Growing up, I dreaded Yom Kippur. Not merely the frightening and guilt-evoking liturgy of sin and repentance, not only having to go 24 hours without food, but also for the mood and the obligations of this challenging day itself. 

Our family spent the whole day at temple. My father would insist that we join him in the congregation while my mother sang with the temple choir. For a time, my siblings and I willingly sat with our father, pretending to remain interested in the words and prayers and music and sermons, much of which was above our heads or felt irrelevant to us. 

As we grew older and more rebellious, though, we would slip away, with or without permission, to join our friends and the other teens of the congregation wandering the halls or congregating outside, wreaking mild havoc but rarely reaching the point of needing to be disciplined. One year, for example, I recall discovering the temple break-the-fast being set up in the temple basement during the Yizkor service, presenting a unique challenge.  

While our wanderings from the sanctuary were more or less tolerated throughout the day, my parents actually banned us from sitting with them during Yizkor services in the afternoon, telling us that “one day you’ll need to go to Yizkor, but for now you shouldn’t be here saying these prayers.” Only many years later did I understand. 

Yom Kippur, you see, has countless memories for me, revolving around sin, forgiveness, “thou shalt nots” and “thou shalts” and more. Over the years, I have made peace with the psychology and theology of the Day of Atonement, the need for teshuvah (atonement) and particularly as I have been granted entry into the club of those for whom Yizkor is permissible. In fact, I have come to look forward to this day each year. In need of times of self-reflection and contemplative prayer, I welcome the opportunity to spend a day focused on such an introspective accounting of my life — known as Cheshbon Hanefesh (accounting of the soul). From the large attendance that Yom Kippur inspires for so many of us, I suspect this is a widely shared perspective.

This Cheshbon Hanefesh, however, is not merely for each of us as individuals. Our tradition couches most of the prayers of the Vidui, or Confessional Prayer, in the plural, to teach, in part, that we are all responsible for the sins of humanity, whether we personally have committed each sin or not. “Al chet shechatanu lefanecha….For the sin that we have committed before You…” we intone again and again throughout Yom Kippur. If some have sinned, then we all have sinned.

This communal sense of responsibility teaches an important lesson. We are not merely all responsible for the sins that we permit by our own behavior or by our complicity, or even by our negligence. We are also all responsible for our collective sins — the shortcomings that we have allowed to flourish in our community, together, by our collective failures.

This demands a complicated calculus. As we each seek to do our own teshuvah, which includes the sins we ourselves have committed and those others have committed, we also must think about the times we remained silent when witnessing injustice or harm coming to others, or the times we justified such injustices on the basis of our own self-interest.

The past year has provided ample opportunity for us all to do just this. Countless examples abound, locally and throughout the world, of us our own sense of being wronged, our own hurt, our own fear, our own pain, our own sense of being the victim of injustice. There is no doubt that we have been the victims, that we have been wronged. This is a slippery slope, for we when we construct definitions of injustice or wrongdoing only on the basis of our own experience, we risk coming to the conclusion that what is hurtful to me justifies doing what is hurtful to others. Our tradition, though, we must remember, teaches, in the familiar words of Rabbi Hillel, that “what is hurtful to you, do not do to others. This is the whole Torah — the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.”

Yom Kippur is about all of this. When we have been wronged, when we recognize our own pain, we are challenged to forgive those who have wronged us. Doing so is often unbearable, seemingly impossible, yet ultimately necessary. And when we realize that we have wronged others, we are commanded to change our ways, to do teshuvah, and to return to the essence of our values and our faith.

I no longer dread Yom Kippur. I welcome it, with the painful yet sweet opportunity it prevents for us to feel that we may begin again, inscribed for blessing for another year.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah…May we all be inscribed for a good year — a year of individual and collective cheshbon hanefesh, a year of blessing for all.