The Nature of Yom Kippur
When Hasidism came onto the scene with the arrival of the Baal Shem Tov in the 18th century, it would be an understatement to say that feathers were ruffled in the Jewish world. The ecstatic prayer and singing at the expense of perfunctory ritual performance was too much for many to bear. All of the religious Jews that couldn’t stand this new brand of Judaism were called “Mitnagdim” – “the ones against.”
It was High Holiday time, and two mitnagdim heard that the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples would sing and dance on Yom Kippur. This news angered them beyond belief because this kind of frivolity on the most sacred day of the year seemed desecrate the Divine name and lead Jews and Judaism down a dangerous dangerous path. People still felt the aftermath of the false messiah, Shabbatai Tsvi and how he twisted the meanings of Judaism.
They resolved to put an end to the nonsense of the Baal Shem and his disciples and they set out for Medzibosh to arrive on the eve on Yom Kippur. Sure enough, as they stepped into the synagogue, instead of solemn chest beating, people were dancing and singing wildly. The anger flared and brought blood to the face of these two men. They saw the Baal Shem Tov at the front of the room, eyes closed in ecstasy and marched straight to him. They shook him and yelled “How can you do this on the holiest day of the year?! Who do you think you are?!”
The Baal Shem opened his eyes and placed his hands on the heads of the two men. Suddenly, in their eyes, the room transformed. All of the Hasids that were dancing were glowing light and they were clearly inscribed in the book of life. They were so alive. And they looked at each other, and they saw their tension, their anger, their anxiety and fear, their isolation – they saw that they were inscribed in the book of death.
And all they could do was collapse on the floor and cry. They worked so hard all their lives to be so holy, to do everything right, and they failed. Huge sobs racked their bodies and they cried: “God we are so sorry. All we wanted to do was serve you. We didn’t realize that you didn’t want our service. We want life. We want you.” And when their cries died down, they looked up at the Baal Shem smiling. Then, they looked at each other. With a gentle glow, they were inscribed in the book of life.
Yom Kippur is about being at one with the aliveness of creation. It’s the day of at-one-ment. In the biblical vision of the Torah, Yom Kippur is a ritual – it’s the time where the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies. He enters into the space of the most concentrated holiness, brings the people’s sins for purification, and restores the relationship between God and Israel.
In the rabbinic vision, the midrash says that this was the day that Moshe came down with the second tablets. The giving of the second tablets was a restoration of the relationship with Yisrael. We remember the story of Mount Sinai when the entire community had an experience of God that blew their minds. They saw sounds and heard colors. The Rabbis say that when Yisrael had this experience, their souls temporarily left their bodies. The experience of the Infinite was too much to be contained in an finite form of humanness. As awesome as this experience was, the people were not able integrate this experience into the limited vessel of human perception. As soon as Moshe didn’t come down from the mountain exactly the moment the Israelites expected, they thought he was never going to come down and their relationship with God would be lost. If they had integrated the experience at Sinai, they would know that every part of their experience is filled with the ever-vibrant Divine presence. Instead, they built the Golden Calf – an attempt to replace the Infinite One with a human-made finite form. When Moshe came down with the first set of tablets – which was the reality of God engraved by God, and he saw that the Israelites had built the Golden Calf, he shattered these tablets. One way to understand this shattering is that he saw that the Israelites could not integrate the full experience of God. It was too much for them, so he shattered it. He went back up to the mountain and prayed to God to restore the relationship with Yisrael. After 80 days, he comes back down with a second set of tablets. On these tablets, the word of God is dictated by Moshe, letting these tablets be an integration of the Divine reality with human limitation. This was a Torah that could truly guide our lives. The Rabbis teach that the day that Moshe came down with the second tablets was Yom Kippur. Like the Biblical vision, the rabbis see Yom Kippur as a deepening of our relationship with God in a way that acknowledges our human limitations. This is a day where we celebrate relationship and acknowledge the aliveness comes through relationship, at the same time we our honest about our limitations.
