To those who fully open themselves to it, Yom Kippur is a life-­transforming experience. It tells us that God, who created the universe in love and forgiveness, reaches out to us in love and forgiveness, asking us to love and forgive others. God never asked us not to make mistakes. All He asks is that we acknowledge our mistakes, learn from them, grow through them and make amends where we can.

No religion has held such a high view of human possibility. The God who created us in His image gave us freedom. We are not tainted by original sin, destined to fail, caught in the grip of an evil only divine grace can defeat. To the contrary, we have within us the power to choose life. Together we have the power to change the world.

Nor are we, as some scientific materialists claim, mere concatenations of chemicals, a bundle of selfish genes blindly replicating themselves into the future. Our souls are more than our minds, our minds are more than our brains, and our brains are more than mere chemical impulses responding to stimuli. Human freedom – the freedom to choose to be better than we were – remains a mystery but it is not a mere given. Freedom is like a muscle and the more we exercise it, the stronger and healthier it becomes.

Judaism constantly asks us to exercise our freedom. To be a Jew is not to go with the flow, to be like everyone else, to follow the path of least resistance, to worship the conventional wisdom of the age. To the contrary, to be a Jew is to have the courage to live in a way that is not the way of everyone. Each time we eat, drink, pray or go to work, we are conscious of the demands our faith makes on us, to live God’s will and be one of His ambassadors to the world. Judaism always has been, perhaps always will be, countercultural.

In ages of collectivism, Jews emphasized the value of the individual. In ages of individualism, Jews built strong communities. When most of humanity was consigned to ignorance, Jews were highly literate. When others were building monuments and amphitheaters, Jews were building schools. In materialistic times they kept faith with the spiritual. In ages of poverty they practiced tzedaka so that none would lack the essentials of a dignified life. The sages said that Abraham was called haIvri, “the Hebrew,” because all the world was on one side (ever eĥad) and Abraham on the other (Genesis Raba 42:8). To be a Jew is to swim against the current, challenging the idols of the age whatever the idol, whatever the age.

So, as our ancestors used to say, “S’iz schver tzu zein a Yid” – “It is not easy to be a Jew.” But if Jews have contributed to the human heritage out of all proportion to our numbers, the explanation lies here. Those of whom great things are asked become great – not because they are inherently better or more gifted than others but because they feel themselves challenged, summoned, to greatness.

Few religions have asked more of their followers. There are 613 commandments in the Torah. Jewish law applies to every aspect of our being, from the highest aspirations to the most prosaic details of quotidian life. Our library of sacred texts – Tanakh, Mishna, Gemara, Midrash, codes and commentaries – is so vast that no lifetime is long enough to master it. Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, sought a description that would explain to his fellow Greeks what Jews are. The answer he came up with was, “a nation of philosophers.”

So high does Judaism set the bar that it is inevitable that we should fall short time and again. This means that forgiveness was written into the script from the beginning. God, said the sages, sought to create the world under the attribute of strict justice but He saw that it could not stand. What did He do? He added mercy to justice, compassion to ­retribution, forbearance to the strict rule of law. God forgives. Judaism is a religion, the world’s first, of forgiveness.

Not every civilization is as forgiving as Judaism. There were ­religions that never forgave Jews for refusing to convert. Many of the greatest European intellectuals – among them Voltaire, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Frege and Heidegger – never quite forgave Jews for staying Jews, different, angular, countercultural, iconoclastic. Yet despite the tragedies of more than twenty centuries, Jews and Judaism still flourish, refusing to grant victory to cultures of contempt or the angel of death.

The majesty and mystery of Judaism is that, though at best Jews were a small people in a small land, no match for the circumambient empires that periodically assaulted them, Jews did not give way to self-hate, self-disesteem or despair. Beneath the awe and solemnity of Yom Kippur, one fact shines radiant throughout: that God loves us more than we love ourselves. He believes in us more than we believe in ourselves. He never gives up on us, however many times we slip and fall. The story of Judaism from beginning to end is the tale of God’s love for a people who rarely fully reciprocated that love, yet never altogether failed to be moved by it.

