By the time you read this, it’s probably too late for me.
To repent, I mean.
You might be reading this on the day before Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement itself, which begins Sunday at sundown. And by then — despite all the rabbinic lore of last-minute deathbed confessions and Indiana Jones-style slide-under-the-fast-closing-door of Heaven’s pearly gates — I think that if you haven’t been thinking about your wrongs until the final hour, Ne’ilah, then you don’t have a prayer to be saved.
How many shall leave this world and how many shall be born into it? Who shall live and who shall die? Who shall live out the limit of his days and who shall not?
Who shall perish by fire/water/ sword/
beast/hunger/thirst/earthquake/plague/
strangling/stoning … etc.?
If my attitude toward these holy days seems glib, it is because from a young age I took these Yom Kippur prayers very seriously, and this is my only way to deflect that foreboding feeling that grips my chest like a shrunken glove sometime in mid-August, at the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul, a month before Rosh Hashanah.
Some people look forward to the High Holy Days, with its delectable apples and honey, the family ingathering and even, they say, their time in synagogue, which they say is “cleansing.” Imagine that.
I, on the other hand, raised on the fire-and-brimstone imagery of angry angels, an unforgiving God and a never-ending checklist of sins listed in the High Holy Day Machzor (prayerbook), was never overjoyed at the prospect of these holidays.
How could I be?
There were too many things I did wrong over the year for me to enjoy the holiday — although from the perspective of 20 years later, what an 11-year-old religious girl could do wrong seems laughable.
Greater men than I have thought about the concept of sin. Rabbis, theologians, philosophers, professors have dedicated tomes to it. But this is a subject that I have been schooled in all my life — one way or another, Orthodoxy, and the departure from it, is always about sin — and I have become an amateurish expert myself.
My first “sin”: My first official fast, age 12. It is drizzling, a September Brooklyn rain that cools and clears the sizzling summer streets and portends the torrid winter to come. The night mist spritzes my father and me on our way home from shul. I am wearing my yellow plastic slicker, run-walking, trying not to slip, to keep up with my father’s lengthy paces. I put my right sleeve in my mouth, while my left holds my father’s yanking hand. The rubber is wet. I am thirsty, and it tastes good. I let some more rain gather on the edge of the sleeve, and then suck it off, delicately. My father doesn’t notice. I am drinking. On Yom Kippur. A sin.
Oh, there were many sins for which to repent. “For the sin we have sinned before You under duress and willingly, and for the sin we have sinned before You through hardness of the heart. For the sin we have sinned before You without knowledge, and for the sin we have sinned before You with utterance of the lips. …”
A sin for every occasion. The Artscroll Machzor lists 26, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which we recite about 10 times throughout Yom Kippur, pounding our hearts in repentance.
There we are, crowded in one row: My mother, her mother and I, sandwiched between my older and younger sisters. On rickety metal chairs with sticky red vinyl cushions, in the basement “break-away minyan,” the five of us stand, sit, stand, sit, each time the ark is opened and closed.
We take our right hands in a fist and pound our hearts for every sin. My elder sister, nearly as pious as God, sways and pounds fervently, like a metronome, carefully iterating every word, loudly. Too loud.
“You’re supposed to whisper,” I tell her.
Another sin. Talking during davening.
My grandmother doesn’t say the words at all. I watch her lips and they aren’t moving.
“You’re supposed to talk them,” I tell her. Me, the little rebbetzin.
“I’m reading them to myself,” she says. I am disappointed. Also, look at how she pounds her heart — with an open hand, tepidly, as if caressing herself. What kind of repentance is that?
And forget my mother. She pounds her heart perfectly in time. Her hand is just the right shape, but it is her heart that isn’t in it. I see it, but I say nothing. Because you can’t tell someone who doesn’t care about sinning to repent.
But as much as I am watching those around me, it is my own young soul for which I am mildly terrified.
Yom Kippurs pass, awesome in their familiarity, and standing between my mother and older sister, my piety vacillates: I’m repentant, at times, and questioning at others. “For the sin that we have sinned before You through denial and false promises …”
This is the one I have the most trouble with. My false promises.
Yes, I know. In the three steps of repentance — acknowledgment of the sin, regret for the sin and a promise not to do the sin again — I am clear on the first two. But year after year, I find myself in shul, making the same promises, having the same regrets, seeing the same failures — with new ones added to boot.