Sin
The way that we demonstrate our human limitation is through Sin. What is sin? Rabbi Jan Urbach says: “The question of what is sinful is related to whether or not we believe in eternal truths, values, and ideals that exist, whether or not we can know them. Even if we can’t know exactly what God considers sinful because our categories are only human attempts at discernments, through the process of erring and repenting, we arrive a t a deeper understanding of what sin is.” Here, sin has both objective and subjective elements. The objective element is connected to eternal truths, values, and ideals, whether or not we believe in them. It is a sin because the Torah says it is a sin. It is a crime because civil law says that it is a crime. The subjective element is something that we know from experience. We notice how our choices and behavior damages our relationship with ourselves, with others, with God.
Whether objective or subjective, I’d like to define sin as that which disrupts relationship. On Yom Kippur, affirm the nature of our deep relationship with all of life – with ourselves, with others, with God. When the high priest entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple, he entered the deepest experience of intimacy. Because of our human limitations, we can’t help but disrupt the relationship – we can’t help but make choices and act in ways that don’t honor the reality of the connection that we share.
In the rabbinic mind there are many words for sin. The rabbis were interested in the different ways that we become disconnected from life. We see the main three types of sin referred to over and over in our Yom Kippur liturgy. First, there is the Cheyt . A cheyt is an unintentional, inadvertent sin. We were unaware that what we did hurt ourselves, hurt others. Maybe we said something insensitive that hurt another person. We weren’t trying to hurt them, but only later they tell us and we realize how our comment was insulting. Cheyt as being unintentional has the connotation of missing the mark. We’re engaged in the act of trying to hit the bullseye – to do what’s right, but because we are not aware of how to be a good archer, we missed.
The second type of sin is an Avon. When we do an avon, we are aware that it is a sin, and we don’t want to hurt ourselves or others, but the urge is too strong to resist. Maybe we have a gambling addiction and we know that we don’t have the money to spend, but the thrill is too compelling and we lose large amounts of money, hurting our families and ourselves.
And, finally there is the Pesha – a rebellious act against ourselves, others, or God. We commit a Pesha when we hurt. We try to hurt someone we love because we feel hurt. Maybe we’re angry at God and so we turn our back and don’t engage in Jewish practice or give ourselves opportunities to let God in. A pesha is commonly fueled by anger and has an element of revenge.
Avonot and Pesha’ot are considered “averot” – transgressions of the boundary of relationship. With an “avon” we are aware of what the boundary is in our relationship, with others, or with our own values or ideals, or with God, and we cross it, because our need for something seems to consume us. We don’t want to disrupt the relationship, but we can’t seem to help ourselves.
The reality of our human limitations ensures the inevitability of sin. Even in our rituals, we acknowledge this reality. For example, the structure of Torah reading, having two people standing on each side of the reader to correct errors, is a way of saying there is no expectation of perfection; there’s an expectation of error and correction that will be done with love.
How do we transform our sins into deeper relationship with life?
Teshuvah
We do this through the process of Teshuvah. Commonly translated as repentance, Teshuvah is more accurately translated as “return” – return to relationship, to connection – with ourselves, with others, with God. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the chief rabbi of Palestine in the early part of the 20th century describes Teshuvah this way:
“Teshuvah is the healthiest feeling of a person. A healthy soul in a healthy body must necessarily bring about the great happiness afforded by Teshuvah, and the soul experiences therein the greatest natural delight. The elimination of damaging elements has beneficent and invigorating effects on the body when it is in a state of health. The purging away of every evil deed and its resultant evil effects, of every evil thought, of every obstruction that keeps us away from divine spiritual reality, is bound to arise when the organism is in a state of spiritual and physical health.
