the golden calf. Moses plead their case before G-d, and through a process of resentence we enact to this day, He forgave them 40 days after inaugurating the process of atonement.
This was the first time forgiveness came into existence, and so through the spirals of time and through lifetimes of Yom Kippurs, to this day we try and tap into the intrinsic spiritual power the day has to offer us.
As the day wanes and the sun is setting, as we cry out just before the gates of repentance are closing and as we hear the final, cathartic blast of the shofar we feel and we know, this day is different from any other.
When we are repeating the 13 attributes of Divine compassion over and over again, opening our consciousness to entering a meditative state, what we are doing is actually connecting with and in some sense re-enacting the original dialogue and process of atonement between G-d and Moses.
When Moses descended from Mount Sinai returning to the encampment of the Jews with the original tablets and witnessed the scene taking place around the golden calf, the Torah says that when Moses saw the scene of sin with the people around the calf, dancing, his anger burned and that is when he sent the tablets reeling from his hands, smashing them to smithereens.
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