Rabbi Akiva put it best in a mere two words: Avinu Malkeinu (Ta’anit 25b). Yes, You are our Sovereign, God Almighty, Maker of the cosmos, King of kings. But You are also our Father. You told Moses to say to Pharaoh in Your name: “My child, My firstborn, Israel” (Ex. 4:22). That love continues to make Jews a symbol of hope to humanity, testifying that a nation does not need to be large to be great, nor powerful to have influence. Each of us can, by a single act of kindness or generosity of spirit, cause a ray of the divine light to shine in the human darkness, allowing the Shekhina, at least for a moment, to be at home in our world.

More than Yom Kippur expresses our faith in God, it is the expression of God’s faith in us.

I. Shame and Guilt

Judaism is the world’s greatest example of a guilt-and-repentance culture as opposed to the shame-and-honor culture of the ancient Greeks.

In a shame culture such as that of Greek tragedy, evil attaches to the person. It is a kind of indelible stain. There is no way back for one who has done a shameful deed. He is a pariah and the best he can hope for is to die in a noble cause. In a guilt culture like that of Judaism, evil is an attribute of the act, not the agent. Even one who has done wrong has a sacred self that remains intact. He may have to undergo punishment. He certainly has to make amends. But there remains a core of worth that can never be lost. A guilt culture hates the sin, not the sinner. Repentance, rehabilitation and return are always possible.

A guilt culture is a culture of responsibility. We do not blame ­anyone else for the wrong we do. It is always tempting to blame others – it wasn’t me, it was my parents, my upbringing, my friends, my genes, my social class, the media, the system, “them.” That was what the first two humans did in the Garden of Eden. When challenged by God for eating the forbidden fruit, the man blamed the woman. The woman blamed the serpent. The result was paradise lost.

Blaming others for our failings is as old as humanity, but it is disastrous. It means that we define ourselves as victims. A culture of victimhood wins the compassion of others but at too high a cost. It incubates feelings of resentment, humiliation, grievance and grudge. It leads people to rage against the world instead of taking steps to mend it. Jews have suffered much, but Yom Kippur prevents us from ever defining ourselves as victims. As we confess our sins, we blame no one but ourselves.

That is demanding, psychologically and spiritually. Yet it is the price we must pay for freedom. Other ancient literatures record the successes of rulers and empires. The Hebrew Bible is a unique chronicle of failures. No one in its pages is perfect, not the patriarchs and matriarchs, not priests or prophets, not kings or the ruling elite. No history is as painfully honest as that of Tanakh, and it was possible only in the deep belief that God forgives. God pardons; God atones; God is holding out His hand, calling us back with inextinguishable love. That allows us to be honest with ourselves.

II. The Growth Mindset

It also allows us to grow. We owe a debt to cognitive behavioral therapy for reminding us of a classic element of Jewish faith, that when we change the way we think, we change the way we feel. And when we feel differently, we live differently. What we believe shapes what we become.

At the heart of teshuva is the belief that we can change. We are not destined to be forever what we were. In the Torah we see Judah grow from an envious brother prepared to sell Joseph as a slave, to a man with the conscience and courage to offer himself as a slave so that his brother Benjamin can go free.

We see Moses grow from a man lacking the confidence to lead – “Who am I?” (Ex. 3:11), “They will not believe in me” (Ex. 4:1) – to become the greatest leader of all time. The man who once stammered and said of himself, “I am not a man of words” (Ex. 4:10), becomes by the end of his life the most eloquent and visionary of all the prophets.

We see remarkable women transcend their social situation. Tamar, the woman Judah mistakes for a prostitute, eventually teaches him to have the courage to admit he was wrong, reinforcing his role as the first ba’al teshuva in history. Ruth, the woman from Moab, Israel’s enemy, ­displays such growth through her loyalty to Naomi that she becomes the great-grandmother of David, Israel’s greatest king.

We see Hosea, Jeremiah, Jonah and Job wrestle with themselves and with God. That, after all, is what the name Israel means: one who wrestles, not one who accepts the status quo. The figures of the Hebrew Bible are not two-dimensional figures who remain at the end of their lives what they were at the beginning. Theirs may be a painful, but not a tragic, fate.

We know that some people relish a challenge and take risks, while others, no less gifted, play it safe and ultimately underachieve. Psychologists tell us that the crucial difference lies in whether you think of your ability as a fixed quantum or as something developed through effort and experience. Teshuva is essentially about effort and experience. It assumes we can grow.

