OzTorah

Yom Kippur has an amazing fascination. It draws to the synagogue massive numbers of Jews who show very little interest for the rest of the year.

For some it is the day when one shouldn’t be absent; if one doesn’t come, family, friends and fellow congregants say, “We missed you. Were you well?”

There are three serious reasons for the power of Yom Kippur – speech, song and silence:

Speech

The language is old-fashioned but the themes are everlasting.

Franz Rosenzweig never spelt out what tugged at his heart on that fateful Yom Kippur, but he drew back from the brink because he sensed that his life had been lacking.

When we come to shule on Yom Kippur we sense that something is missing in our lives.

In the classical terms of theology, we have sinned. Whatever the sins, they reduce the quality of our lives.

Song

Starting with the poignant Kol Nidrei, the day is full of melody, its minor keys moving to major, its major keys moving to minor. Often the melody outweighs the words.

There are great cantorial pieces and a distinctive underlying chant, but the wise cantor often leaves it to the congregation to sing because that’s how they make the service their own.

Silence

There are ups and downs in the service. One of its great points is its moments for meditation.

Don’t fret if you miss out a few pages. If a thought catches hold of you, let yourself daydream about it. Tease what you can out of the words, the ideas, the moment.

Don’t resort to chatting with your neighbour; chat to yourself, chat to the Almighty.

Silence is speech. God is in the kol d’mamah dakkah, the thin, small inner voice.

I sat there all day on Yom Kippur.

I knew that was what a Jew ought to be doing.

The day had its ups and downs. I looked around. Most of the congregation started off quite avidly.

They didn’t worry too much about the words and the ideas, but they were hooked on the tunes, more or less the same ones we were brought up on. We joined in with gusto.

Then we got irritable and wriggled. The things we could have been doing if it wasn’t Yom Kippur! We didn’t even have the energy to chat too animatedly. The stale air and the lack of food and drink were getting to us. We started dozing and dreaming.

I guess the rabbi, the cantor, the choir were all trying their best. Surely they were as worn out as the rest of us.

Anyhow, there was a moment when my mind perked up and I began thinking – about God of all things.

Probably there was so much God-talk coming from pulpit and bimah that it affected my thinking. I’m not sure how long the daydream went on, but it was certainly about God.

Was it God the Prime Mover, or God the Eternal Thou? I’m not sure. It lasted a few minutes – how many I can’t be certain.

Suddenly it occurred to me – I had actually been thinking about God, about religion, about prayer… even about sin and forgiveness. I suddenly realised. I had found God!

Then what happened? I picked up the prayer book and tried to work out what page we were on. Since I had found God, I suppose any page would have been the right one.

There are people who devote far more attention on the High Holydays to food, fashions and festivities than to penitence, prayer and charity.

There can be little objection to starting a new year with a festive appearance.

Food and fashions are certainly a superficial way of showing it is yom-tov. But they are part of a total mosaic that includes greeting cards, flowers and fruit, staying away from work, family meals after the services; even the anxious enquiries on Yom Kippur as to how each is fasting.

Religious tradition adds other impressive features – white vestments, cherished melodies, old machzorim, historic prayers and especially the blowing of the shofar: even the very size of the milling yom-tov crowds.

Ideally, a universal mood of spiritual exaltation, of inner communion with our Maker, would envelop us completely at this solemn season. But we are fallible and human, and few can maintain real spiritual fervour for long.

We need customs and symbols that keep on impressing us with the meaning of the occasion and turn our thoughts again and again to the deeper spiritual issues.

But the symbols are meaningful only when they succeed in arousing our minds and hearts.

There are times when we achieve this best by closing our minds off from everything which is going on around us, even from the synagogue service, and communing with our own spirit.

There are moments when we need to be still, to uncover our own souls, to face our own consciences.

Not only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It was indeed a wise person who said that someone who has not a moment for himself every day is not really a human being.

In our rational moments we criticise the Yom Kippur confessions: Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, “We admit our guilt; we have sinned, we have transgressed, we have gone astray…” Is it really true?

Classical Christianity made a doctrine of the thought of sin. It said that because Adam sinned, we are all sinners; it says sinfulness comes with the genes, sins are inherent in human nature, and the only way out is theological.

This doctrine says that man sins because he is a sinner; Judaism says that man has no predisposition to sin though he sometimes goes wrong and does the wrong thing. Some Jewish thinkers go as far as to claim that doing good is a person’s true nature.

The Torah says, “If a person sins…” There is an “if” about it. Anyone can make a mistake and if they (who? The kohen gadol! The Sanhedrin! The king! The ordinary person!) go wrong, nothing forces them. They and not their genes are responsible, and they and not their theology can find the solution.

The solution in fact is like a religious form of the three Rs – remorse for the wrong, recognition of the sin, and resolution not to sin again.

Rabbi Dr Raymond Apple z”l passed away in January 2024. As an archive of the Rabbi’s written contributions across his many fields of interest, this site is a tribute to the man and his work. More information about his life is available in the About section. Y’hi zichro baruch.