Atonement Time

Atonement is not in fashion. It conjures up images of self-denial, hairshirts, that sort of thing. I am a modern person, an atonement skeptic, meeting the concept with misgivings every Yom Kippur. Let’s face it. Yom Kippur is not for the faint of heart. It’s a marathon that begins, as Jewish holidays do, at sundown the previous day, and goes on well past my dinner hour some twenty-five hours later. During this period, people who are committing to the practice refrain from eating and drinking. In the afternoon, there is usually a block of time to go home for a rest. I allowed myself a glass of water back at the house around 2 pm because I thought maybe dehydration was inadvisable. But the water lay there in my empty belly and made the fast more difficult. I could sense it sloshing around. I felt alert for the morning liturgy, but by the time I came back from the house for the afternoon and final services, my knees hurt from standing and my head ached from caffeine deprivation. I started to resent the repetition. How many times do we have to say the amidah, I groused under my breath? This is a particularly challenging prayer because it’s intended to be intoned standing up and once, apparently, is not enough. But the rabbis knew what they were doing. By this I don’t mean the young guy with the pony tail and the earring fresh from seminary, I mean the rabbis in ancient times who developed these practices. They understood that self-reflection flourishes in adversity.

Photo by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash

In the late afternoon, I returned to the synagogue for a study session. During the rest time at home, I basically stared into space. I always think I’m going to read or nap, but when it comes down to it, I’m so immobilized even a nap seems like hard work. All I can do is descend into deep waiting, itself a potent spiritual practice. It was pouring at 5 pm which felt right like a rainy day at the cemetery, all the mourners weeping under black umbrellas. The rains came down, plastering my clothes to my body and drenching my shoes into sponginess. I didn’t mind getting wet walking from the car, but when we got to the synagogue, the door was locked. The door was locked because there is in Jewish life a thing called security. In Rome in the ‘90s, there was a tank outside the temple. Minneapolis could be Pittsburgh. So we knocked. Nothing. We knocked again. Soon the knocking became banging and I felt the bile starting to rise while the rain fell. There were two volunteers in the vestibule, a thirty-ish man and a somewhat older woman. At length, they opened the door for us and I heard myself yelling and I don’t mean raising my voice, I mean yelling. 

It is the genius of Yom Kippur that just in case you think you have nothing to atone for, materials will be provided. There I was on the holiest day of the Jewish year, a guest at a synagogue I do not belong to in a city not yet my own, raving like an overwrought basketball coach at the buzzer. Later, during the atonement liturgy, I did not have to make a fist and beat my breast as some people do to feel the anguish of regret. The description of this primitive gesture has more recently been gentrified to “knocking on the door to the heart.” But sometimes you have to get down and dirty. You have to beat on your breast to get your soul’s attention or you’ll just end up out in the rain. I waded in this remorse during the end of day services, tired and hungry, trying to find my way, until the rabbi gave us a few minutes to walk around and greet one another. Then, I went out to the entranceway and apologized to the young volunteer who was sitting alone by the door. And here’s the kicker. I did not apologize to the woman who had been with him earlier. I didn’t immediately see her and just couldn’t generate the juice to do it twice, so I had to stare down that lack of completion, forgive myself for that and recognize the blessing of the bottomless pit of opportunities for atonement.  I thought of Zeno’s paradox. In ancient Greece, long before prayer replaced animal sacrifice in Palestine, the philosopher Zeno developed his famous paradox. Any moving object must reach halfway on a course before it reaches the end; and because there are an infinite number of halfway points, a moving object never reaches the end in a finite time. There will always be occasions for atonement. Nothing like a good paradox on an empty stomach.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. This month, Many Voices will feature an essay by woman’s empowerment and intimacy coach, ordained inter-spiritual minister, counselor, and educator, Mary Campbell. Beginning in October, all subscribers will be able to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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