Teshuva means I can take risks, knowing that I may fail but knowing that failure is not final. Time and again Moses failed to engender in his people a clear sense of history and destiny, even a basic gratitude for what God had done for them. But failing a hundred times does not make a failure. Indeed in God’s eyes none of us is a failure so long as we still have breath to breathe and a life to live.

Teshuva means that if I get it wrong and make mistakes, God does not lose faith in me even though I may lose faith in myself. “Were my father and my mother to forsake me, the Lord would take me in” (Ps. 27:10). Some of the greatest heroes in the Bible did not believe in themselves. Isaiah said, “I am a man of unclean lips” (Is. 6:5). Jeremiah said, “I cannot speak for I am a child” (Jer. 1:6). Jonah, given a mission by God, ran away. God believes in us, even if we do not. That alone is a life-changing fact if we fully open ourselves to its implications.

Teshuva means that the past is not irredeemable. Through ­teshuva undertaken in love, said Resh Lakish, “even deliberate sins may be transformed into merits” (Yoma 86b). Resh Lakish himself was a ba’al teshuva, a reformed bandit who used the strength he had once devoted to robbery to instead save people held hostage. King David, another ba’al teshuva, drew some of his deepest poetry from the pain of his personal abyss.

Teshuva means that from every mistake, I grow. There is no ­failure I experience that does not make me a deeper human being; no challenge I accept, however much I fall short, that does not develop in me strengths I would not otherwise have had.

That is the first transformation of Yom Kippur: a renewed relationship with myself.

III. Our Relationships with Others

The second is a renewed relationship with others. We know that Yom Kippur atones only for sins between us and God, but that does not mean that these are the only sins for which we need to seek atonement. To the contrary: many, even most, of the sins we confess on Yom Kippur are about our relationships with others. Rabbi Ĥanina ben Dosa taught: “In one whom people delight, God delights” (Avot 3:13). Throughout the prophetic and rabbinic literature it is assumed that as we act to others so God acts to us. Those who forgive are forgiven. Those who condemn are condemned.

The days from Rosh HaShana to Yom Kippur are a time when we try to mend relationships that have broken. It takes one kind of moral courage to apologize, another to forgive, but both may be necessary. Failure to heal relationships can split families, destroy marriages, ruin friendships and divide communities. That is not where God wants us to be. As the sages pointed out, God allowed His own name to be blotted out to make peace between husband and wife. They also said that after Sarah died, Abraham took back Hagar and Ishmael into his family, mending the rift that had occurred many years before. Aaron, according to tradition, was loved by all the people because he was able to mend fractured friendships.

Writing as a self-confessed secular Jew, the philosopher Alain de Botton says that Yom Kippur is “one of the most psychologically effective mechanisms ever devised for the resolution of social conflict.” He explains:

The Day of Atonement has the immense advantage of making the idea of saying sorry look like it came from somewhere else, the initiative of neither the perpetrator nor the victim. It is the day itself that is making us sit here and talk about the peculiar incident six months ago when you lied and I blustered and you accused me of insincerity and I made you cry, an incident that neither of us can quite forget but that we can’t quite mention either and which has slowly been corroding the trust and love we once had for each other.¹ (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012).

footnotes: ¹ Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion

Without a designated day, would we ever get around to mending our broken relationships? Often we do not tell people how they have hurt us because we do not want to look vulnerable and small-minded. In the opposite direction, sometimes we are reluctant to apologize because we feel so guilty that we do not want to expose our guilt. As De Botton puts it: “We can be so sorry that we find ourselves incapable of saying sorry.” He adds: “So cathartic is the Day of Atonement, it seems a pity that there should be only one of them a year.”

That is the second transformation of Yom Kippur: a renewed relationship with others.

IV. Coming Home

The third is a renewed relationship with God.

On Yom Kippur, God is close. Admittedly in Judaism we prefer to talk to God than about God. Hence we have relatively little theology. We know that God is beyond our understanding. If I could know God, said one Jewish philosopher, I would be God. Yet Jewish life is full of signals of transcendence, intimations of eternity. We encounter God in three ways: through creation, revelation and redemption.

