Voices of Torah / Yom HaKippurim

Yom Kippur, Holidays Deuteronomy 29:9–14, 30:11–20 (Morning) and Leviticus 19:1-4, 9-18, 32-37 (Afternoon)

D'var Torah By: Lawrence Kushner, Reprinted from ReformJudaism.org

Decades ago, Rabbi Jack Reimer explained Yom Kippur for me this way. It's not saying: I'm sorry I was bad and I won't do it again. That's only a Sunday school, superficial expression of something much deeper and spiritually far more important.

Look at it this way, he suggested: For twenty-four hours you wear white, you don't eat, you don't drink, you don't sleep (much), you don't have sex, and (less well-known) you don't perfume, anoint, or deodor­ize yourself either. Reimer says, just look around the room on Yom Kippur afternoon, say around four o'clock, at a bunch of Jews who have been observing the above laws and customs and you realize you're looking at a room full of people who are dressed up like their own corpses!

They're rehearsing their own deaths! Atonement, shmatonment! Yom Kippur is a day of death-the death of the old year, the death of the old sins, and the death of the old ego. But it is not morbid. Indeed, it is predicated on the hope (and a prayer) that a new year and, above all, a new ego will be born the exact moment that final t'kiah g'dolah shofar blast is sounded. It is a day of death- so that there can be new life. You want that a better and purified you should emerge from the encrusted shell that a year of sinful acting has made you ? There's only one way: The old you has to go! Your "something"must become "Nothing."

The Chasidic master Rabbi Yehiel Michal of Zlochov teaches the same lesson. He cites a sermon by his master, Rabbi Dov Baer of Mez­hirech, first taught in 1777 (Yosher Divrei Emet , Meshullam Feibush of Zabrazh [Jerusa­lem, 1974], p. 14); a translation of the complete text appears in my The Way into Jewish Mystical Tradition [Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000], pp. 18-20).

In order to appreciate the nuance and the tongue-in-cheek humor of this homily, we must revisit and redefine two very common Hebrew words. The first word, yesh, means "somethingness" or simply "isness," but according to the kabbalists, it re­fers to virtually all reality. Yesh is anything (not just material) that has a beginning, an end, a location, a border, geographic coordinates, a definition. It is every thing (and every non-thing) in the world. Yesh is not bad. Indeed, it's only problematic if you think that's all there is. That brings us to the second word, ayin.

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