Over against every measure of ugliness that is withdrawn from a person through her inner conformity to the light of Teshuvah, worlds resplendent with higher sensibilities come to expression in his soul. Every removal of sin resembles the removal of an obstruction from the seeing eye, and a whole new horizon of vision is revealed, the light of vast expanses of heaven and earth and all that is in them. (Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot HaTeshuvah)
This vision sounds wonderful, but may seem lofty and inaccessible. How do we reach this vision. Maimonidies, a 12th century Jewish sage also known as the “Rambam” describes the process of Teshuvah in three steps:
First, there is acknowledgement of the sin and remorse. Next, there is a resolve not to do it again. And finally, a verbal confession to God that acknowledges the sin and expresses the resolve.
Does this sound easy? Many of us may see this process as problematic for two reasons: First, while much of this process seems intuitive and we may engage in it each Yom Kippur, or even at other times in the year, it doesn’t always seem to work. There are areas of our lives where we have engaged this process, and still find ourselves acting out the same behavior. How many times have I sat in the evening and mindlessly watched T.V instead of reading something that enriches my life? How many times have I de-valued and judged my wife’s needs because they come into conflict with my own? How many times have I raised my voice in anger because my spouse or my child won’t do what I want?
Our second problem with this process asks the question: “Why is a confession to God a part of this process.” An atheist or agnostic can certainly make changes in their lives through engaging the first two steps.
Restoration of Reality
We haven’t been able to do Teshuvah in the past, because feeling bad about ourselves is not sufficient to change behavior in any permanent or lasting way. Feeling pain does not mean that our perception of reality has changed.
Teshuvah is primarily of restoration of the reality of Truth. In the first chapter of Hilchot HaTeshuvah, Rambam discusses Teshuvah from the verb m’chaper, as in “Yom Kippur.” Kapparah – from “m’chaper” is something that can only be given by God. Only in the second chapter, does he use the words “slichah” (forgiveness) or “mechilah” (pardon), something that can be given by human beings. Rambam begins to discuss Teshuvah from the perspective of something that can only be given by God, because he’s saying that Teshuvah begins with a restoration of our perception of reality. We need to first see ourselves and the world as it is, not how we would like it to be.
When Rambam articulates his first step as acknowledging our sin, we need to acknowledge it, not solely from a place of feeling pain, but from a place that sees clearly that the perception of reality that led to the sin is false. When we sin, our perception of reality is confused.
For example, let’s look at the sin of smoking. An addictive smoker smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and wakes up each morning with a pain in his chest. He knows that smoking is destroying his body and he knows that when he wakes up the next morning, he will feel the pain in his chest. However, right before he smokes the next cigarette, there is a voice inside that says that one more won’t hurt. Now, there are two voices speaking inside him in the moment of choice. One voice, says that one more won’t hurt. We know that this is the voice of falsehood masquerading as the truth. One more does hurt and even though the smoker knows this, he’s willing to accept the false voice as true. He has a choice. He can smoke and have pain and believe the falsehood that one more won’t hurt, or stop and honor the truth that pain and deterioration of the body comes from smoking. We can probably find this dynamic in other areas of our lives. We know what is right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, true and false. And yet, in a given moment we are willing to warp our perception of reality and turn falsehood into truth.
It would seem that the voice that honors the truth would be stronger and prevail because we don’t really want to lie to ourselves, but still, we are willing to believe the falsehood that one more won’t hurt and give in to the will to smoke.
We may believe that the destructive will, addictive will, unhealthy will is too strong for us – that it actually can take over the reasoning process so we will purposefully ignore the truth and submit to falsehood, but is that really the case? Does the false will have power over us? Anyone who has had to make a choice towards the right and good, when the pull to go the other direction is so strong, knows that the unhealthy will does not truly have power over him/her – the person is not enslaved by the will. That person has freedom to choose.
So there most be something else besides the will that has power, and that is: us. Each one of us chooses/decides whether we will honor truth or submit to falsehood. When we honor truth, we acknowledge what is – we express our lives and who we are in the most real way. When we submit to falsehood – there is a true need that we are trying to meet that we are unaware of – that through our unawareness, we believe that submitting to the falsehood is the only way to meet that need. For the smoker, maybe that need is to feel relaxed and at peace with the world. The need is real and true. However the method for getting the need met is only temporary and causes much more harm than good.
