REsources for Living
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The evening of September 22nd this year marks the start of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, which is often known as the Day of Atonement. Which brings up a sort of interesting question: just what is atonement, anyway? I have seen some people write it as at-one-ment, meaning that it has to do with coming into oneness, wholeness with yourself and with the Holy. Which is nice, but it kind of skips something important.
Atonement, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is “reparation for an offense or injury.” Atonement is about paying back, about trying to fix what you have broken. It’s the necessary first step of forgiveness. Now, the dictionary also helpfully notes that in a Christian context, atonement refers to “the reconciliation of God and humankind through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ.” In other words, the death of Jesus pays God back, makes reparations, for the sins of all humankind.
But that’s not how atonement works in a Jewish sense, and it’s not a theology that most Unitarian Universalists embrace, either. Atonement, when it comes to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is something you do yourself. It’s personal. You, personally, are expected to take the ten days that come between the Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur to check in with all your friends and family and see if you have done anything to hurt or offend them. And if you have, it is up to you to atone, to do what you can to make it right, or at the very least, to apologize.
Then, on Yom Kippur itself, the whole community goes to the synagogue and atones—apologizes—to God. It is said that during those ten Days ofTurning between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur the Book of Life is open. But come the end of Yom Kippur the Book is closed, and your fate for the year to come is sealed. So if you want to have a good year, it would be wise to atone to your friends and neighbors and to God, thereby earning yourself a spot in the Book of Life.
In Jewish theology—and that of most UUs—you need to do the work of making things right under your own steam.
But here’s the interesting part. The litany of atonement that a Jewish congregation recites on Yom Kippur is a long list of things that we have done, and thus apologize for all together. And it doesn’t matter whether you, personally, have done any particular piece of the long list of errors. The whole community atones as one. You take care of your own business before Yom Kippur arrives, but when it comes to apologizing to God, the community takes responsibility as a whole.
It might seem a bit unfair to be asked to apologize for things that you haven’t done, but I have to say that this notion of a whole community ritual of atonement feels deeply right to me. Think about it. Racism, for instance, is a grave wrong that belongs to a community as a whole. You can’t really blame any given white person for the unearned privileges that their race grants them. No single white person asked to live in a system that gives them unfair advantages in education, employment, housing, the justice system and much more. And no single white person can really choose to give those unfair advantages back.
It takes the community, the whole system, recognizing the long history and continuing practice of injustice in order to make reparations and move toward lasting change.
And no one of us can take the blame for the terrible human cost to our environment. We are all just going about our business, doing what we need to do, shaping the world to our comfort and convenience as best we can. I certainly hope that each of us is making conscious choices to minimize the damage to the planet caused by our living on it, but each life carries a cost, and all of us together are doing tremendous damage to the Earth and its creatures.
We need to find a way to atone as a community, as neighborhoods and countries, and as the human race, to make reparations so that there is room for all beings to flourish.
Each of us needs to take responsibility for our own actions, to atone for the things that we have broken, the damage that we have done. But something more is also required. Together, as human communities, we need to hold up the ways we participate in large systems of brokenness that privilege a few at the cost of many, so that we can begin to find ways to atone, to make reparations, to make things whole once again.
Yes, we are called to at-one-ment, but that isn’t just a nice feeling of spiritual connection—although there is certainly a place for that as well. Yom Kippur calls us to the difficult, ongoing work of recognizing that if we are all one—one human family, one precious planet—then we must all take responsibility for rebuilding the whole. May we embrace that work with courage, so that all may be inscribed in the Book of Life.
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