REsources for Living
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Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, many be the source of one of the most…um…surprising religious traditions I know of. Surprising, as in a nice way of saying downright strange. Although only a few Orthodox Jews do it any more, it is traditional on Yom Kippur to do kapporot.
And what is kapporot, you might well ask? Well, basically it’s swinging a live chicken around over your head.
Which I imagine is pretty exciting, for the person as well as for the chicken.
Like most curious religious practices, there is an explanation for this funky chicken. The book of Leviticus talks about the High Priest making himself ritually pure, and then making a sacrifice of a bull as a blood offering for his sins and the sins of his family. Then he would take two goats, and basically draw straws to see which goat would be killed and brought to the Temple as payment for the sins of Israel. The priest would ritually place the sins of the community on the head of the other goat (the scapegoat) and send it off into the wilderness. Or shove it off a cliff, depending on which version you read.
OK, that still sounds pretty funky. Most of us don’t believe that we can pay for our sins by making animal sacrifices. Really, since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago, the Jews don’t either. And you’d have a hard time finding anyone around these days who thought that you could make up for the sins of a community by dumping them on an innocent goat and sending it away.
Except…scapegoats are still very much around. Now we use the term metaphorically, to talk about people who get blamed for problems that really belong to the larger community. Maybe we blame people on welfare for dragging down the economy by not doing the work, or rich people for dragging down the economy by not paying their share of taxes. Maybe we blame undocumented immigrants for taking jobs that should go to citizens or gay people for destroying the sacred institution of marriage or people who drive big vehicles for causing climate change. We humans seem to be generally happy to find someone else to carry the blame for the problems of our society.
And maybe none of those groups is completely innocent of the things they’re blamed for. But the reality is that none of us is totally innocent. All of us have taken more than we needed or given less than we could have managed. All of us could have worked harder or been kinder or cared more for those who needed our compassion.
And that’s why, even if we have no intention of swinging chickens or banishing goats, it makes all the sense in the world to have a time of atonement, a time to recognize that we each hold some responsibility for the ways our communities, small and large, fall short of their potential.
Of course, the whole idea of having to pay or sacrifice for your failings is pretty foreign to us religious liberals. We generally prefer to talk about atonement as at-one-ment, as restoring connection, or coming to peace, or offering forgiveness. But maybe there’s something to be said for this old-fashioned notion of sacrifice. At least for those of us who have enough and more than enough, maybe it’s not a bad thing to stop for a moment and think about how we take more than we need. Maybe we drain the earth’s resources by the reckless use of power and water, and by the creation of waste. Maybe we gain unfairly through privileges of race or class. Maybe we take advantage of the kindness of our friends or family members, without an equal effort to give back to the people closest to us.
In her sermon in this issue, Marti Keller talks about the Days of Turning before Yom Kippur, when Jews are expected to make things right in all their relationships as they look toward the Day of Atonement. That is one piece of the process of atonement that belongs to the holiday, along with prayers for forgiveness that are part of the holiday itself. But there’s one more part of the requirements for the Days of Turning that lead into Yom Kippur that we tend to forget about.
In Hebrew it’s called tzedakah. In English we might call it charity, or giving, but tzedakah is actually something a little closer to the old notion of making a sacrifice. Charity implies that we give out of kindness or generosity. Tzedakah implies that we give because we owe it to the world, because we understand that nothing, ultimately, belongs to us. Our lives, and everything we enjoy, are gifts. We give back, not just because it’s a nice thing to do, but rather because we cannot be truly religious people without making our fair contribution back to the larger whole.
That chicken which is swung around for kapporot is then given to the poor. The more modern version is to put some money in a handkerchief and swing it around over your head instead, before giving it to some good cause. I expect you could do the same thing with a checkbook.
But one way or another, the process of atonement is not complete without some form of giving, of sacrifice, of tangibly remembering our obligation to the world in which we are privileged to live.
- REsources for Living - December 1, 2020
- A Fond Goodbye - December 1, 2020
- REsources for Living - November 1, 2020