Rambam’s first step of acknowledging our sin means that we fully embrace how the sin is motivated from a false perception of reality and how it has ruptured our relationship with ourselves or with others. We need to fully acknowledge the full cost of the sin in our lives. We need to see clearly how we distort reality in an attempt to get some valid and true needs met.
In the second step, we resolve not to do it again. This resolve comes from an awareness of the cost of the sin and the false perception of reality that it was based on. Many times we resolve not to do something again, but there is a part of us that still wants the sin. If this is the case then, we are still holding on to a false picture of reality. Some part of us still believes that the sin is only way to meet our need, and that maybe it’s worth the disruption of our relationships. We haven’t fully acknowledged our false picture of reality and therefore haven’t done the first step correctly. However, if we have done the first step of acknowledging the sin fully, then our resolve will be real. It’s also important that the resolve acknowledges the real need that was behind the sin. While Rambam doesn’t address it, I think that along with the resolve should also be a plan to address our needs in ways that are more sustaining and fulfilling. For example, if I feel lonely in my relationship with my spouse because of the full and complex business of life that we are so occupied with, we can intentionally create spaces for connection and intimacy. If I’m having trouble eating too many desserts in my life, I may need to look at my need for nourishment and think more about how I can do that with either healthy tasty food or with connections with good friends.
The third step involves a confession to God. We need to acknowledge the sin out loud to God and our resolve to change it. This confession defines Teshuvah differently from any other resolve to change because it creates a context and motivation for the change that will allow the change to be successful. My context and motivation for change needs to happen in relationship to something greater than myself. The relationship to something greater is important for two reasons: First, the relationship to something greater acknowledges that my perception of myself and the world is limited. I can’t change dysfunctional perceptions and patterns of behavior if I’m seeing the world from within them. I need to be able to step outside of them into a greater dimension of who I am. I need to step into the Divine dimension of myself.
The second reason is that my motivation for change has to come from enduring values that represent the reality of the interconnection and vibrancy of all life. My motivation for change needs to be an effort to come into deeper relationship with life. It’s the Truth behind the motivation that will make it successful. When I confess my sins out loud to a power greater than my self, I help create this greater reality. Our words, the articulation of consciousness, help actualize this inner awareness. Our tradition says that God created the world through speech – “Baruch Sheamar V’haya Ha-olam.” (Blessed is the One who speaks the world into being)
Complete Teshuvah and The Bechirah Point
While Rambam defines this three step process as Teshuvah –as the recipe for change, he also discusses something called “Complete Teshuvah.” Apparently, while Teshuvah is an authentic way we can initiate a restoration of our relationship with reality, Complete Teshuvah is the way that God gives us the opportunity to fully transform ourselves. The Rambam says that Complete Teshuvah is being “in the same place with the same woman and with the same desire to sin, and choosing not to.” It is only when we are able to choose differently in real life that we actualize the inner process of Teshuvah to complete a full transformation of our relationship with ourselves and life. When we are given an opportunity to be in the same situation with the same desire to sin, then we have opportunity to return to what is real in a more complete way.
Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, the head of the Gateshead Yeshiva in England in the first part of the 20th century defines the moment of transformation as the “Bechirah Point.” He describes how when two armies are locked in battle, the fighting takes place at the battlefront. That battlefront can change depending on the success of each army. There are times where we have to make a choice and the armies – the different voices within us, are locked in battle.
“Bechira takes place at the point where the truth as the person sees it is confronts the illusion produced in him by the power of falsehood.” In our example of the smoker, he may reach a point where he is choosing whether or not to smoke a cigarette and his desire to honor his health and say no is just as strong as his perception that just one more won’t hurt. Both realities have an equal voice within him. Which one will he listen to?
