VIDUY – CONFESSION Confession is the hardest act in the moral life, since Homo sapiens has been endowed with an inexhaustible capacity for self-justification and self-deception. Only the knowledge that God loves, forgives and never gives up on us, makes it possible. The confession as we have it today is the result of a long process of development, with its roots in the Torah, many elements from Mishnaic and Talmudic times, and further elaborations over the centuries. It resolves a series of tensions between conflicting considerations. It is powerful to declare our sins in public but it can also seem shameless, almost like bragging. It is good to confess our sins in the first person plural – “We” rather than “I” – since “All Israel are responsible for one another” (Shevuot 39a); we are responsible not only for our own sins but for those of others that we might have prevented (Shabbat 54b–55a). But it is also important to confess in the singular, since teshuva requires that I put right what I have done wrong. So we confess publicly and collectively, while also admitting our wrongs individually and privately. The public confession includes two alphabetical lists of sins, one short, the other long. But this is only the outer form of an act (the ma’aseh mitzva) whose inner fulfillment (kiyum) requires that I acknowledge the specific sins and wrongs I committed, resolving not to repeat them. So while reciting the public confession along with the community, I must constantly be asking myself in detail what I have done wrong, and saying so to God. The true confession is the one engaged in silently by each of us within the soul. Confession as mere ritual without remorse is, said the sages, like trying to purify yourself by immersing yourself in a mikveh while still holding in your hand the source of the impurity. No sin is too great for God to pardon. No wrong is too small for habit to magnify. (Rabbi Baḥya ibn Pakuda) To sin against a fellow human is worse than to sin against God. The person you harmed may have gone to an unknown place and you may lose the opportunity to beg his forgiveness. God, however, is everywhere and you can always find Him when you seek Him. (Rabbi Yaakov David Kalish, the Amshinover Rebbe) If you have done someone a small wrong, let it be in your eyes great. If you have done someone a great good, let it be in your eyes small. If someone has done you a small good, let it be in your eyes great. If someone has done you a great wrong, let it be in your eyes small. (Avot deRabbi Natan 41:11) Whether we choose to or not, we are an influence on those around us. If we are cynical they will become cynical; if we are dishonest they will become dishonest; if we exploit others they will feel free to do likewise. Do this and we will eventually lose the friendship of the genuinely good people in our lives. One of the ways we become trapped in bad habits is that we find ourselves surrounded by friends who have the same bad habits. This allows us to believe that they are not bad habits at all. Those driven by envy, animosity, resentment or a sense of grievance are not only unhappy; they are a cause of unhappiness in others. Worst of all are those who combine these faults with a sense of self-righteousness. Those who want the world to share their own high opinion of themselves are destined to a life of self-deception. The irrationality of envy is that it allows someone else’s happiness to poison mine. The two have nothing to do with one another. That someone else has much does not mean that I have little; that someone else is great does not mean that I am small. No one found happiness by “desiring this man’s art or that man’s scope.” Who is rich? One who rejoices in what he has (Mishna, Avot 4:1), that is, unaffected by what anyone else has. Anger is a failure of self control, allowing the amygdala, the seat of reactive emotion, to bypass the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows us to reflect on our actions and their likely consequences. Anger injures others and ultimately ourselves. The sages said: “When a person becomes angry, if he is a sage, his wisdom departs from him; if he is a prophet, his prophecy departs from him… Even if greatness has been decreed for him, he forfeits greatness” (Pesaḥim 66b). “The life of an angry person is not a life” (ibid. 113b).

בְּבִטּוּי שְׂפָתָֽיִם By an utterance of our lips. Note how many of the sins enumerated here have to do with speech (eleven out of the forty-four). The sages took “evil speech” with utmost seriousness. They said it is as bad as the three cardinal sins – murder, forbidden sex, and idolatry – combined (Arakhin 15b). It kills three people: the one who says it, the one who listens to it, and the one about whom it is said. Speech may be evil even when it is true. Character assassination, insinuation, the spreading of suspicion, the sowing of unrest, derogatory talk, depreciation, back-biting and bad-mouthing are subtle ways in which the trust on which human relations depend is undermined. It is all the more dangerous since it is often done in private and denied in public. Its practitioners tell themselves they have done no harm: they did no more than tell the truth, and people ought to know the faults of others. The sages said that in biblical times leprosy was the punishment for evil speech (ibid.). The act done in private was thus exposed in public, and those guilty of it were shamed and forced temporarily to live outside the camp as pariahs. Once, a man went about speaking derogatorily about the . Later, realizing the wrong he had done, he felt remorse, and went to the rabbi to beg forgiveness, saying he would do all he could to make amends. The rabbi told him, “Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds.” The man did not understand why, but did so. Returning to tell the rabbi that he had done as he requested, the rabbi then said, “Now, go and collect the feathers.” “I can’t,” said the man. “They have been carried far and wide by the wind.” “So it is with evil speech,” said the rabbi. “You cannot undo the harm it does, for you do not know where it has gone and where it has spread.”

דָוִד, מִיכָה, דָּנִיֵּאל, עֶזְרָא David, Micah, Daniel, Ezra. Having invoked the prophetic precedent of Moses’ prayer after the sin of the golden calf, and the priestly ritual of confession, we now turn to other historic precedents of biblical figures who prayed for forgiveness, among them King David; the prophet Micah; Daniel, adviser to the royal court in Babylon; and Ezra, the priest and scribe.

אֵל רַחוּם שְׁמֶֽךָ Compassionate God is Your name. This and the following prayers have the basic structure of a litany or a chant. Chants derive their power from rhythm and repetition. They consist of short, repetitive lines, and are often structured alphabetically. Among the most famous in Jewish prayer are the Hoshanot said on Sukkot. Chants are mood-inducing rather than the expression of a structured supplication.

מִי שֶׁעָנָה The One who answered. This prayer derives its basic form from the special Amida said in Israel on public fasts proclaimed at times of national emergency, especially during prolonged drought. In its original form it mentioned seven great occasions when prayer was answered: Abraham in Nimrod’s furnace, the Israelites at the Reed Sea, Joshua at Gilgal during his campaign against Jericho, Samuel in his battle against the Philistines at Mitzpah, Elijah in his confrontation with the false prophets at Mount Carmel, Jonah in the belly of the fish, and David and Solomon when they faced famine (Mishna Ta’anit 15a). It is considerably expanded in its present form. There is a difference between history and memory. History is what happened; memory is our attempt to discover meaning in what happened. History focuses on the uniqueness of events; memory on their repeated patterns, the structure visible through the details, the music beneath the noise. Judaism is a religion of memory, not just history, and this prayer is a key example. It takes events from different eras and links them as instances of a single pattern. People – our ancestors – prayed and God answered. We are not wanderers in the void, alone in a universe bereft of moral form. We pray not out of wishful thinking but out of the concrete experience of our people’s past. Prayer made a difference to them; it will make a difference to us. This we believe, not blindly, but in the full consciousness of memory as it educates and gives substance to our hopes.

רַחֲמָנָא Loving God. A short, moving plea, written in Aramaic and in part based on the previous prayer. It appeared for the first time in the siddur of Rabbi Amram Gaon (821–875), the first Jewish prayer book.