Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, falls ten days after Rosh Hashanah. When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the High Priest effected atonement for the entire people through an elaborate ritual. Today, in the absence of the Temple, each of us stands, alone, together, naked as it were, before God.
Yom Kippur is the dramatic culmination of the entire season of teshuvah, repentance. On Yom Kippur, Jews abstain from eating, drinking, bathing, sexual relations, and the wearing of leather, a sign of luxury, for 25 hours. Jews dress in white and traditionally spend most of the day in synagogue.
The holiday begins with the haunting melodies of Kol Nidre. Throughout the day we recite the vidui, an alphabetical litany of our sins. Although none of us is guilty of all of the sins on the list, we recite the confession in the first person plural – we take collective responsibility for our failings. Other highlights of the day include the Yizkor service, the Service of the High Priest, and the reading of the Book of Jonah. The final service, Ne'ilah, begins at sunset, and represents the closing of the Gates of Repentance – in the high holiday psychodrama, this is our final chance to be written in the Book of Life. The service ends with the recitation of the Shema, the three-fold repetition of baruch shem, (Blessed is God's name forever and ever), the seven-fold repetition of the phrase, "The Lord is King," and a final blast of the shofar. It as if, after all the words we have said, we fear that we may still not have found the right ones – we repeat these formulas and blow the shofar in the hope that we will somehow express all that was in our heart but for which we could not find words.
We enter the holiday with fear and trepidation. We stand before God who judges us. For 25 hours we abstain from all the usual pleasures of life, acting as if we were not alive. In a way, we try on our own death and remind ourselves of all the little deaths we have died over the last year and of the ultimate fate which awaits us all. In play-acting death, we remind ourselves both that our time is short and that we cannot afford to live our lives dying a little more each year. We must repent so that we can be reborn whole and new, so that we will not keep living while more of ourselves dies each year. When we succeed at the work of Yom Kippur, we feel reborn at its conclusion. We leave the synagogue and hammer the first nail into our sukkah, getting ready to celebrate Sukkot five days later. On Sukkot, we will not only harvest our physical fruits, but the fruits of our spiritual labor as well. Sukkot is the holiday of pure joy because, after Yom Kippur, we are reborn into life to live it fully.
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