A few thoughts moments before settling into this Yom Kippur. A bit long, a bit into the weeds. Apologies. How do we repent on this Day of Repentance - when we are still afraid and unable to really judge ourselves? When we still rage at God and man? How do we shrink ourselves into supplicants when family members are in a war and we are called upon to be brave and present and strong to support those who struggle around us? How do you enter the “headspace” of Yom Kippur when it seems so detached from the anxiety that surrounds us? To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t know how to pray this Yom Kippur. I suspect I’ll fail. Here’s my attempt to make it possible. Yom Kippur is a hard holiday, grim and serious. It isn’t user-friendly or happy or self-validating. It isn’t for the kids, it doesn’t commemorate anything. You can’t make a Spielberg movie out of it. It’s about suffering and shame and confession and the impossibility of purity and how the painful baring of one’s soul is a necessary precursor to the emotional and spiritual release of forgiveness. “Torment your souls,” Leviticus instructs us about this holiday. But it isn’t the torment of the fasting. The “torment,” chapter 23, verse 23 commands us, begins the day before, “on the ninth” of Tishrei. Today. Amid the bustle of preparations and family and the feasting that precedes the fast. The Talmud makes it explicit. In tractate Yoma, page 81, it explains: “All who eat and drink on the ninth, [the Torah] treats them as if they tormented [their souls] on both the ninth and the tenth.” The feast is as much “torment” as the fast. But why? “Why is the feasting on the eve of Yom Kippur comparable to the fasting?” asks the 19-century sage and poet Malbim. “Because to eat for the sake of heaven is more difficult than to fast for the sake of heaven.” The Sages believe in the theater of religion, in the power of these theaterics - poetry, music, ritual, special spaces - to shape shared norms and build strong sacralized community. But like the Torah, they are also afraid of these theatrics, of the repetition that robs them of their authenticity, of the way the ritual inevitably comes to replace genuine emotional and moral change. And so they dislike the ascetic impulse, the all-too-easy holiness of self-flagellation. The fear it because it is beguiling, because it is fake. It is far easier to die with great fanfare for a great moral cause than to live for it each day, through drudgery and effort. It is easier to get social validation from high drama than from sustained self-correction. In Chapter 2 of his Laws of Repentance, part of his monumental codex of Jewish law called the Mishnah Torah, the 12th-century sage Rambam instructs us to begin the confession of our sins *today*, hours before Yom Kippur itself, and specifically before the start of the pre-fast feast. His explanation is sarcastic and biting and the heart of Yom Kippur: “Lest he choke during the feast without having confessed.” The fast is meant to clear the mind, not to torment it. If you are focused all day on the fast, you’re doing it wrong. It isn’t the physical discomfort that absolves. Repentance isn’t a tit-for-tat of suffering in which self-inflicted pain earns brownie points with God or with those you have wronged. A repentance that doesn’t torment you when you’re feasting doesn’t become more authentic or real when you’re fasting. On Yom Kippur, our Sages teach, you stand before a God who knows you, who sees through your confusion and defenses and self-loathing to each wrinkle of your struggling soul — and luckily for us all, to the deepest core of goodness around which he built us, that inner nucleus of self buried beneath the many layers of experience and pain that drive us to do bad things. It is this knowing God, this forgiving God, before whom we stand and confess our failings, before whom we ask for help reaching inward to that goodness that is our essential core and root and truth. I plan to scream at God. He can take it. And then I plan to tell him about my awful year. And then I hope to obtain his help in turning inward to my innermost self, in the desperate hope that I can find it. In that moment of honesty, with God’s help, I will ask my people for forgiveness. I could have done so much more. I will ask my enemies for forgiveness too, for reasons too complex to be listed here. Then I will ask God for forgiveness. And finally, with any luck, I will ask myself for the same. May we all know the difference between real repentance and wasting ourselves on our egomania, and may we all find solace and release in true forgiveness of each other and ourselves. Gmar hatima tova.
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