Reflections on Yom Kippur

What is Yom Kippur?

For those who practice Judaism, Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.  Yom Kippur begins with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Also called the "Day of Atonement," it is a time for reflection and introspection.  It is a time to focus on becoming a better person, to forgive, and to let go of resentments.  During this time we both seek forgiveness and give pardon.  What can Unitarian Universalists learn from Yom Kippur?

Metaphorical Arrows

I believe the Buddha said something like this: “Imagine that you are walking along a path in the forest and suddenly, out of the trees, comes an arrow and heads right into your thigh.  When the arrow goes into your thigh, do you say to yourself, ‘I wonder what kind of wood the arrow is made out of?… I wonder where its bird feathers came from…  I wonder how hard the arrow traveled before it hit me…  NO! What you are thinking is, ‘I gotta get this freaking arrow out of my leg!’” 

This makes sense, but so many of us do not remove the metaphorical arrow from our metaphorical leg.  We dwell on it instead, sometimes for years.

 

Amends

Yom Kippur is about confessing, being honest in our personal inventory, and then working on forgiveness and reconciliation with one’s god and other people

After my father got into recovery from his alcoholism, he came to me wanting to reconcile.  He had done his fourth and fifth steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, a searching and fearless moral inventory, and admitted to God, to himself, and to another human being the exact nature of his wrongs.  And he said before we could reconcile he needed to make amends to me.  

Why tell this story when we are talking about Yom Kippur?  Yom Kippur is about confessing, being honest in our personal inventory, and then working on forgiveness and reconciliation with one’s god and other people.  My father had certainly done these things.

“Stuckness”

But here’s the hitch.  At the point my father came to me, I was still in process.  I hadn’t done all the forgiveness work I needed to do and was not sure I was ready for reconciliation.   I wanted to think about it and write about it some more.  I wanted to be in control of when and how this happened.  I couldn’t even conceive of reconciliation with my father.  I was stuck and not sure what to do.

Unitarian Universalist minister Reverend Forrest Church talked about this “stuckness” while reading:  

I wasn't paying attention. I go back to the top (of the page) and read it again. More often than not, when I go back to read the page again I get even less out of it than I did the first time. I concentrate harder, read sentence after sentence, and again realize I haven't caught the drift. The harder I try to get through this page, the more completely incomprehensible it becomes.

In life, as when reading a book, whenever you are stuck, when the harder you try the less you comprehend, when you have read the same passage three times with diminishing returns, my suggestion follows the logic of (the) sacred season of Yom Kippur: ‘Turn the page.’

Reverend Church concludes, “Yes, you will probably have missed something. But sometimes trying to find something you know you have missed just delays you from discovering things that await you when you turn the page. 

To Turn the Page

So, I turned the page with my father.  I decided to meet with him, even though I hadn’t done all the work, even though I didn’t feel I was ready.  I had been working on forgiveness of him for my own internal healing, but reconciliation that was something completely different. 

I let him share his Step work with me.  I listened, I accepted his confession, his forgiveness, and his desire for reconciliation.  I wanted there to be more.  In my head I had turned the page, but in my heart turning the page was much more difficult.

 

Trying to find something you know you have missed just delays you from discovering things that await you when you turn the page

I wanted to a new beginning with my father, but it would take some more time for me.  I could now treat him with kindness, compassion, respect, but I still needed joy, love, and connection to really turn the page.  I knew I had just ear-marked it to come back to it later.

The key was confessing my “stuckness” to him and working together to find the joy, love and connection that we once had, and we both wanted to find again.

Confession, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation

In the Jewish faith, Yom Kippur calls for confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation.  We can, with the help of our spiritual community, as well as our own internal resources, do the work of confession and even forgiveness, knowing sometimes, reconciliation may not be possible.  Sometimes, the person is dead, or is not ready, or you are not ready, or the person is not someone you really want to reconcile with—perhaps he/she is an abuser—and we have to turn the page without reconciliation. 

Our heart will not be fully healed, but we must move on in our lives.  As Rev. Church says:  “If you've read some recent chapter from the script of your life over and over, and it's making less and less sense, seal the book, turn the page.”  Seal the book.  Easy to say, hard to do.  Within all of us are books that just need to be sealed permanently, so we can move on. 

Blessings, Rev Tom