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    • How is Yom Kippur celebrated? A Beginner’s Guide to Reconciliation
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    How is Yom Kippur celebrated? A Beginner’s Guide to Reconciliation

    Vaseline Posted on

    Growing up, I had a grudging appreciation for Yom Kippur. The services were long and the fast was uncomfortable, but I appreciated the way it required silence.

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    Rosh Hashanah has come and gone and with it the joy of welcoming a new year. What follows is the great Jewish anti-celebration: Yom Kippur.

    The most important day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur – or the Day of Atonement – ​​offers an opportunity to ask for forgiveness. It concludes the “10 Days of Awe,” which, sandwiched between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, offers Jews a brief period to perform “teshuvah,” or repent.

    Growing up, I had a grudging appreciation for Yom Kippur. The services were long and the fast was uncomfortable, but I appreciated the way it required silence. Although there were always more prayers for those who sought them, my family usually returned home after the main service and lazily let the time pass until the sun set. We exchanged notes on the sermon and eagerly awaited the oversized Costco muffins that usually appeared in our community during recess.

    This year, as the world feels increasingly restless, the chance to dedicate a day solely to solemn reflection feels especially important.

    Yom Kippur dictates a generosity of spirit, imagining that God will see the best parts of us and we may be able to locate them ourselves. In the name of that generosity, this year I am offering a guide – for Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike.

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    Think about mortality

    If Yom Kippur asks one thing of us, it is the recognition of our fragile grip on life. Central to the holiday is a reading, Unetaneh Tokef, which imagines – literally – how any worshiper could die in the coming year.

    Look at the sharp edges of the world, it seems to say, see how you can pierce yourself? Don’t think yourself too big and invincible: you might forget that life is something precious to be honored with Good alive.

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    But the Good The life you imagine on Yom Kippur is not based on indulgence – it requires acts of loving kindness: excess wealth poured out to those in need, patience for friends in times of struggle, reaching out to hold back the subway doors so that a hurried commuter can enter.

    In the end, the world is more likely to be repaired with small pieces of spackle than with a massive rebuild.

    Humble yourself

    “We all live with a gun to our head and no one knows when it will go off,” Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles told a New York Times columnist in 2018. Yom Kippur gives us the opportunity to put our retinol on hold. fueled quest for eternal youth and humbly acknowledge that no future is ever guaranteed, despite our best efforts.

    Asking for forgiveness also requires humility. Yom Kippur is not a passive holiday. You must go public with your atonement, humble yourself in front of others, and offer sincere apologies without the guarantee of being forgiven.

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    In addition, worshipers must perform good deeds without the security of a reward on the other side. Goodness cannot exist merely as a gateway to recognition or affirmation; it must reproduce itself.

    Make room for hope

    There is a reason why Yom Kippur exists alongside Rosh Hashanah. We look back on our shortcomings – individually and as humanity – with the aim of ushering in a better year.

    The hope that emerges then becomes not just a blind wish, but a more honest pursuit, guided by the knowledge of where we went wrong.

    That is the hope that we as Jews channel every year as the sun sets on Yom Kippur. It is a stark recognition of the improbability of the good, and a solemn vow to pump our lives, our communities, and our world as full of it as we can.

    Anna Kaufman is a search and optimization editor for USA TODAY. She covers trending news and is based in New York.

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