Yom Kippur (Archives)

“Reflect Upon the Day of Your Death”

It has often been commented that the much vaunted “openness” of our society is no more than a reversal or switching of previous taboos. Whereas Victorian society had a strict taboo on any reference or allusion to sexuality, but openly accepted the fact of death and human mortality, contemporary society shouts about sex from the rooftops, but approaches the subject of death with the hush-hush attitude formerly reserved to sexuality.

True, in recent decades such people as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and others have made attempts to deal with the subject of death and dying in a serious, psychologically constructive way; nevertheless, the predominant mood is still one of denial, with extreme emphasis on youthfulness. Old age, rather than being venerated and respected, as in traditional societies, is denied for as long as humanly possible—no doubt because of its proximity to death.

Judaism, as a rule, does not pay overly much attention to death. The emphasis is on life: ve-hay bahem—“you shall live by them”; the Torah is essentially a guide to life, not a handbook for getting into the Afterlife. The law (Lev 21) preventing priests from having any contact with bodies of the dead may have perhaps been a rejection of the cult of death in ancient Egypt, and elsewhere, in which the priest’s main function was to help the dying man negotiate the dangerous transition to the spirit world.

An interesting homily in Berakhot 5a, brought by Levi bar Hamma in the name of Resh Lakish, enumerates four steps involved in confronting the temptations of evil. First, “a person should always exercise his Good Urge against his Evil Urge”—that is, marshal ones moral will power. “If you defeat him, well and good. If not, engage in Torah”: Engage in Torah study, filling ones soul with positive intellectual contents as a powerful counter balance to lewd thoughts. If that does not work, step three: “one should recite Shema”—i.e., invoking the unity of God, and reflecting upon the most basic fundaments of ones faith. Only if that fails does one turn to the fourth and final step: “Reflect upon the day of death,” as is said: “Speak with your hearts on your beds, and be silent.” Awareness of the ultimate silence of the grave is sure to stop all but the most hardened sinner dead in his tracks.

But all this holds true in the normal course of events, during the round of the year. However, on Yom Kippur (and to only a slightly lesser degree on Rosh Hashana), which is “the time of repentance for all,” one of the important motifs, one of the psychological foundations of teshuva, is to reflect upon our mortality, to remember that human life is limited. (The motif of death also plays an important role, paradoxically, in Sukkot, the joyous festival par excellence—but more on that in due time.)

This motif is expressed in the Selihot for Erev Yom Kippur (“Adon Din im yedukdak” and “Adon be-Pakdekha Enosh labekarim”); in Dunash ibn Labrat’s piyyut, “Asher eimatkha”; in the contrast between the Supernal King and the humble earthly monarch, and their respective deeds (Melekh Elyon / Melekh Evyon; Ma’aseh Eloheinu / Ma’aseh Enosh); etc. But it attains its climax in the popular liturgical poem, Unteneh Tokef, the center-piece of the Musaf prayer. “Who will live and who will die… whom by fire, whom by water, whom by plague, whom by earthquake...” The portrait of the frailty of human life reaches its zenith in: “Man’s foundation is from dust, and his end is dust. He attains his bread with his very soul; he is likened to a broken potshard, to dried out grass, to a wilting bud, to a passing shadow, to a cloud that passes by, to a wind that blows, to dust that scatters, and to a fleeting dream.”

A similar motif appears in Job 8:9: “For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing; our days on earth are but a shadow”; or in Psalm 90, where man is like “grass, which springs up in the morning, but withers in the evening…” (v. 6); and in many other biblical passages. But ultimately, the goal of remembering death is not to become depressed and melancholy, but rather “Teach us to number our days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom” (v. 12). That is, not to live life as if we are immortal and we have all the time in the world to squander, but to utilize the time we have been given—whose length we can never know for certain—to the hilt.

Reflections on the Laws of Teshuva

Those of us who were privileged to study under Rav Soloveitchik ztz”l, if only tangentially, remember the shiurim he gave every year during this season, bringing ever new and profound insights into Maimonides Hilkhot Teshuva (“Laws of Repentance”). This text, which is the final section in the opening book of his great halakhic compendium, the Mishneh Torah, deals with a variety of issues in Jewish thought, not necessarily confined to issues of “repentance” in the narrow sense.

