When I was a kid, Yom Kippur was mostly about how long I could make it without eating. It wasn’t easy.
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I remember Kol Nidre the night before. Getting dressed for temple the next morning. The long services, sitting restless with the congregation. Reciting prayers I’ve known by heart for as long as I’ve had a voice. The growling stomach and dry mouth that got harder to ignore as the hours went by. Watching the clock inch toward sundown, services that seemed to last a lifetime, and waiting for that final blast of the shofar.
I knew Yom Kippur was our holiest day. I knew we were asking for forgiveness and to be written into the Book of Life. But there are things you can know your whole life and not really understand until you’ve lived enough life to understand them.
I understand Yom Kippur differently now.
Tonight at sundown, Yom Kippur begins. For about 25 hours many of us won’t eat or drink. We’ll step away from the everyday stuff that usually fills our time and spend those hours looking back on the year we just lived through. The people we hurt and apologies we owe. The things we wish we had done differently. The people who were here last Yom Kippur and aren’t with us this year.
Some Jews will spend almost the entire day in synagogue. Some will come for Kol Nidre tonight and return tomorrow. Some haven’t been inside a synagogue since last Yom Kippur and may not be back again until next year. Some won’t leave their house at all. Yom Kippur pulls us back.
Jews have been saying these prayers for a very long time. We’ve said them in places where we were welcomed and places where we were hunted. We carried them through expulsions, pogroms, ghettos, the Holocaust, wars and all the ordinary years in between. Tonight we’ll say them again.
And many of us will say them behind locked doors with armed guards outside.
The police car in the parking lot. Security at the entrance. Cameras pointed toward the doors. Someone watching over us while we pray. Our children know the drills and know why the doors are locked. They’ve grown up with security at synagogue the way I grew up knowing there would be challah on Shabbat.
We’ll walk past those guards, say hello, and go inside to confess our sins. We’ll ask forgiveness from the people we’ve hurt and from God. We’ll remember our dead. We’ll ask to be written into the Book of Life for another year.
While we’re inside asking God to forgive us, someone outside will be carrying a gun because there are still people who want to kill Jews while we pray.
Yom Kippur comes ten days after Rosh Hashanah, at the end of the Days of Awe. Jewish tradition teaches that the Book of Life is opened on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. We don’t know what the coming year will bring or whether everyone who was with us last year will still be here next year.
Teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but it also means return. We’re supposed to look at ourselves without all the excuses we normally make. Who did I hurt? Where did I fail someone? What did I say that I shouldn’t have said? What didn’t I say when I should have spoken? What can I still repair?
Judaism doesn’t let us hand all of that over to God. Yom Kippur can atone for sins between a person and God. But if I wronged another human being, I have to go to that person, apologize, and try to make it right. God isn’t going to do the heavy lifting for me.
Tonight begins with Kol Nidre. Tomorrow we’ll confess together, and we’ll do it in the plural. We don’t spend the day saying I have sinned. We say we have sinned. We have betrayed. We have stolen. We have spoken falsely. We have hurt people. Even when a particular sin isn’t ours, we say the words together. Nobody gets to sit there deciding which person in the row really needs to hear that part.
There will be Yizkor for the people we’ve lost. By late afternoon we’ll be hungry, thirsty and tired. Neilah will begin as the day starts running out. Finally the shofar will sound, and we’ll go home to break the fast.
Outside, the guards can go home too.
Jewish holidays gather Jews in predictable places at predictable times. Yom Kippur brings out Jews who may not walk through synagogue doors any other day of the year.
In September 1941, German forces occupying Kyiv ordered the city’s Jews to report on September 29 with their documents, money, valuables, and clothing. They were marched toward a ravine called Babyn Yar.
September 29 was the eve of Yom Kippur.
Over the next two days, German SS and police units, assisted by local collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jewish men, women and children. Families were forced to undress and surrender their belongings before being taken into the ravine in groups and shot.
The following year, Yom Kippur fell during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The mass deportations to Treblinka had begun that summer and continued through the Jewish holy days. Jews were deported from the ghetto on Yom Kippur too.
For Jews trapped under Nazi rule, even the calendar could be used against them. Jews were gathered together. Normal routines had stopped. On Yom Kippur they were also fasting.
Thirty-one years after Babyn Yar, Jews would once again be attacked on the holiest day of their year.
Only now there was a Jewish state.
Israel was a newborn state when Yom Kippur began in October 1973. Six years had passed since the Six-Day War, when Israel defeated the armies surrounding it with a speed that stunned much of the world. Israelis had good reason to trust their military. They also trusted their intelligence services to recognize when another war was coming.
There were warnings in the days before Yom Kippur. Egyptian forces were gathering along the Suez Canal. Syrian forces were massing near the Golan Heights. Soviet dependents were suddenly leaving Egypt and Syria. Israeli intelligence saw much of it but continued to assess the likelihood of war as low.
