It was the most shocking, unexpected sin in history. The Israelites were encamped near Mount Sinai. They had just been liberated from slavery. No exiled people had ever been freed this way before. The supreme Power had intervened in history to rescue the supremely powerless. The rescue had been accompanied throughout by signs and wonders. Ten plagues had struck the Egyptians until Pharaoh let the people go.

Even then the wonders did not cease. When the people were thirsty on their journey through the desert, God sent them water from a rock. When they were hungry, he gave them manna from heaven. When they came up against the impassable barrier of the Sea of Reeds, God divided the waters so that they could cross on dry land. More than three thousand years later we have not stopped telling the story, the greatest narrative of hope the world has ever known.

Then, at Mount Sinai, the people had experienced the greatest revelation in history, when God spoke to an entire nation and made a covenant with them, promising to be their Sovereign and Protector, inviting them to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, a nation unlike any other, constituted by its faith.

Now, forty days later, after the memory of that moment had receded, the people wondered what had become of their leader. Moses had climbed the mountain to receive a record of the covenant on tablets of stone, and had not returned. The people panicked. What were they to do in the absence of the man who led them out of Egypt and communicated with God on their behalf? They felt the need for a substitute. They clamored around Aaron. They made a golden calf. Even today, reading the story, it remains a shocking moment. From the heights they had descended to the depths. God, aware of what was happening, told Moses: “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt” (Ex. 32:7).

Moses prays. Never had there been a prayer as long, protracted, passionate, as this. “I fell prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights; I ate no bread and drank no water, because of all the sin you had committed, doing what was evil in the Lord’s sight and so arousing His anger” (Deut. 9:18). In the end God relented. He agreed to forgive the people, and promised Moses a new set of tablets to replace those he had broken in his anger and now lay in fragments beyond repair.

The new tablets symbolized a new beginning. For another forty days Moses was with God. He then descended the mountain, holding the tablets. The people saw him and what he was carrying and knew that they had been forgiven. When Moses came down the mountain with the second tablets, that day became the enduring image of ­forgiveness. Moses descended on the tenth of Tishrei, and thereafter, the anniversary of that day would become established as a time of forgiveness for all generations.

There is a daring midrash on this, taking as its point of departure the line from Psalm 61, “Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer.” The psalm, like many others, begins with the word LaMenatze’aĥ, literally, “For the conductor, the director of music.” The word could be read, however, as “For the victor,” and with a truly remarkable inversion, the midrash interprets this as “For the victor who sought to be defeated”:

For the victor who sought to be defeated, as it is said [Is. 57:16], I will not accuse them forever, nor will I always be angry, for then they would faint away because of Me – the very people I have created. Do not read it thus, but, I will accuse in order to be defeated. How so? Thus said the Holy One, blessed be He: When I win, I lose; and when I lose, I win. I defeated the generation of the Flood, but I lost thereby, for I destroyed My own creation, as it says [Gen. 7:23], Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out. The same happened with the generation of the Tower of Babel and the people of Sodom. But in the days of Moses who defeated Me [by persuading Me to forgive the Israelites whom I had sworn to destroy], I gained for I did not destroy Israel. (Pesikta Rabati 9)

Moses is the hero who defeated God – which turned out to be God’s own deepest victory. When Moses came down with the symbol of the power of penitential prayer, that day became the first Yom Kippur.

I. The Aftermath of Sinai: Penitential Prayer

That is not the only legacy of that moment, however. Something else happened that has had a decisive impact on Jewish prayer. To understand it we must turn to the great scene when Moses, having secured the people’s forgiveness, asks God to show him His glory (Ex. 33:18). God tells Moses to stand in the crevice of a rock. There God will cause His glory to pass by. Moses will not be able to see God directly, “for no one may see Me and live,” but he will come as close as is possible for a human being:

And the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed in the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in loving-kindness and truth, extending loving-kindness to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, rebellion and sin, and absolving [the guilty who repent]….” (Ex. 34:5–7)

Note that God speaks these words, which became known as the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, not Moses. What is God doing at this point? God Himself says, “I am making a covenant with you” (Ex. 34:10). But it is not yet clear what this means. After all, God had just made a covenant with the people. They had endangered it by their sin, but Moses had prayed for and achieved their pardon. What then is this new covenant with Moses? The answer to all these questions becomes clear only two books later, in the book of Numbers.

