SPIRIT
TORAH EXPANDED
Yom Kippur: The Happiest Day of the Year
H
ow would you describe Yom Kippur? A solemn day? A day of prayer and supplication? A day of abstinence? The Mishnah has a different description. It says Yom Kippur is a day of joy — in fact, one of the two happiest days of the year. This Rabbi seems surprising to Warren Goldstein say the least. Yom Kippur is a day spent praying and fasting and generally putting aside the things that bring us physical enjoyment. The Talmud explains the happiness and joy of the day is because it’s a day of forgiveness for our misdeeds, the opportunity to begin our lives afresh, free from the mistakes and wrongdoings of the past. It’s the miraculous opportunity to go back and change history … our history. The Hebrew word for repentance is teshuvah, which literally means “return.” Through teshuvah, we return to that pristine state in which there was no distance or disconnect in our rela-
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tionship with our Creator and with our fellow human beings. Of course, it doesn’t just happen. Real repentance takes heart-rending effort and application. The Rambam, in his Laws of Repentance (Laws of Teshuvah, 2:2), defines the process of repentance and sets out its various components: regretting the mistakes of the past, desisting from that wrongdoing in the present, resolving not to return to this course of action in the future and, finally, confession, an explicit verbal admission of all of our misdeeds. The process of teshuvah leads to forgiveness at any time, but it has special power on Yom Kippur. As the Rambam writes: “Yom Kippur is a time of teshuvah for every individual and for the multitudes, and it is the climax of forgiveness … therefore everyone is obligated to do teshuvah and to confess on Yom Kippur.” (Laws of Teshuvah, 2:7). On Yom Kippur, the force of Divine forgiveness is at its apex. Our heartfelt pleas for forgiveness are more readily accepted.
AN EXTRA STEP IS NEEDED The Rambam points out that the process of teshuvah is sufficient when it comes to misdeeds that have damaged our relationship with God, but words and actions that cause harm to other people require an extra step. To rectify the harm done to others, we need to personally ask their forgiveness, as well as make any monetary restitution if we have caused them financial loss. Indeed, the Rambam says, based on the Talmud, that Yom Kippur does not atone for sins between one person and another unless personal forgiveness has been granted. It is for this reason that in the days leading up to Yom Kippur,we ask for forgiveness from whoever we have wronged in the past year, so as to be able to access the gift of Divine forgiveness. The Rambam writes that it’s important for the person who has been wronged to act with compassion and graciously grant forgiveness. In this way, relationships damaged by our wrongdoing can be fully restored.
The bottom line is that the redemptive, purifying powers of Yom Kippur can only be accessed through real action and sincere intention — through a deep and meaningful teshuvah process. This also explains why an important part of our Yom Kippur prayers is devoted to viduy — “confession.” In each of the Yom Kippur Amidahs, there is a section devoted to confession. The fact that the confessions formula is embedded in the most intimate and personal of our prayers — the Amidah — indicates our confession is meant to be a direct encounter with God, a moment of truth as we stand before our Creator, our defenses down, without any pretensions of innocence. The relationship between confession and the other components of the teshuvah process is important to understand. The teshuvah process is largely an internal process of transformation, buried in the heart, mind and soul of a person. Regret for the past and resolve for the future are a state of mind. It is