By early Saturday morning, October 6, new information indicated Egypt and Syria were going to attack that day. Reservists began to be called up, but there were only hours left.
At about 2:00 that afternoon, Egypt and Syria attacked at the same time. Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai while Syrian forces poured across the Golan Heights.
Across Israel, people were in synagogue.
The streets were nearly empty. Businesses were closed. Radio and television had largely gone quiet. People were fasting, and families were together. Thousands of reservists who might have been scattered across the country on an ordinary Saturday were sitting in synagogues.
Word began moving through congregations. Names were called. Men got up in the middle of services, said goodbye to their families and headed for their units. Some went from Yom Kippur prayers into tanks.
Hours earlier they had been asking to be written into the Book of Life.
The Golan became a nightmare almost immediately. Syrian tanks and troops came across in huge numbers while a much smaller Israeli force tried to hold them back. Below the heights were Israeli towns and kibbutzim, with very little country between the Syrian army and the families living there.
Israeli tank crews fought for hours. Some lost their tanks and climbed into others. Ammunition ran low. Men who had begun the day fasting were suddenly fighting one of the largest tank battles since World War II.
In the Sinai, Egyptian troops crossed the canal under the protection of Soviet-supplied air defenses. Infantry armed with anti-tank missiles tore into Israeli armor. Israeli positions along the Bar-Lev Line were overwhelmed. Soldiers were killed, surrounded or captured.
Back home, families waited.
Israelis were accustomed to wars that moved quickly. This one began with shock and terrible losses. Reservists poured toward the fronts while families tried to figure out where their husbands, sons, brothers and fathers had gone and whether they were still alive.
Israel eventually stopped the Syrian advance and pushed Syrian forces back. In the south, Israeli troops crossed the Suez Canal and established themselves on the Egyptian side. By the time the fighting ended, thousands of Israeli soldiers had been killed and thousands more wounded. Hundreds had been taken prisoner.
Israel had a population of only about three million people. There weren’t many degrees of separation from the dead.
Men had walked out of synagogue on Yom Kippur and gone to war. Some came home wounded. Some came home carrying things they rarely spoke about.
Some didn’t come home.
After the fighting, Israelis wanted to know how this had happened because the warning signs hadn’t been invisible. Troop movements had been seen. Information had arrived. The problem was what happened to that information once it met an idea Israeli intelligence had already accepted.
They believed they understood the conditions under which Egypt would go to war.
Evidence that didn’t fit was explained away.
The Agranat Commission investigated the failures. Military careers ended. Chief of Staff David Elazar left his post. Public anger reached the government, and Golda Meir resigned in 1974.
Four years later, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem. The man who had sent his army across the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur stood before Israel’s Knesset and spoke about peace. In 1979 Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. Israel returned the Sinai, and Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists two years later.
The treaty survived him.
When I was younger, Yom Kippur was mostly about making it through the fast. Saying the prayers. Watching the clock. Hearing the shofar. Finally eating.
I understand the day differently now.
We don’t enter a new year empty-handed. We bring the year we just lived with us. The people we lost. The mistakes we made. The things we wish we had said and the things we desperately wish we could take back. We bring what we learned about other people and, sometimes much harder, what we learned about ourselves.
And we bring our history.
For Jews, remembering has never meant living in the past. We remember because the past has something to tell us. Sometimes it tells us that we were wrong. Sometimes it tells us that we missed what was right in front of us. Sometimes it reminds us that people mean what they say, even when we desperately wish they didn’t.
Maybe age has changed this part for me too. Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting. Hope doesn’t mean pretending. Looking inward doesn’t mean closing our eyes to what is happening around us. We can search ourselves for the ways we’ve failed without carrying the sins of people who hate us. We can want peace with everything in us and still recognize when someone else does not.
We can enter a new year with an open heart without closing our eyes.
Tomorrow evening the shofar will sound and the Book of Life will close for another year. None of us knows what will be written there. Another year isn’t promised. Neither is peace. Neither is the chance to fix tomorrow what we should have fixed today.
So we ask to be forgiven. We forgive where we can. We remember what we’ve learned. And we ask for another year to do better with all of it.
G’mar chatimah tovah.
May we be sealed in the Book of Life.
A quick programming note before I go:
I’m taking Monday off from writing a full post. I’ll still be around with my regular Notes, but there won’t be a new article.
I’m also skipping the standard Lioness Ledger this week. Instead, below you’ll find a simple roundup of anything you may have missed over the past week.
Also, I know I keep saying I’m going to start doing subscriber-only Lives. Life keeps moving, the holidays arrived, and somehow I still haven’t gotten there. I’m so sorry if I’ve disappointed anyone. But I haven’t forgotten. I promise, they’re coming after the holidays!
Wishing everyone observing an easy and meaningful fast.
