Yom Kippur

COME NOW, LET US DEBATE, SAYS THE LORD. IF YOUR SINS PROVE TO BE LIKE CRIMSON, THEY WILL BECOME WHITE AS SNOW; IF THEY PROVE TO BE AS RED AS CRIMSON DYE,

THEY SHALL BECOME AS WOOL.

(Isaiah 1:18)

 

It is taught that Rabbi Eliezer said: If your sins prove to be like crimson, etc., [k'shanim can be read as "like crimson" or "like the years"] - [If your sins prove to be] like the years [it takes to travel] from heaven and earth, they will become white as snow - and if more than this - they shall become as wool [which is not quite as white as snow is].

R. Yehoshua said: If your sins prove to be like crimson - [If your sins prove to be] like the years of the [lives of the] Patriarchs, they will become white as snow - and if more than this - they shall become as wool. R. Yudin bar Pazi said: If your sins prove to be like crimson - in the First [Temple period]; if they prove to be as red as crimson dye, in the Second [Temple period].

The Rabbis say: If a person's sins be as the number of his years, they will become white as snow - and if more than this - they shall become as wool.

R. Yudin Antidriy said: When sins are minor, they will become white as snow; when they are serious - they shall become as wool.

(J. Shabbat 9:3)

 

 

Goral, Atonement, and Seal

Shlomo Fox

It is taught in a Baraita: All [things] are judged on Rosh Hashanah, and their verdict is sealed on Yom Kippur, so said Rabbi Meir.

R. Yehudah said: Everything is judged on Rosh Hashanah, but verdicts are sealed for each in its own time; on Pesah for the grains, on Shavuot for the fruits of the tree, on Sukkot for water. Man is judged on Rosh Hashanah, and his verdict is sealed on Yom Kippur.

R. Yossi says: Man is judged daily, as is written, You inspect him every morning (Job 7:18).

R. Natan says: Man is judged every hour, as is written Examine him every minute (ibid.). (Rosh HaShana 16a)

According to R. Meir and R. Yehuda, Yom Kippur is the day when the verdict is decided, the day when one rises to one's goral ["lot" or "fate"], as Scripture states: And you, go to the end, and you will rest and rise to your goral at the end of the days (Daniel 12:13). On that day one expects a day of fateful decisions. The Yom Kippur service is replete with the casting of lots: lots used to choose priests to perform tasks in the Temple, lots used to decide of the goats which is for the Lord and which is for Azazel, and in this vein, the Book of Jonah is read as the haftorah of the Minha service; in that book, Jonah is also selected by lots.

Confession is one of the elements of the day that is supposed to explain a person's goral. As the RaMBaM wrote:

With regard to all the precepts of the Torah, affirmative or negative, if a person transgressed any one of them, either willfully or in error, and repents and turns away from his sin, he is under a duty to confess before God, blessed be He, as it is said, When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the Lord, and that person be guilty, then they shall confess their sin which they have done (Bamidbar 5:6-7); this means confess in words; and this confession is an affirmative precept."

How does one confess?

The penitent says: "I beseech you, O Lord, I have sinned, I have acted perversely; I have transgressed before You, and have done thus and thus, and lo, I repent and am ashamed of my deeds, and I will never do this again." This constitutes the essence of confession. The fuller and more detailed the confession one makes, the more praise worthy he is. (Hilhot Teshuva 1:1, Hyamson translation).

Even someone sentenced to death by the court must confess, as we read in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 6:2):

When he is ten cubits away from the place of stoning they say to him: "Confess, for it is the custom of the executed to confess, for everyone who confesses has a portion in the World to Come..."

If he does not know how to confess, they tell him: "Say [this]: ‘May my death be an atonement for all my sins.'"

R. Yehuda says: If he knows that he was falsely tried, he says, "May my death be atonement for all my sins, except this sin."

They told him: If that is the case, everyone would so speak in order to make himself appear innocent.

The function of confession is to bring the sinner atonement and life in the World to Come. According to R. Yehuda, confession has another purpose; it affords one a last opportunity to address the court and the Creator in order to express one's lack of comprehension of why one is being hurt.

Should one's sins be listed in detail, or is it enough to make a blanket statement of confession? The Talmud (Yoma 86b) continues the debate between the Tannaim and adds:

One must list one's sins in detail, for it is written: Please! This people has committed a grave sin. They have made themselves a god of gold (Shemot 32) - these are the words of R. Yehuda ben Baba. R. Akiva says: Happy is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is concealed (Psalms 32) [i.e., there is no need to list the sins in detail]....

Two good leaders arose for Israel, Moses and David. Moses said: Let my sin be recorded, for it is said: Since you did not have faith in Me to sanctify Me (Bamidbar 20). David said: Do not record my offense, for it is said, Happy is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is concealed.