Through creation: the more we understand of cosmology, the more we realize how improbable the universe is. According to Lord Rees, former president of the Royal Society and Britain’s most distinguished scientist, the margin of error in the six mathematical constants that determine the shape of the physical universe is almost infinitesimally small. The universe is too finely tuned for the emergence of stars, planets and life to have come into existence by chance. The only alternative hypothesis is that there is an infinity of parallel universes of which we happen to inhabit the one congenial to the emergence of life. That raises as many questions as it solves, if indeed it solves any. The more we understand of the sheer improbability of the existence of the universe, the emergence of life from inanimate matter, and the equally mysterious appearance of Homo sapiens, the only life-form capable of asking the question “Why?” the more the line from Psalms rings true: “How numerous are Your works, Lord; You made them all in wisdom” (Ps. 104:24).

Through revelation: the words of God as recorded in the Torah. There is nothing in history to compare to the fact that Jews spent a thousand years (from Moses to the last of the prophets) compiling a commentary to the Torah in the form of the prophetic, historical and wisdom books of Tanakh, then another thousand years (from Malachi to the Babylonian Talmud) compiling a commentary to the commentary in the form of the vast literature of the Oral Torah (Midrash, Mishna and Gemara), then another thousand years (from the Geonim to the Aĥaronim, the later authorities) writing commentaries to the commentary to the commentary.

No people has so loved a book, declaring that its study is a higher religious experience than prayer. In the land of Israel it was their written constitution as a nation. In the Diaspora it was, as Heine put it, the “portable homeland” of the Jews. It remains the source and wellspring from which the West has drawn its great ideals of the sanctity of life, the twin imperatives of justice and love, personal and social responsibility, peace as an ideal, tzedaka as an imperative, the importance of equal access to knowledge and dignity, our duties as guardians of the natural world, and many other ideals without which the West would not be what it is. If we search anywhere for the voice of God, it is here, in the Book of books.

And through history: many great thinkers, including Blaise ­Pascal and Leo Tolstoy, believed that Jewish history was the most compelling evidence of the existence of God. Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) was a former professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow who eventually rejected Marxism and devoted the rest of his life to religion. In The Meaning of History he explains why:

I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint…. Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a ­special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.² (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009), 86–87.

footnotes: ² Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History

But perhaps such reflections are beside the point. For it can sometimes be that God comes to us not as the conclusion of a line of reasoning but as a feeling, an intuition, a sensed presence, as we stand in the synagogue on this holy day – listening to our people’s melodies, saying the words Jews have said from Barcelona to Bergen-Belsen to Benei Berak, from Toledo to Treblinka to Tel Aviv – knowing that we are part of an immense story that has played itself out through the centuries and continents, the tempestuous yet ultimately hope-inspiring love story of a people in search of God and God in search of a people.

There has never been a drama remotely like this in its ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, its songs of praise and lamentation, and we are part of it. For most of us it is not something we chose but a fate we were born into. But as Winston Churchill put it, “Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are beyond question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” Or as the Oxford literary scholar A.L. Rowse wrote toward the end of his life, “If there is one honor in the world I should like, it would be to be an honorary member of the Jewish people.”

V. What Chapter Will We Write in the Book of Life?

In 1888, Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite, was reading his morning papers when, with a shock, he found himself reading his own obituary. It turned out that a journalist had made a simple mistake. It was Nobel’s brother who had died.

What horrified Nobel was what he read. It spoke about “the dynamite king” who had made a fortune from explosives. Nobel suddenly realized that if he did not change his life, that was all he would be remembered for. At that moment he decided to dedicate his fortune to creating five annual prizes for those who’d made outstanding ­contributions in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. Nobel chose to be remembered not for selling weapons of destruction but for honoring contributions to human knowledge. The question Yom Kippur forces on us is not so much “Will we live?” but “How will we live?” For what would we wish to be remembered?

On this day of days we are brutally candid: “Before I was formed I was unworthy, and now that I have been formed it is as if I had not been formed. I am dust while alive, how much more so when I am dead.” Yet the same faith that inspired those words also declared that we should see ourselves and the world as if equally poised between merit and guilt, and that our next act could tilt the balance, for my life and for the world (Maimonides, Laws of Repentance 3:4). Judaism lives in this dialect between our smallness and our potential greatness. We may be dust, but within us are immortal longings.

