Personal Reflection before Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur is both an intensely communal time as well as deeply personal time of reflection on our past year and our shortcomings.
As a community we prayer together more so on Yom Kippur than on any other day in our calendar. The Shaliach Tzibbur (communal emissary) prefaces the Kol Nidrei Service with the following words:
“With the consent of the Almighty, and consent of this congregation, in a convocation of the heavenly court, and a convocation of the lower court,3The court of man. we hereby grant permission to pray with transgressors”
Yom Kippur is the day we try to achieve atonement. It is the day that historically God forgave the Jewish people for the sin of the golden calf. However, we acknowledge that we cannot achieve this alone. It is only as part of a community that we can find personal redemption, cleanse our souls, and atone for our sins. We must even invite the transgressors to join us in prayer.
As an individual we stand no chance before God’s judgement. By what merit can I be written into the book of life? We stand no chance. However, as a community we each support and provide merit for each other. We each have Mitzvot and therefore merits that another does not. This goes into a collective “merit pot” so to speak. We become part of something greater than ourselves.
The Jewish people are more than just a collection of souls sharing a religious code of rituals and ethics and beliefs. We are literally considered like “one person with one heart”.
Yet for most people this year Yom Kippur will be marked at home. No communal singing. No sense of awe inspired by the holy incantations of a chazzan. On the one hand this is a sad time. Yet on the other hand I feel that although we are physically separated and socially distanced, Yom Kippur is a sacred time when we can be spiritually close to one another through our thoughts and prayers.
Yom Kippur is a day of transcendence beyond time and space. On the holiest day (Yom Kippur) the holiest man (the high priest) would enter the holiest place (the holy of holies in the Temple). There he would utter the ineffable name of Hashem and achieve atonement for the people.
We are taught that one of the miracles in the Tabernacle was that the Holy Ark took up no space in the holy of holies. If you were to measure the length of the ark and the staves it would take you past the curtain (Parochet). Yet miraculously the Ark fit perfectly inside without the staves able to fit.
The holy of holies is the place beyond place, the space beyond space, where “heaven and earth kiss”. In the days of the Temple the High priest entered this intensely spiritual place and put his life literally on the line in order to achieve atonement and purity for the entire Jewish people.
Today we have no physical Temple. We have no Holy of Holies. Instead the day of Yom Kippur itself provides atonement when we sincerely tune into its spiritual rhythms.
This Is the day when we can access our innermost divine core. It is a day when we are spiritually connected with every single Jew past present and future. That is on reason why Yizkor is so important connecting us in the present with souls of the past. No Jew is left out of Yom Kippur! Although we are socially distant, the Jewish soul CANNOT be spiritually distanced from itself because in essence we are all one.
As our mystics teach “Torah, the Jewish people (Israel) and Hashem are One.
May Hashem answer all our Teffilot and may the entire world be written and sealed in the book of life.
Shanna Tova and fast well.