It is then that the people commit another sin as grievous as the making of the golden calf. Moses had sent spies to look at the land. They had come back with a demoralizing report. The land is indeed good, they said, flowing with milk and honey. But the people are strong. Their cities are highly fortified. We will not be able to defeat them. They are giants. We are grasshoppers (Num. 13).

At this point the people, despondent and hopeless, say, “Let’s choose a leader and go back to Egypt” (Num. 14:4). As He did at the time of the golden calf, God threatens to destroy the people and begin a nation anew with Moses. Again Moses prays to God to forgive the people, for His sake if not for theirs. Then he adds a new element to his prayer:

Now may the Lord’s strength be displayed, just as You have declared: “The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in loving-kindness, forgiving iniquity and rebellion.” Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished; He punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation. In accordance with Your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as You have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now. (Num. 14:17–19)

Moses is doing something he has not done before. Previously he has prayed on the basis of how God’s acts will look to the world, and on the basis of His covenant with the patriarchs. Now he is praying on the basis of God’s own nature. He is, as it were, recalling God to Himself. Essentially he is repeating what God Himself had said at Mount Sinai. He says so. He says, “as You have declared,” as if to say, “These are Your words, not mine.”

Only now do we fully understand what God was doing on that previous occasion. He was teaching Moses how to pray. This is how the sages put it, with their characteristic daring:

Were it not written in the Torah it would be impossible to say it, but this teaches that God wrapped Himself in a tallit like a leader of prayer and taught Moses the order of prayer. He said: Whenever Israel sin, say these words and I will forgive them. (Rosh HaShana 17b)

That is what Moses inferred, and what he did during the episode of the spies. We now understand what God meant earlier when He said, “I am making a covenant with you.” This was a covenant specifically about the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy. God was saying that when Israel said these words, He would relent and forgive. As for the anthropomorphic idea that God “wrapped Himself” in a tallit, the sages are translating the words “vaya’avor…al panav” (Ex. 34:6) not as “God passed before him [Moses]” but rather, “God passed [a cloak, a cloud] over His face” – so that Moses would not see His face (Malbim). The tallit is the screen separating us from God, the distance that allows God to be God and humans to be human.

No sooner does Moses pray this prayer, than God says two momentous words that will be repeated time and again during Yom Kippur: Salaĥti kidvarekha, “I have forgiven, as you asked” (Num. 14:20). So forgiveness for the sin of the golden calf was more than a one-time event. It gave Moses and his successors the words needed to secure divine forgiveness on other occasions also. The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy are the prayer God taught humanity, the prayer Moses used successfully after the episode of the spies.

The dual episode of the calf and the spies became an essential element of our devotions on Yom Kippur and other penitential days, the prayers we know as Seliĥot. Every time we say them we reenact the drama of Moses pleading for his people. Seliĥot take us back to the scene of Moses in the crevice of a rock at Mount Sinai as God’s glory passed by. It was one of the great moments in the history of the prophets.

II. The Second Yom Kippur

But prophets are not the only type of religious leader in Judaism, and for a compelling reason. There was only one Moses. Not every generation produces a prophet. We have not had them in Judaism since Malachi two and half millennia ago.

Judaism begins in a series of transfiguring moments of epiphany. Something momentous happens. The world seems lit as if by a heavenly light. God has entered the human arena. People glimpse new possibilities. The world will never be quite the same again. So it was when Abraham first heard the call of God, when Moses encountered God in the burning bush, when the Israelites left Egypt on their way to freedom, and when the sea divided and they passed through on dry land. But how do you turn unique moments into ongoing continuity? How do you translate them into the biorhythms of succeeding generations? How do you prevent epoch-making moments fading into the distant past?