Typically, the Rav’s shiurim on this topic focused on the first two chapters of this work, which—perhaps together with the first half of the third chapter, and the seventh chapter—are richest in definitions and descriptions of the significance of teshuva as such. (One of my own hopes in life is to some day have the time and calmness of mind to write a modern commentary—or, more modestly, some extensive glosses—on this great text.)

Before turning to the two chapters, a brief outline of this treatise as a whole. The question as to why Rambam composed it as he did is an intriguing one. What are the significance of the numerous other, seemingly extraneous, elements in this book? Chapters 3 and 4 contain a catalogue of those sins or traits which prevent a person from performing teshuva, as well as of the varieties of heresy, apostasy, denial, etc. of basic Jewish beliefs that in some sense place a person beyond the pale. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with issues of free-will (an indispensable prerequisite for teshuva) and the related, knotty theological issues of the seeming contradiction between God’s knowledge of man’s action and human freedom (yedi’ah u-behira), and that of predestination of man’s own actions (e.g., the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart). Chapter 7 is a veritable song of praise to teshuva; Chs. 8 and 9 deal with the World to Come and its spiritual nature; while Ch. 10, which concludes both the book and Sefer ha-Madda as a whole, is a description of the ultimate goal: the pure, sublime love of God (see my comments on this in HY I: Vaethanan).

To return to the opening chapters: there is a fundamental difference between the definition of teshuva in Chapter 1 and that in Chapter 2. The first chapter, in which teshuva and the confession of sin which is its external expression are defined in very narrow, focused, specific terms, is concerned with kapara: teshuva as a prerequisite of atonement. Chapter 2 is more concerned with teshuva as a moral-psychological act, the rebuilding of the personality; there, the test of true teshuva is if one withstands temptation when it crosses ones path again.

This dichotomy is a basic one, that may be defined as the tension between kapara and teshuva: between formal, often ritual expatiation, and internal work on one character and personality. Atonement, in turn, is inextricably wrapped up with the Day of Atonement, as a day carrying in itself quasi-mystical properties, as well as with the sacrificial system—particularly with the sa’ir hamishtaleah, the “scapegoat” sent into the desert on Yom Kippur bearing the sins of the entire people of Israel. We encounter here an extraordinary idea, that seems diametrically opposed to our modern ethical-spiritual-psychological understanding of teshuva. Not only is there collective atonement here, by means of the ritual performed by the high priest, but there is even atonement without any teshuva at all, at least for “minor” sins. (See m. Shavu’ot 1.6; Rambam, Teshuva 1.2; Sefer Ha-Mizvot, Aseh §73; etc.). How is this to be understood?

Another baffling, anomalous feature of this ritual is that the Yom Kippur goat is not at all a sacrificial offering in the usual sense: i.e., of an animal that is slaughtered on the Temple precincts, its blood poured out against the altar, and its flesh consumed by its fires. Rather, it is sent far into the wilds of the Judaean desert, where it is pushed over a cliff. Ramban, in his commentary to Lev 16:8, noting that one could almost be seen as an offering to demonic forces, speaks of it as a sacrifice to Middat ha-Din (“the Aspect of Stern Judgment”).

Adherents of the historical critical school will explain all this quite simply, as a development from a more “primitive,” semi-magical conception of religion, to a higher, ethical approach. The notion of vicarious atonement through animal sacrifice fits in with the models of ancient religion, the language of ritual sacrifice described by Robertson-Smith (one of Wellhausen’s precursors) in his Religion of the Semites. And indeed, classical Reform Judaism expurgated all reference to the Yom Kippur ritual and the goat from its Mahzor.

But for those of us who adhere to a more holistic, organic conception of the Torah, we must wrestle with this concept, and attempt to understand the religious meaning even within this seemingly anomalous ritual. What value can there be to atonement without repentance? More important, what does it do to the moral image of God, if He allows people to get off lightly, without undergoing the cathartic experience of abandoning their past wrongdoings and undertaking with a full heart to repair their ways? Indeed, one of the central motifs of modern Jewish apologetics vis-a-vis Christianity is that, unlike the Roman Catholic confession, where the sinner confesses to a priest behind a curtain, is told to say a few “Hail Marys,” and goes his way without real change or contrition, Judaism demands moral self-correction. (I’m not sure, by the way, that this stereotype is an accurate rendition of the understanding of the confession within Catholicism—but that’s another issue.)