What parable is similar to Moses and David? [They are] like two women who were flogged by the court. One of them played the harlot while the other ate [in some tests: "stole"] pagei shevi'it [unripe figs of the Sabbatical year]. The one who ate pagei shevi'it said to them: "Please, announce why she was flogged so that people will not say that one [of us] was flogged for the other's crime. They brought pagei shevi'it and hung them around her neck, and they would declare before her: "she was flogged for an infringement of the Sabbatical Year."

The Talmud illustrates the disagreement between the Tannaim regarding confession by citing the examples of Moses and David, and points out the reason for listing sins in detail with the parable of the two women who sinned. What does this parable teach us?

Prof. Saul Lieberman wrote in his book Greeks in Jewish Palestine (pp.163): "It is therefore quite certain that the Rabbis used here a figurative expression, implying by pagei shevi'it they favor an unmarried woman or even the connubium of the betrothed with her own bridegroom before they were fully married...The regular procedure [common in Greek law] was to exhibit the sinner adorned with objects which reminded him of the character of his sin. The unripe figs were taken in our case as a symbol of premature enjoyment."

Prof. Daniel Sperber (In Sidra 7, 1991) offers an additional explanation: While we have seen situations in which a woman is brought to suffer capital punishment while she is "decorated" with a string of figs, pagim are fruit, including figs, which are insufficiently ripe - she is completely innocent. It is well known that she has not sinned.

In ancient Greece, and especially in the city of Athens, some people were selected from the lower class and supported by public funds. When calamity struck the city - be it a draught, a plague, or the like - two of those selected people would be brought as sacrifices to Azazel, a man for the men and usually a female for the women. The man would wear a black string around his neck, while the other had a string of white figs wrapped around his/her neck. They were taken through the city's streets with great pomp and publicity, and then out of the city, where they were stoned to death."

Prof. Sperber writes:

This ancient and barbaric custom was burned into the memory of the Greek people and even into that of the Romans, as can be seen from its being cited in later Roman and Byzantine sources. Perhaps some foggy memory of the custom found its way to the Tannaim. According to this suggestion, they knew of the possibility of two women being sentenced to death, one for harlotry and the other innocent. The innocent one goes wears a string of white figs (pagim!) around her neck.

The Jewish Sages of those days interpreted this "picture" as if it referred to someone who had dealt with the pagei shevi'it in the special significance of this expression for the language of the Sages, and she begs them to decorate her with those pagim in order to publicize her deed. In fact, she is begging to be so decorated in order to publicize her innocence.

I would like to go further with the claims of Professors Lieberman and Sperber and suggest that the Sages did in fact know of this custom. That is why they related the parable to two of Israel's leaders: David, who sinned and wanted to hide his transgression, and Moses, who wanted his transgression to be recorded - by means of the customary symbol of unripe fruit being hung around his neck - thereby implying his innocence. In other words, the Gemara is trying to find a gentle way of having Moses say "I am like a scapegoat".

The Talmudic discussions addresses the question of whether sins must be listed in detail, and it brings a parable in order to make a daring statement: we do not always have a sin to describe; not everyone is corrupt. Sometimes one's goral parallels the predicament of the scapegoat, and so the woman asked that her transgression be recorded, and Moses wanted to be told in which way had he sinned.

According to this approach, one might say that the significance of the liturgical confession, "We have sinned! We have betrayed!" may not necessarily be relayed only by exclamation marks, but perhaps also by question marks: "We have sinned?" This process requires each of us to clarify for himself why he is liable to punishment. If we have sinned, let our transgressions be written down so that we might know what we have done.

From here to the essence of kapara - atonement.

This word - kapara, like the word goral, combines the notion of "covering up" as in the word kaporet [a covering] with kefira - denial. That is to say, we must clarify whether kapara assumes the possibility of covering over the past and opening a new page, or whether kapara involves erasing the past, as the House of Shamai said in connection with the regulation regarding the return of stolen construction materials that had been incorporated in a building, i.e., that the building should be torn down [in order to retrieve the stolen materials], and only afterwards can a new beginning take place on wholly new foundations.

This is similar to the debate in the Gemara regarding the opinion of the House of Hillel; does the Holy one blessed be He hide iniquity or pass over iniquity? The Talmud (Rosh HaShana 16b) states:

The House of Hillel says: and abundant in loving-kindness, i.e., He tends towards loving-kindness.

How doe He do this?

Rabbi Eliezer says: He hides it [sin], for it is said: He shall return and grant us compassion; He shall hide our iniquities (Micah 7).

Rabbi Yossi bar Hanina says: He forgives it, for it is said: Who forgives iniquity and passes over the transgression (Micah 7).