That is when we need memory and ritual. You take a unique event and turn it into a recurring ceremony. You turn linear time into cyclical time. You reenact history by writing it into the calendar. The Hebrew word for calendar, luaĥ, also means “tablet.” The tablets of stone are written onto the tablet of the year and thus into the tablet of the heart. The descent of Moses from the mountain in a blaze of divine light was to become not a once-only event but a regularly repeated one. Thus Yom Kippur as an annual event, the Sabbath of Sabbaths of the Jewish year, was born.

But that required someone other than a prophet. The prophet lives in the immediacy of the moment, not in the endlessly reiterated cycles of time. This required religious leadership of a different order, namely, the priest. The priest represents order, structure, continuity, the precisely formulated ritual followed in strict, meticulous obedience. Max Weber called this the routinization of charisma. The first Day of Atonement needed the intercession of a Moses, but the second and subsequent occasions required the agency of an Aaron, a High Priest. That is indeed how the Torah describes it in Leviticus 16.

The service of the High Priest on Yom Kippur was high drama. It was an event like no other. It involved strange rituals performed at no other time, such as the casting of lots on two animals, one of which was offered as a sacrifice to God, the other of which was led, bearing the sins of the people, “to Azazel.” There is nothing remotely comparable in any of the other Temple rituals.

This was the moment of supreme solemnity when, each year, the High Priest atoned for the sins of the entire nation. He prepared for it for seven days in advance. Elaborate contingency measures were taken in case at the last moment he was unable to officiate. It involved an ­elaborate ­choreography of ritual and changes of garments. There were public moments when the High Priest appeared before the people robed in gold and splendor. There were also intensely private ones, as when he entered the Holy of Holies alone, dressed in a simple white tunic, and communed with God.

The transition from the first to the second Yom Kippur involved a move from prophet to priest. This is a huge difference. Prophets and priests were different kinds of people who served God in different ways. What was appropriate to one was inappropriate, even forbidden, to the other. Judaism is a religion of distinctions and differences. Only thus do we bring order to the world. Judaism radically distinguishes between priestly and prophetic sensibilities. Each has its place in the religious life. Each receives eloquent expression on Yom Kippur. But they are ­different, especially when it comes to atonement and sin.

III. Priests and Atonement

Some of the differences between priests and prophets are obvious. Priesthood was dynastic. It passed from father to son, from Aaron to his descendants. Prophecy was not. Moses’ children did not succeed him. The son of a prophet is not necessarily a prophet. In general, the prophets were drawn from no particular tribe, class, region or occupational group. Prophecy is a uniquely individual gift that you do not inherit.

The priesthood was exclusively masculine, whereas there were women prophets as well as men. Tradition counts seven: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Ĥuldah and Esther. Priests wore robes of office; prophets had none. Priests functioned within the precincts of the Temple; prophets lived among the people.

The authority of the priest was official, while that of the prophet was personal. That is why the prophets were so distinctive. Their ­personalities shaped their perception and message. Hosea was not Amos. Isaiah was not Jeremiah. Prophet and priest exemplified Max Weber’s famous distinction between charismatic and traditional-legal authority.

What I want to explore here, though, is the difference between Torat Kohanim and Torat Nevi’im – the codes that guided priestly and prophetic sensibilities – in their response to the religious life, obedience and sin, atonement and repentance. We are used to thinking about these things as if they all belonged to a single system. They do now, but they did not always. When prophets and priests were the active Jewish ­religious leaders, they had different ways of thinking about the life of faith, so far apart that they hardly overlapped at all.

For the priest, the key words of the religious life are kadosh, holy, and tahor, pure. To be a Jew is to be set apart: that is what the word kadosh, holy, actually means. This in turn has to do with the special closeness the Jewish people have to God. Because of this we are bound to a special code of conduct that gives expression to this singularity. It means, for example, eating only certain kinds of food and being bound to a strict discipline of sexual ethics. In Torat Kohanim, the priestly law, there are statutes, ĥukkim, that do not seem to make obvious sense in terms of conventional ethics, such as not eating meat and milk together, or not wearing clothes of mixed wool and linen, or not sowing fields with mixed seeds. All these laws have to do with the special perspective of Torat Kohanim.