We all have different Bechirah points in relationship to each life issue. The majority of choices we make don’t exercise our Bechirah. They take place without any clash between truth and falsehood taking place. We may make choices that are healthy, physical and moral, because we were brought up that way and it wouldn’t occur to us to do anything else. For most of us, not taking a computer that we see through an open car window may be a no-brainer. But, for a gang member who is trying to turn his life around, seeing the computer in the open car window may create huge conflict within him. It’s not our Bechirah point, but it is his. Or we might make unhealthy choices because we simply don’t realize that they are unhealthy. For example, a person may eat food with tons of preservatives and transfats because he doesn’t realize that is unhealthy. There is no struggle inside, no battleground. Or, a woman may seek out men who are physically or emotionally abusive. A dysfunctional childhood inspired the belief that she deserved to be treated in a cruel way. As long as she is unaware that there is another option – no bechirah is exercised. But, when she realizes through therapy that she didn’t deserve what she experienced in childhood, then, she might have struggle in choosing her next relationship. Two voices compete for what is true. And she has to choose. She has found her Bechirah point.
It is the moment of the Bechirah point where we have the opportunity to transform ourselves and do Complete Teshuvah. When we experience the pulls of truth and falsehood equally and we choose truth, we strengthen the reality of truth in our being. We restore a truthful picture of reality. This is Teshuvah.
Our sages teach “Mitzvah Goreret Mitzvah, Averah Goreret Averah” (One Mitzvah leads to another, One transgression leads to another.) This is another way of saying that our Bechirah point is fluid. Every choice we make is not only for the moment, but also is an expression of the overall direction that we want to head. The more we choose the truth, the easier it will be to choose the truth in the future because the falsehood that we had to battle with at one point in our lives dissolves and loses it’s hold over us. It’s our process of Teshuvah, of restoring our picture of reality, that allows us to be successful when we reach our Bechirah point. This is what Yom Kippur is about – the reality of connection and relationship. The more we strengthen this reality with in us, the more our choices change.
Teshuvah from Awe, Teshuvah from Love
In the Talmud, our sages say: If one does teshuvah out of awe of God, transgressions become as if they were unintentional; if he does teshuvah out of love of God, they become as if they were mitzvoth – good deeds. (Talmud Yoma 86b)
This is an amazing statement about the transformational power of Teshuvah. Obviously there is no way to erase the consequences of our past actions on ourselves or others. One cannot erase the suffering that our actions my have caused in ourselves or others at a specific moment in time.
But, if we do Teshuvah out awe of God, our transgressions become as if they were unintentional. When we sinned, we held a certain perception of reality that was warped. Had we had a different relationship to reality at that time, we wouldn’t have transgressed. So, if we, in the present, enter a place of awe and see the full consequences of our thinking and our actions towards ourselves and others, and are fully honest about our how our perception of reality became warped, then, from the perspective of our current state of awareness, the transgression would be unintentional. From our current perspective, any act against our honest picture of reality would have to be an accident.
However, the Talmud also says that if we do Teshuvah out of love of God, then our transgressions become as if they were mitzvoth? How does that happen?
Rabbi Nachman, a 19th century Hasidic master says: “It is to a person’s great advantage that he has an inclination to evil, for he can then serve God with that very inclination, overcoming it in the heat of his passion and channeling it to the service of God. Without an evil inclination, his service would not be worth anything. To this end, God allows the evil inclination to completely overwhelm a person – especially one who truly longs to come close to Him – to the point that he commits great sins and spiritual damage. But it is all worthwhile to God – for the sake of that small, noble effort a person makes to escape from it, in the midst of being overwhelmed. This is more precious to God than a thousand years of service without the evil inclination.” (Meshivat Nefesh 37)
According to Rabbi Nachman, for God, it is all worthwhile for the sake of that brief moment when we say in our hearts: “Tomorrow I will be better.” We would not be able to serve God and affirm God’s reality if we weren’t challenged with sin. If we never had a reality of falsehood created by our misguided actions, then we would never have the opportunity to demonstrate our love of the truth. When our love of God and of the truth drives us to do Teshuvah in an authentic way, then our sins have a holy purpose – to awaken our consciousness and deepen our relationship with life.