I found an interesting answer to this problem in an unexpected place: in an essay on “Atonement and Sacrifice in Contemporary Jewish Liturgy” by a highly unconventional Jewish theologian, Richard Rubenstein (in his book After Auschwitz, pp. 93-111). Lambasting the smug certainty of liberal Judaism that it has reached a “higher” and “more elevated” conception of religion, he asserts that the essential function of Yom Kippur is not moral exhortation, but to enable people to come to terms with their guilt and moral failures. Speaks in primarily psychological, therapeutic terms, he goes on to elaborate upon the well-known distinction between “prophetic” and “priestly” approach to religion. The former exhorts people to constant moral perfection, leaving behind the person who cannot meet its high, uncompromising standards. It is often marked by an aesthetic and emotional barrenness, to the point of being almost inhuman. Priestly religion, by contrast, gives greater vent to the emotions, is more in touch with the unconscious and irrational side of human nature. It is more willing to accept “sinners.”

Underlying this is a fundamental difference in attitude towards human beings: whereas prophetic religion believes in human perfectibility, the priestly type is based on “the unspoken conviction that human beings are more likely to repeat their failings... from one generation to another” (p. 106). Expatiation through, for example, animal sacrifice, as exemplified by the Yom Kippur ritual, thus provides an essential catharsis, enabling people to get on with their lives for another year. Translating this back into the language of Torah, we can see the idea of kapara without teshuva—“atonment” or “expatiation” without contrition or penitence—as making a great deal of sense. Kapara is a free gift from God, given every year on Yom Kippur. This idea is expressed in a number of places in the liturgy, from “Because You loved us, you gave us this one day in the year to atone for all our sins,” to the closing formula of the middle blessing of the Yom Kippur Amidah , “who removes our guilt each and every year “ (u-ma’avir ashmotenu bekol shana veshana). As for the distinction between “prophetic” and “priestly” religion, or “church” and “sect” (Rubinstein takes these distinctions from the classical sociologists, Troeltsch and Max Weber) — the Torah, in its Divine wisdom and insight into human nature, is able to both transcend and encompass both of these conceptions, allowing room for both kapara and teshuva to be pushed to their extreme logical conclusions, notwithstanding the seeming contradictions between them.

This sheds light on another issue. There has been lively discussion these past weeks in Yakar over the issue of what Rabbi Mickey Rosen has called “closure” in teshuva: that is, Rambam’s assertion that authentic teshuva requires ones being able to say “I will never do this thing again.” When speaking of the real ethical problems most people face in life—i.e., dealing with such basic character traits as greed, anger, arrogance, jealousy, etc.—this is all but impossible. Rosen, seeing teshuva more as a striving to improve than as a one-time, definitive act, has counterpoised Rambam’s confession text in Teshuva 1.1 with a series of more poetic, general prayers of amoraim quoted in the Bavli and Yerushalmi. Perhaps this approach may be connected with the approach described above: Yom Kippur as a day for dealing with failure, while making some all-too-human, frail efforts to improve oneself in a limited way.

This insight may also help us to understand the role of Yom Kippur for many secularized Jews. For many non-observant Jews, participating in the synagogue service for at least some part of Yom Kippur, coupled with fasting, are acts of great power and significance. They seem to accomplish a certain catharsis, compensating for whatever failings one may have had as a Jew during the year—perhaps not unlike what was felt by the throngs in Second Temple days when the High Priest completed the service of the day. Such emotions are not to be mocked or scorned. (See also S. Y. Agnon’s stories about Yom Kippur, especially “Pi Shnayim,” in which the hero spends the entire day in futile efforts to get to the synagogue, and makes the morrow into a kind of private day of atonement.)