Each of these sages cites a verse from the prophet Micah, the very verses chosen as an epilogue to the haftorah of the Book of Jonah:

18) Who is a God like You, Who forgives iniquity and passes over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He does not maintain His anger forever, for He desires loving-kindness.

19) He shall return and grant us compassion; He shall hide our iniquities, and You shall cast into the depths of the sea all their sins.

20) You shall give the truth to Jacob, loving-kindness to Abraham, which You swore to our forefathers from days of yore.

That is to say that the Holy One blessed be He sometimes acts as One Who hides sin and sometimes as One Who forgives sin. In continuation to my discussion above, "there is a time to describe the sin in detail" and "a time to forgive the sin"; a time to confess, as David confessed to the prophet Nathan, I have sinned, and a time to raise complaints against Heaven, as Hannah and Moses did (Berakhot 31b-32a).

The final verse attributes truth to Jacob and loving-kindness to Abraham, ascriptions that demand deep understanding of the behavior of those patriarchs. It teaches us that only one who contends with something is allowed to offer instruction in it.

We might add to the verse and read it: You shall give truth to Jacob, loving-kindness to Abraham, peace to Pinhas, a mission to Jonah, which You swore to our forefathers from days of yore. The understanding of goral and of the essence of atonement requires more than one meaning.

The real test of atonement comes with the end of Yom Kippur, as R. Simha Bunem of Pishcha explained in a parable:

One of R. Bunim's hassidim came to visit him and spilled out his heart to him, saying that he had devoted many days to fasting and mortification in order to rise up and achieve the higher levels of spirituality, but he felt that none of this helped him in the slightest bit.

R. Bunim answered him by telling a story: Once the Ba'al ShemTov ordered that his horses be hitched and he set off with them on the road. Since he had set out to attend to a most pressing matter and wanted to reach his destination as quickly as possible, he made the trip in a leap, the horses flying like arrows from the bow...

The horses were flying in the air over the roads and they wondered why they did not stop by any inns, for they were used to making stops to be given fodder and water. It occurred to the horses that perhaps they might not be horses at all, but rather human beings, and that when they arrived at a town they would certainly have a meal placed before them as is done for humans.

However, they flew over town after town without respite. It occurred to them that perhaps they were not humans, but rather angels, for angels have no need for food.

Later, when the Ba'al Shem Tov reached his destination, the horses were led into the stables and they began guzzling down their feed in the manner of horses.

"It is not during the fast" - concluded R. Bunim, turning to the hassid, "that a man becomes an angel. The main thing is how he behaves after the fast."

Indeed; atonement, in its various meanings, is strongly dependent upon a person's readiness to change and to implement that change in his daily life.

May we bless each other and be blessed with a good "seal," a seal marking change and improvement.

Shlomo Fox teaches at Hebrew Union College, at Beit Shemuel, and at Kolot. He is educational director of the IDF project at Beit Morasha.

 

Repentance raises a person up from all of the low-places of the world, but even so, it is not a stranger to the world. Rather, it lifts up the world and life with itself. It refines sinful tendencies. The powerful will, which breaks through all limits and causes sin is itself transformed into a living force that performs great and lofty works for the good and for a blessing.

(From Rabbi A.I. Kook ztz"l, Al Ha-Teshuvah)

 

The repentance which brings about a radical transformation of a whole way of life leading to a rebirth of the personality is repentance of redemption; another type of repentance, unlike this kind, is directed against a specific sin - it is repentance of expiation.

(Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, Pinchas H. Peli, editor, pg. 174)

 

 

Hannah Senesh - Confession

On the eve of Yom Kippur 11 October, 1940, Hannah Senesh wrote the following lines in her personal diary, which was published after her death:

'I would like to confess, to give an accounting of myself, an accounting to God; that is to say, to measure my life and deeds against the highest, purest ideal that stands before me; to compare what should have been with what was.

I shall begin my confession in the name of humanity. There is no sin in the world that does not enter this year's list of transgression, seven-fold more than in other years... and the plan for the new year - to study and delve into my profession and into the language and to search out the path. To be a human being.

I fear that conditions here make that last item very difficult, but I will try.

For that is the only path worth taking. But how?

After a year I shall see if I succeeded.

I still want to write down an attempt at a poem [her first Hebrew poem].

In the bonfires of war, in blazes and flame,

Amidst these stormy days of blood

Here I light my little lantern

To search for a human being.

The fire's flames extinguish my light,

The fire's glare blinds my eyes,

How will I look, how will I see, how will I tell, how will I know him,

When he stands before me?

God, give a sign, set a sign on his forehead

So that in fire, and flames, and blood

I will know the pure and eternal radiance,

He whom I had sought: a human being.

 

 

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