They have to do with order. The priestly mind sees the universe in terms of distinctions, boundaries and domains, in which each object or act has its proper place and must not be mixed with another. The priest’s task is to maintain boundaries and respect limits. For the priest, goodness equals order. We learn this from the way God created the world. He took chaos – tohu vavohu – and turned it into a finely tuned universe with its myriad life-forms, each with its ecological niche, its place in the scheme of things. A world that is ordered is good. One that is chaotic is bad and unsustainable.

So Jews are charged to respect and honor boundaries and differences by obeying the will of God, Creator of the world and Architect of its order. Priests see the world in terms of strictly defined categories: kodesh and ĥol, holy and profane; tahor and tameh, pure and impure. The key priestly verbs are lehavdil, “to distinguish,” “to separate,” “to demarcate,” and lehorot, “to teach” in the sense of giving halakhic rulings.

Priests have a strong moral sense. The commands to love your neighbor and the stranger as yourself occur, in the Torah, in the most priestly of the books, Leviticus, and are taught alongside the ĥukkim, the statutes, that have no apparent moral content. The highest virtue for the priest is obedience: doing exactly as God told us to do. Prophets often acted on the spur of the moment. That is what Moses did when he smashed the tablets on seeing the golden calf. But there is absolutely no place for spontaneity in the world of the priest.

Nadav and Avihu, two of Aaron’s sons, spontaneously made a fire offering at the consecration of the Tabernacle and died as a result. When priests, charged with maintaining order, act spontaneously, it is like mixing milk and meat, or matter and anti-matter. It creates disorder, and disorder in the moral universe is like entropy in the physical universe. It means a loss of energy, a diminution of the presence of God. So when people sin, they have to restore order through the appropriate ritual.

When the Temple stood, this involved purification if you had become defiled, or the bringing of a sacrifice if you had done wrong. You had to come to the Temple because that, in the world of the priest, is where humans meet God. God is everywhere, but we meet Him only in special places at special times. Each time has its appropriate sacrifice and service, just as each prayer has its appropriate words. It is through acting exactly as God has prescribed that we restore the order we have damaged through our sins.

Listening carefully to how the Torah describes the ritual of the High Priest on Yom Kippur, we hear the key terms of the priestly sensibility:

When he finishes bringing atonement for the holiest place and the Tent of Meeting and the altar, he shall offer up the living goat. Aaron shall press his hands onto the head of the living goat and confess all the guilt of Israel, and all of their rebellions, all of their sins…. For you will be atoned on this day and made pure; of all your sins before the Lord you shall be purified. (Lev. 16:20–21, 30)

The key themes are confession, purification and atonement, the last of which occurs a sizable twenty-three times in the space of a single chapter. The day itself, the tenth of Tishrei, is described three times in the Torah as Yom (Ha)Kippurim, the “Day of Atonements.”

The root k-p-r, “atone,” has a variety of meanings. It means “to cover over”: Noah was told to cover (vekhafarta, Gen. 6:14) the ark with pitch. The gold covering of the Ark in the Tabernacle was called a kaporet. A kofer was also a ransom, a sum paid to redeem a debt or avoid a hazard (see Ex. 21:30).

Guilt, therefore, is seen as a kind of debt incurred by the sinner to God and must be redeemed by the performance of a ritual, confession, and the payment of a ransom, the sin offering. This “covers over” or obliterates the sin. It also cleanses the sinner since sin leaves a mark on the soul. It is a kind of defilement (see Nahmanides to Lev. 4:2).

Sin, for the priest, is the transgression of a boundary, and there are specific names for the different kinds of sin: ĥet, for an unintentional sin, avon for a deliberate sin, and pesha for a sin committed as a rebellion. All sin threatens the Divine-human harmony on which the universe depends. Confession accompanied by sacrifice restores that harmony, and the ritual itself must follow a highly structured procedure. Structure is of the essence, for the priest is the guardian of order, and only by obediently following divine instructions do we honor the order God made in creating the universe. Note that the fundamental concern of the priest is the relationship between the people and God.

