Have We Been Doing Yom Kippur Wrong?
Tech Tribe Dispatch #216
💡 Think:
Few Jewish holidays are as misunderstood as Yom Kippur. The apex of spiritual ascents, the one day that many Jews choose to engage with the shul, and yet it’s often viewed as negative day. We fast. We confess. Somehow, for far too many Jews, its’ become an unhappy holiday for a people who, perhaps fittingly, make phlegmy sounds and complain about gastro-intestinal issues.
More so, many Jews aren’t comfortable with the language couched in what feels like very un-Jewish ideas: Sin, Repentance, Atonement… But this discomfort is due not to the fact that these are foreign concepts in Judaism, but rather that they are mistranslated ones.
Repentance, teshuvah in Hebrew, means to return. We’re not turning over a new leaf, calling ourselves to do something new. We’re reconnecting to something that was really always there with us.
On Yom Kippur we return. We return to our source, only to realize that it was there with us all along.
When we err, when we miss the chance to do good in this world, we show how far we are from our source, and when we turn inwards, we realize how close it was all along.
We reconcile the sense of inner estrangement - from ourselves, our Judaism, our Creator. For there is nothing so distant as two people standing back to back, with the entire circumference of the world between them, and nothing so near as when they turn around and realize, face to face, they were always together.
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