Shalom everyone,
This year, the date God has chosen for the opening of the gates of heaven begins on Sunday evening, 13th October 2024. So I thought I would write a little about one particular aspect of the Great Day, ha-Yom ha-Gadol.
Before I begin, I just want to mention a belief that is found in the mainstream Jewish community, and that is that on Yom Kippur, God seals your fate to give you either a good or a bad year. If you are good and repent of everything, God will give you a good year; if you don’t repent of everything, God will give you a bad year. But then if a good and decent person has repented of everything, and they go on to have a horrible year (which is nothing to do with their own personal behaviour), what are they supposed to think about God then – that God is an unjust judge? I therefore have to disagree with this superstition, because that’s what it is. It makes Yom Kippur all about punishment and just deserts, and that’s not what Yom ha-Kippurim is meant to be about. I would have to reject the mainstream Talmudic idea that the Great Day is about deciding your fate for the coming 12 months. Yom ha-Kippurim is about Expiation, which is what the Hebrew word kippurim means; it’s not about punishment.
Expiation is not simply about forgiveness. When you repent, you are immediately forgiven by God of the sin you are repenting. However, there is something greater going on that many people don’t realise, and as a result, they don’t really get out of the Day what they are supposed to.
How you approach the Day, and how you look at what God is actually doing for you, affects the eventual outcome of the Day for you. You are not flagellating your soul; you are not going before a tyrant-king to be beaten and bloodied. You are returning home to your heavenly Father, who throws his arms around you and takes you back into his gracious and loving embrace. And the power of that embrace is meant to heal us of all that is hurt and broken inside us.
Repentance prepares us to return to YHVH, our heavenly Father. Whatever it is God does to us or for us on the Day of Expiations, is because YHVH loves us. And the Great Day, the holiest day of the year, is not about punishing us. It’s not even about scolding us or rebuking us. It’s about restoring us, healing us, and making us better (Lev 16:30 tells us that this day has been given to us for cleansing). It’s about examining our faults, see how they have hurt others and ourselves, and realising how we can do better.
During these eight days of preparing to draw near to YHVH’s Glory, we have had to look at ourselves honestly, with humility, knowing that there is nothing we can hide from God; we can’t simply blame someone else. God knows it all, and it is impossible to lie to our Heavenly Father. But there is more to this process of honesty and humility than simply saying sorry. When we realise that God is not going to beat us at the end of this repentance, it gives us the courage to be honest with ourselves – God cannot punish you for something you have repented of and turned away from.
The wrong way of going about self-reflection
The most destructive view of sin and guilt comes from a warped view of religion itself, and of who God is. If your approach to religion is to see it as an institutionalised method of controlling people, then that goes on to permeate every aspect of life, and ultimately, how we perceive sin and guilt. When the God we worship is portrayed as someone who is there to control us, making sure we behave and don’t step out of line, we naturally project that fearful image in our practice of religion. God is presented in this worldview as someone who does not want to be messed with, someone who needs to be appeased, so that God won’t be angry and chastise us.
This human-made kind of god only succeeds in diminishing us, making us into something small and weak. We become slaves to a wrathful master, and that’s all we’ll ever be. So how does that affect how we see sin and repentance? It becomes more about control and punishment, and then we are turning God into an abusive parent, who is only able to bring out the least in us, because in an abusive relationship, that’s all we are able to give. We do what we do because we have to. Practicing religion this way simply perpetuates this abuse, and we are merely living in an open prison, generation upon generation. Or in a bad marriage that we cannot ever escape from. That’s not love. That’s not who YHVH is; it’s not the YHVH we know.
Furthermore, this outlook turns the holiest day of the year into nothing special. It makes us fearful about a day which is instead about healing and a blessed release.
A sensible approach to guilt and remorse
Expiation is about re-empowerment, healing us by the power of God’s Glory, and making us strong once more.
Unless we have done something that warrants criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit, our wrongdoings are mostly connected with our relationships with other people, or specifically in our relationship with God.
Most of us are basically good and decent people. It is therefore unhealthy to beat ourselves up and humiliate ourselves spiritually and emotionally. On this holiest and most special of days, God doesn’t want us to do something that will harm ourselves, and end up making things worse – that’s the exact opposite of why the Great Day exists. In the very act of coming back from whatever has injured our relationship with God, and in returning to God’s ways, we are doing something that makes God love us more, not punish us (remember how joyful the father of the prodigal son was when he returned to him? Our realisation of our current state, and who we are returning to, makes all the difference).
Using the Day of Expiations in the right way, to get the most out of it
When YHVH our God created us, God created us perfect. There was nothing wrong with us. Then we were born on earth, and our experiences have perhaps turned us this way or that, we made the wrong decisions, we did things in the heat of the moment, and perhaps they were not the smartest things to have done, and something inside us feels hurt or even broken.
Rather than viewing the Day of Expiations as a time for God to berate us, look at it rather as an opportunity for God to heal us, to mend what has been broken over the last year, cure us of the weight of our burdens and remove them, so that we can be restored to full health. We are, in effect, being restored to our original factory settings; we are being given a clean slate once more, to start again.
In Israelite theology, sin was not merely disobedience to God; sin was whatever diminished the overall health of the soul. Sin was therefore like a state of sickness of the soul, and YHVH is our Great Healer. Yom ha-Kippurim is like entering a heavenly hospital. We are coming before our Healer and Saviour to be cured, so that we can continue along on God’s mission with renewed vigour.
There is a sense of a great weight being lifted from us, that we perhaps didn’t think possible. This is what coming before the power of God’s Glory enables to happen. Even though our sins have injured us, wounded us and bruised us, it is like God is laying hands on us, taking away all the hurt, the pain and the ache, and returning us to what we were on the day we were born, and took our first breath. On the Day of Expiations, we are healed and reborn. At the end of the Day, we are meant to feel renewed, hopeful and positive about our ongoing life-journey once more.
As part of the closing liturgy of the ancient Temple services, the High Priest would say,
“On this day, through your repentance and prayers, expiation has been made for you to restore you and make you whole; from all your sins you are now clean before YHVH.”
These profound and healing words are included in the Massorite Talmidi liturgy, to remind us what YHVH, our Saviour and Redeemer, has personally done for us on this holiest day.
I hope you all have a meaningful fast on Sunday and Monday.
Your brother
Shmuliq