Note also what is missing from the priestly account. There is nothing here about the relationship of human beings with one another. The verb shuv, to “return” or “repent,” does not appear at all. The priest is engaged in kapara and tahara, atonement and purification, not with teshuva, repentance and return.

IV. Prophets and Repentance

The prophets are quite different. They use different words. They think in different ways. Here, for example, are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea and Joel on the subject of repentance:

Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of My sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: If your sins are like scarlet, they shall be whitened like snow; should they be as red as crimson, they shall become like wool. (Is. 1:16–18) Now reform your ways and your actions and obey the Lord your God. Then the Lord will relent and not bring the disaster He has pronounced against you. (Jer. 26:13) Return, Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall! Take words with you and return to the Lord. Say to Him: “Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer the fruit of our lips.” (Hos. 14:2–3) Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in loving-kindness, and He relents from sending calamity. (Joel 2:13)

This is a completely different way of thinking. The prophets are intensely concerned with social morality. They regard injustice, corruption, the neglect of the poor and the oppression of the weak as national catastrophes. They are not indifferent to the relationship between the people and God – far from it. They constantly castigate idolatry. But they see this in moral terms. It is an act of betrayal, disloyalty, faithlessness. Also they are concerned less with outward ritual than with inner remorse: “Rend your heart and not your garments.” They are not opposed to ritual and sacrifice, but they are outraged when it is used as an attempt, as it were, to bribe God to avert His eyes from evil and injustice.

Note also that the prophets speak from and in the midst of history. Sin is not something that has consequences only for the spiritual relationship between the people and God. It damages the nation’s fate. It threatens its future. When drought, famine, war and defeat happen it is because the people have sinned, and if they continue to do so, worse will follow.

The language the prophets use is quite different from that of the priests. Time and again they use the word the priests never use, namely “return,” shuv, from which we get the word teshuva. Return to God, they say, and He will return to you. The priestly word k-p-r, “atone,” plays almost no role whatsoever in the prophetic literature. ­Isaiah uses it rarely, Jeremiah only once and negatively (“Do not ­forgive their crimes or blot out their sins from Your sight” [18:23]). The twelve minor prophets do not use it at all (Amos uses it once [5:12] to mean a bribe). This is particularly noticeable in the book of Jonah whose entire theme is repentance.

There is one other difference between the language of priests and prophets. They both make use of the verb s-l-ĥ, to forgive. But the prophets use it always and only in the active form: God forgives. Priests use it exclusively in the passive form: venislaĥ, “it will be forgiven.”

So we have two types of religious leader, the priest and the prophet, both of whom serve the same God as part of the same faith and the same people, whose visions of the spiritual-moral life are quite different. The priest thinks of sin primarily in terms of the relationship between humans and God. The prophet sees the effects of sin on ­society. He or she knows that if you dishonor God you will eventually dishonor human beings.

What angers the prophet is seeing people trying to have it both ways – honoring God by bringing sacrifices at the Temple while exploiting or oppressing their fellow humans. Don’t think you can fool God, the prophet says. You cannot ignore Him and survive as a nation. The prophet speaks not in the language of holy and profane, pure and defiled, ­commandment and sin, but in terms of the great covenantal virtues: ­tzedek, righteousness, mishpat, justice, ĥesed, love, and raĥamim, compassion.

The prophet does not speak about putting things right by sacrifice and confession but by a change of heart and deed, abandoning evil and returning to God. The one exception was Ezekiel, the only person to use both a prophetic and a priestly vocabulary. The reason is simple: ­Ezekiel was that rare phenomenon, a prophet who was also a priest (unlike ­Jeremiah, both roles are evident in the language of Ezekiel).

Priests and prophets belong to different worlds. The only reason we think of them together is because of the history of Yom Kippur. The first Yom Kippur was brought about by Moses, the greatest of the prophets. The second and subsequent Days of Atonement belonged to Aaron and his descendants, the High Priests.

It took historical catastrophe and a religious genius to bring the two worlds together. The catastrophe was the destruction of the Second Temple. The genius was Rabbi Akiva.