Yom Kippur invites us to become better than we were in the knowledge that we can be better than we are. That knowledge comes from God. I remember as a student hearing a witty put-down of a brash business tycoon: “He is a self-made man, thereby relieving God of a great responsibility.” If we are only self-made, we live within the prison of our own limitations. The truly great human beings are those who have opened themselves to the inspiration of something greater than themselves.

“Wherever you find the greatness of God,” said Rabbi Yoĥanan, “there you find His humility” (Megilla 31a). Yom Kippur is about the humility that leads to greatness: our ability to say, over and over again, “We have sinned,” and yet know that this is not a maudlin self-abasement, but rather, the prelude to greater achievement in the future, the way a champion in any sport, a maestro in any field, reviews his or her past mistakes as part of the preparation for the next challenge, the next rung to climb.

Jews had a genius for spiritual greatness. Even Sigmund Freud, ­hostile as he was to religion in general, could not but express admiration in the last book he wrote, Moses and Monotheism, for the way Judaism ­produced not one charismatic figure but generation after generation of them. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, even more ambivalent about his Jewish ancestry, wrote in his notebook in 1931, “Amongst Jews ‘genius’ is found only in the holy man.”³ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 18e. Jews had this genius not because they are better than others – often, reading the prophets, you get the impression that the opposite was sometimes true – but because they worked harder at it. The Hebrew word for serving God, avoda, also means “hard work.”

footnotes: ³ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Judaism takes the simple things of life and makes them holy. Kashrut makes eating holy. Kiddush makes drinking holy. The laws of family purity make the physical relationship between husband and wife holy. Study sanctifies the intellect. Prayer reconfigures the mind. Constant acts of generosity and care sharpen our emotional intelligence, honing our skills of empathy. Judaism, as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik put it, sees creativity as the essence of humanity, and our greatest creation is our self. We forge our life in the fire of love: love of God, the neighbor and the stranger. And by sanctifying family and community, Judaism sacralizes the bonds of belonging that make us who we are.

The power of Yom Kippur is that it brings us face to face with these truths. Through its words, music and devotions, through the way it focuses energies by depriving us of all the physical pleasures we normally associate with a Jewish festival, through the sheer driving passion of the liturgy with its hundred ways of saying sorry, it confronts us with the ultimate question: How will we live? Will we live a life that explores to the full the capacity of the human mind to reach out to that which lies beyond it? Will we grow emotionally? Will we learn the arts of loyalty and love? Will we train our inner ear to hear the cry of the lonely and the poor? Will we live a life that makes a difference, bringing the world-that-is a little closer to being the world-that-ought-to-be? Will we open our hearts and minds to God?

It is possible to live a lifetime without asking any of these questions. It is the genius of Judaism that it makes us do so once a year, when God is close to us because we are close to Him. Yom Kippur retains the traces of those two great figures, Moses the prophet and Aaron the priest, who between them created a tension between spontaneity and structure, passion and order, which continues to vitalize the Jewish spirit, giving it the blessings of both restlessness and rest. Alone with God, together with our people, singing the songs and praying the prayers they said in every age under the most diverse circumstances, we find ourselves questioned, challenged, summoned, inspired.

Like Moses on the mountain, like Aaron in the Holy of Holies, we come as near as we can to being face to face with God, and after it we are not the same as we were before. That personal transformation, the ability to make our tomorrow greater than our yesterday, is the essence of teshuva and of Yom Kippur.

The most demanding day of the Jewish year, a day without food and drink, a day of prayer and penitence, confession and pleading, in which we accuse ourselves of every conceivable sin, still calls to Jews, touching us at the deepest level of our being. It is a day in which we run toward the open arms of God, weeping because we may have disappointed Him, or because sometimes we feel He has disappointed us, yet knowing that we need one another, for though God can create universes, He cannot live within the human heart unless we let Him in.

It is a day not just of confession and forgiveness but of a profound liberation. Atonement means that we can begin again. We are not held captive by the past, by our failures. The book is open and God invites us – His hand guiding us the way a scribe guides the hand of those who write a letter in a Torah scroll – to write a new chapter in the story of our people, a chapter uniquely our own yet one that we cannot write on our own without being open to something vaster than we will ever fully understand. It is a day on which God invites us to greatness.

May He forgive us. May we, lifted by His love, rise to meet His call.