Jonah and Moby Dick

The haftarah for the afternoon of Yom Kippur is the Book of Jonah—one of the two longest haftarot of the entire cycle, and one of only two occasions when an entire book (albeit one of the “Twelve”) is read as haftarah. The story is one of the more popular “Bible stories” in Western culture, but mostly for the wrong reason—i.e., for it being a whopper of a “fish story.” It has a close connection to the Yom Kippur message, of the power of teshuva, of atonement and forgiveness, as will become clear from our reading, but that has nothing to do with the fish.

Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, whose main protagonists, so to speak, are the great white whale of its title and the half-mad whaling captain Ahab, is considered one of the great works of American literature. Moby Dick is, of course, not only a great sea epic, but first and foremost a moral tale. (There is also a direct connection between the two books, beyond the nautical setting: in the opening chapters of Moby Dick, the narrator Ishmael describes a sermon about the Book of Jonah he heard from Father Mapple, the preacher at the whaler’s chapel in the town of New Bedford from which Ahab’s whaling ship, the Pequod, departed. This sermon is disappointing: Mapple completely misses the point of the Book of Jonah, conveying a conventional Calvinist outlook in which obedience to and rebellion against God are the only meaningful parameters of the religious life.) Its hero, Ahab, is obsessed with a single-minded craving for vengeance against the white whale who years earlier bit off his leg; in the process of pursuing this beautiful and essentially innocent great sea creature, he destroys both his own and his crew’s lives.

Jonah, like Ahab, is a stubborn, obdurate character. Unlike Melville’s novel, which sprawls over six or seven hundred pages, in the expansive and leisurely tradition of the nineteenth-century novel filled with illuminating and informative digressions, Jonah’s tale is told in spare, concise terms, as is typical of the Bible: the whole thing is read aloud in the synagogue in ten or fifteen minutes. It opens with God’s call to Jonah to prophesize to the great city of Nineveh “for their evil has come up before Me”; instead, he flees from God, boarding a ship headed to the then most distant imaginable place, the city of Tarshish on the far end of the Mediterranean. Unlike other prophets, such as Isaiah or Moses, who initially rebuffed God’s call out of a sense of their own smallness and inadequacy, Jonah seems to have run away because of a principled quarrel with God’s way of running His world, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Another difficulty: what kind of conception did he have of God, that he thought he could run away from Him? Or was his flight an unthinking, instinctive impulse?

Once they are on the high seas God sends a tremendous storm, which threatens to capsize the ship; the sailors pray to their respective gods, while Jonah is fast asleep below deck. Interestingly, these pagan sailors are shown as pious people, with an innate sense of awe and of the presence of a moral order in the universe. When the captain wakes Jonah to ask him to pray to his god, he realizes immediately that it is on his account that disaster has overtaken these men; significantly, he describes his credo with the words “I am a Hebrew; I fear the Lord, God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9; meaning: there is no place on earth or at sea where he can escape the reach of God’s hand). The sailors are horrified at what he has done and, as the storm worsens, see no option but to throw him into the sea (as a kind of propitiatory sacrifice to his god?). This is not done lightly or callously; note the prayer in v. 14, where they say “let us not be lost on account of this man, nor place upon us his innocent blood, for You, God, have done as You wished.” The sea immediately ceases it raging, and the relieved sailors offer sacrifices of thanksgiving.

Scene 2: Jonah is swallowed by a great fish (not, as usually thought, a whale) sent for that purpose by God, in whose innards he survives for three days (long enough for the creature to swim the great distance from wherever they were—perhaps already well into the Western waters of the Mediterranean—to the seashore closest to Nineveh). While in the fish Jonah utters a prayer, reminiscent in both spirit and language of many of the more personal psalms of prayer uttered in times of stress found in the Psalter, with appropriate references to water, sinking to the depths, etc. Did Jonah learn anything from this experience? Did he realize that God was trying to tell him something? Can we perhaps think of the fish as his rebbe, or Zen master, whose task was to teach him through indirection?

