Yom Kippur reminds us all to acknowledge our faults

Growing up, "somebody" was always in trouble.

"Somebody took the scissors."

"Somebody forgot to feed the dog."

"Somebody didn't put the ice cream back in the freezer."

Yes, my brother, sister and I were always quick to blame the ever-available and ever-obliging "somebody" for any family infraction. Because "nobody" wanted to take the rap.

Of course, nobody has ever wanted to take the rap.

Not Eve, who, 5,672 years ago, blamed the serpent for making her take a bite out of that apple. "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate," she says in Genesis 3:13.

And not the New Jersey couple who, recently filing a lawsuit against the Kellogg Co., blamed a cherry Pop-Tart for burning their house down.

"Talk about a Pop-Tart with an evil inclination," my husband, Larry, says.

In ancient times, during the era of the Second Temple, we Jews didn't need snakes or snacks to serve as our fall guys. We had the original "somebody" on whom to pin all our sins -- the proverbial scapegoat.

Yes, once a year, at Yom Kippur, the high priest Aaron symbolically heaped the Israelites' sins atop a specially selected goat, which was then banished to the desert, and, in some versions, pushed off a cliff to its death.

That ritual, according to the Talmud, atoned for all transgressions.

The goat, it's important to note, was never guilty of any crime, nor was its banishment seen as a punishment. Rather, it served primarily as a vehicle for formally transferring the sins or misfortunes of an entire community to some faraway place.

In "The Golden Bough," author and anthropologist Sir James Frazer describes how primitive societies throughout the world have relied on scapegoats and other ritual purification ceremonies, usually performed annually and seasonally, to purge their communities of evil and epidemics, demons and natural disasters. "To effect," Frazer writes, "a total clearance of all the ills that have been infesting a people."

"Can't we bring the scapegoat back?" my son Gabe, 14, asks, anticipating the hard work of apologizing in store for him. "That would be so much easier."

"But then you'd have another sin," Danny, 10, says. "Killing the goat and breaking the commandment to be kind to animals."

But the bigger obstacle is that today's scapegoat is no longer merely a convenient, if unlucky, carrier of communal sins. Instead, it has become the imagined or projected cause of our troubles, the person or object we unjustly and insidiously blame, and often punish.

And, in fact, we have a multitude of modern scapegoats, a multitude of modern "somebodies" and "somethings" that we use to absolve ourselves of any personal responsibility, no matter what our sin or syndrome, misfortune or misstep.

"Like parents," Zack, 17, says.

Or cigarette companies. Richard Boeken, in the most publicized case, a man who began smoking at age 13, in 1957, and who is dying of lung cancer, sued the Philip Morris Co. He claimed that he had "never heard or read about the health risks of smoking until congressional hearings were held in 1994."

Or questionable mental conditions. Elizabeth Roach, who embezzled close to $250,000 from her former employer, Anderson Consulting, to finance her shopping addiction, recently escaped jail time by claiming what is believed to be the first "shopaholic" defense.

I don't want to belittle the harm caused by dangerous or lethal products such as cigarettes or condone the sometimes negligent and greedy attitudes on the part of many manufacturers. Nor do I want to underestimate the power of addictions and their devastating consequences. But I do want to ask, whatever happened to personal responsibility?

"People take all the credit for something good, even when they don't do all the work," Jeremy, 12, says.

"But people never take the blame for their faults."

The holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, however, reminds us that we have to take the blame.

That we have to rigorously and fearlessly examine our actions over the past year and hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes, misjudgments and misbehavior.

Judaism recognizes that we are imperfect and impressionable -- and gives us, especially since the destruction of the Second Temple when the scapegoat ritual ended and Yom Kippur became a more introspective holiday, the annual opportunity to make a fresh start. We accomplish this by asking forgiveness from people we have injured or harmed and from God for any promises we have broken. And we confirm our sincerity, when faced with a similar set of circumstances, by not repeating the misdeed.

But we cannot even begin to apologize or make amends or alter our behavior until we have conducted a true reckoning of our own faults -- a brutal, honest and uncomfortable vetting of our past year's conduct.

"No one can see his own fault," says the 13th-century Spanish poet Judah al-Harizi.

But that's exactly our task. For repentance, as the Rosh Hashanah liturgy tells us, concerns nothing less consequential than "who shall live and who shall die."

And it's an especially difficult task in today's society, in which somebody is always raking in the windfall of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. Where somebody is always getting special treatment or dispensation by claiming to be a victim. And where somebody is always taking the scissors.