And I grow weary. Wary. How could I be here every year saying the same things, knowing I wouldn’t manage to keep my word? How meaningless is that? It’s like a Hollywood marriage — they say the vows, but everyone knows it will never last. “For the sin that we have sinned before You in public or in private, and for the sin we have sinned before You with immorality.”
Years after I leave Brooklyn, I am beyond my girlish desires of hoping not to sin again. On Yom Kippur I stand there, knowing I will sin. I know I will violate the Sabbath, conduct “lewd” acts, eat in a non-kosher restaurant and countless other wrongs. But, I think, who says these are really sins? (Sin: Haughtiness.)
In my 20s I reached a point where I didn’t even consider these things sins. In Judaism, it seems, the more observant you are, the more you have to worry about. The most pious rabbi, the one who never said an unkind word to a soul and spent all his time studying Torah, sits crying for days before Yom Kippur. On the other hand, my Sunday school friend eats cheeseburgers on the beach on Rosh Hashanah, and thinks, “Hey, I’m a pretty good person. I am nice to my mother, I pay my taxes. What do I have to worry about?”
Which person would you rather be?
So, as an adult, with no one to force me to go to services, I take a break from the holiday, the angry angels, with their copious note-taking on my deeds, tallying them up like Santa’s elves, with the prize being life. The break occurs inadvertently. My non-religious boyfriend won’t come to synagogue with me. “It’s boring,” he says. I had never considered this obvious possibility, synagogue being boring. Especially if you take your prayers seriously; and you have to, don’t you? Or not.
I start to “cut” services on the High Holy Days. I don’t go to the beach or do anything quite so rebellious, I just sleep in or go for a walk in the park. (Sin: “We have strayed.”)
But still the High Holy Day angst does not disappear; it comes regularly, mid-August, like a seasonal occurrence, among the turning leaves and shorter days. I ride it out like a panic attack or a tornado, waiting for the storm to descend, descend, envelop, then disappear by the time Sukkot rolls around.
A few years back I am invited to a Traditional synagogue. Since I no longer identify as “religious,” I think that there is no harm in going there, despite my strict training against non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, which, in truth, have always seemed as foreign to me as another religion.
I arrive just in time for the Musaf service. And it seems as if I have never left. They are reading the same verse as in years prior. My heart starts to pound, and I ready my hand for the sin lists. But they don’t beat themselves, as they read aloud: “We abuse, we betray, we are cruel.”
Hey, those don’t seem so bad, I think. “We destroy, we embitter, we falsify,” OK, I can handle this, I say to myself. “We gossip, we hate, we insult …” I don’t recall the prayers being this easy. They aren’t as negative as I remember. Or is it my childhood bogeyman that frightened me so?
As I read through this list of sins, I feel a sense of possibility. Hey, I can do this, I think. I can be this person. I may have a shot at being a good Jew.
No, this is not solely about different movements — sure, this is a different Machzor I read, a different translation, with only half the sins, interpreted in a way that I can apply to my life without feeling like an utter and complete failure. But it’s more than that. Reading the holiday from a different perspective — instead of the same words I had read since childhood, with the voice of my father/teachers/rabbis embedded within — introduces to me a concept so integral to Yom Kippur, but one that I had forgotten: Forgiveness.
All my life, I worried so about my sins, my wrongdoings, my faults, my failures, that the only image I had was of a vengeful, exacting God towering above us mercilessly. “For all these sins, forgiving God, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.”
These words are there in every Machzor, but this time, I am old enough — distanced enough? — to hear it. If God is so great and awesome, won’t he be more apt to overlook, excuse and yes, forgive me for the sins I have committed? Could there be another God than the one I grew up with?
It’s been two decades since my first “real” Yom Kippur, and I still don’t have the answer to that. Or to any of my other questions on sin and repentance, observance and disobedience.
Nonetheless, I have recently returned to services, sporadically. Last year, at the tashlich services, when we gathered at the ocean to throw bread in the water to symbolize the casting away of our sins, a school of dolphins swam up, nearly to meet us. The dolphins jumped and dove as we lobbed out day-old raisin challah, and while I’m not sure that they ate our bread, as I stood there, knee-deep in the salty high tide, I thought it was a sign. Maybe my sins — whatever they are, however and whoever is counting — will be forgiven. Maybe.
Amy Klein is managing editor of the L.A. Jewish Journal.