Scene 3: In any event, in due course Jonah is spit out on the dry land somewhere near Nineveh, and this time realizes that he has no option but to fulfill God’s command and prophesy to the men of that great city. The so-called “pagan” people of Nineveh immediately repent and exhibit sincere contrition, not only fasting and wearing sackcloth, but abandoning their evil and violent ways. God in His turn forgives them and reverses the decree of destruction against them. Uriel Simon, in his studies of Jonah, has noted the parallel between the two non-Jewish groups —in the sailors of Chapter 1 and the Ninevites of Chapter 3—both of whom exhibit exemplary natural piety and capacity for repentance, as foils to Jonah’s stubborn and intransigent nature.

Scene 4: The crux of Jonah’s quarrel with God is in 4:1-2. Jonah felt very bad that God forgave the people of Nineveh, explaining this as the reason for his flight. “Is not this what I said when I was still on my own land; that’s why I fled to Tarshish: for I know that you are a compassionate and forgiving God…” What a strange, paradoxical answer! Why should he flee because God is compassionate? The only coherent answer is that Jonah was unable to accept such a God. He wanted God to be stern, unforgiving, angry, vindictive, one who only loved those who never made a mistake, punishing sinners in full measure—no doubt, because that is how he himself was. Jonah nevertheless knew that God was compassionate, forgiving, loving, long-suffering, etc.—but he couldn’t take it. Bizarre and illogical as it may sound, Jonah must have thought that he knew better than God Himself how He ought to run his world; he considered himself, so to speak, as “frummer,” more pious, more religious, than God Himself. (Not to mention that the Ninevites were non-Jews, and quite possibly part of a group that had historically been enemies of Israel to boot!) God makes a last ditch attempt to teach Jonah. Jonah goes to sulk in a makeshift hut outside of the city, over which God makes a gourd grow to give him shade. Next morning a worm comes along, making it dry out, and God also sends a harsh east wind, a hamsin, to make things even more unpleasant. When Jonah complains about all this, God answers by drawing a comparison between the gourd “on which you had pity, even though it flowered and died in a single night” (4:10), and His own compassion on the people of Nineveh (4:10-11). What kind of an answer is this? How can God’s compassion for the people of Nineveh, based upon selfless empathy for imperfect creatures who had gone astray in their ignorance, be compared with Jonah’s complaint about the loss of the gourd, rooted, not in empathy, but in self-pity and grief at the loss of an object that had been convenient to him? This is indeed the point: God was mocking Jonah’s capacity for compassion and his much-vaunted moral uprightness, by exposing his essential self-centeredness and egotism. In passing, He makes the important point that human sin, evil and monstrous as it may often be, is ultimately grounded in simple ignorance and lack of understanding (“more than twelve myriads of men who do not know their right hand from their left”), rather than in any deliberate choice of evil.

Did Jonah change his own view of the world? We are not told; I somehow doubt it. In any event, God has the last word here.

To return for a moment to Moby Dick. Melville’s story involves other issues as well, such as the elemental struggle between man and nature, but at root there is an essential similarity between Ahab and Jonah. Ahab is motivated in a single-minded way by emotions of hatred and vengeance, blinding him to all else around him; killing the whale has become the sole purpose of his life. He is impervious both to the consequences for the crew placed under his charge, whom he drags with him on his mad vendetta, and to the essential innocence and purity of the white whale itself. Ahab learns nothing. Only Ishmael, the battered survivor, lives to tell the tale. Jonah, too, represents an all too familiar religious type: stern, unloving, without compassion, frozen in a rigid, stereotyped type of thinking dominated by Fear rather than Love. At least Jonah suffers nothing worse than a touch of sunstroke in the last scene and, we are told by the midrash, returns to a normal life (he is even cited briefly as a prophet in 2 Kings 14:25), and doesn’t bring a ship-full of men down to the briney deep.

In Jewish tradition, this haftarah concludes with the final verses of Micah (7:18-20; see HY II: Shabbat Shuvah), bringing home the point about Divine compassion, a central theme that permeates Yom Kippur, and particularly the final hours of the fast.

Thoughts on Yom Kippur

Partly in light if our discussion of the Book of Jonah, I would like to pose two general questions about Yom Kippur and the teshuva we seek on that day. Is “complete teshuva,” as described by Rambam in Teshuva §2.1 (viz. our discussion in HY II: Ki Tavo), realistic or even possible as a platonic goal? How are we to relate to the near impossibility of achieving “closure” on teshuva? There has been an ongoing discussion on this issue in the Yakar community; Rabbi Mickey Rosen is fond of stating that the quest for perfection leads to insanity, to a kind of catastrophe both to oneself and others. Instead, he suggests, one should seek moral excellence on the human level, what he calls “working with one’s imperfections.” This elicits several important questions. First: what does this mean? Is it giving in too easily to the natural human inclination to laziness, an excuse to not working to hard to change, to a kind of sloppy acceptance of ones faults? Second: is it supportable by Hazal, as an authentic reading of their conception of teshuva? And, perhaps third, what led Maimonides to his outlook? Could it be that his personality make-up was such that he couldn’t comprehend ordinary, run-of-the-mill mortals. I can imagine him as a sort of “Yekke” type: as a person with an iron will, whose life was governed by the idea that, once a decision was made, you stuck by it tenaciously, through thick and thin, guided by ones will and reason, rather than by ones emotions. A handwriting expert, seeing a manuscript in Rambam’s own hand, described him as a man of “passionate emotions ruled by an even stronger will.”

We live in a watershed age: among other aspects, also in terms of the personality types that our culture fosters. The cultural transition from the Old World to the New World can be described in terms of personalities ruled by conscience and principle vs. those that focus upon emotion, feeling, spontaneity, sensitivity to others. “Berlin vs. Big Sur,” if you like; or, within America, the New England WASP vs. the Californian. Part of the sense of alienation of much of religious Jewry within the new, post-modern dispensation, the “New Age” spirituality, is that Judaism seems to come down squarely on the side of old-fashioned character values, such as self-discipline, conscience, etc.—or does it? The problem is a complex one, with far reaching implications for the nature and very possibility of teshuva.

Another Thought: “With this Aaron will enter into the holy place” (Lev 16:2). Yom Kippur is often described as representing the very peak of spirituality. On this day Jews are likened to the ministering angels, transcending all corporeal needs; the day itself is known in Hasidic lore simply as Yom ha-Kadosh, “the Holy Day.” The question is, what is the connection between the focus on sin and atonement, on human failure and imperfection, and the sublime spirituality attainable on this day? Are not the two ideas contradictory? Perhaps the answer lies in the idea of bittul, of self-abnegation, that through acknowledging ones own smallness and weakness one somehow opens oneself to up to letting God in. Again, there is a conflict here between what we usually think of as the modern world-view, with its celebration of the individual, and the mystical and spiritual insights of traditional religion.

Yom Kippur: A Postscript

Some further thoughts on Yom Kippur, and my reflections on the polarity of teshuva and kapara, of repentance and atonement. In terms of geographical imagery, this is the day on which the Temple worship is focused on the two most extreme possible poles. On the one hand, the High Priest goes lifnai velifnim, to the innermost sanctum, to the Holy of Holies, to sprinkle the purging blood on the curtain of the ark. On the other hand, the scapegoat is led far away into the wilderness, rather than being offered on the altar like all other sacrifices. Perhaps, symbolically, the high priest’s journey to the holiest place symbolizes teshuva, the longing for human perfection, the wish to approach the ineffable, mysterious God, perhaps even for mystical unity. On the other hand, the goat symbolizes kapara, the purging of sin that is the necessary concomitant of the human condition, the acceptance of the inherent impossibility of men to fully realize their spiritual ambitions, their hopes for moral and cognitive perfection. A symbolic casting out of these negative forces, in an almost violent way, in the opposite direction from the focus of Holiness.

Both of these motifs intermix in the Yom Kippur liturgy. The idea of essentially gratuitous forgiveness is reflected in the middle blessing of the Amidah, which quotes such verses as “I have wiped out your sins like a cloud… return to Me, for I have redeemed you” (from the burden of sin itself?). The Rav speaks of seliha, of the gift of forgiveness, as the birkat hahag—the unique subject of blessing of this festival. Hence, the blessing of Sheheheyanu is associated with the verses of forgiveness recited after Kol Nidrei. On the other hand, the moral aspect of teshuva predominates in the concluding paragraph of Neilah: “Return to me, O house of Israel… For He does not desire the death of the one who dies, but that he return and live.”