What Is Yom Kippur? The Day of Atonement Explained
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
For twenty-five hours in the autumn, observant Jews do not eat, drink, wash, wear leather shoes or work, and spend most of the day in the synagogue confessing, in the plural, a list of sins that few of them have committed individually. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, falls on the tenth day of the Jewish new year, and it is the day on which, in the tradition, God seals the judgement on each person for the year ahead. In Israel the roads empty, the airport closes and the television goes dark; it is the one day that even the secular observe, and its logic is older than the temple in which it was first performed.
Where it comes from
The book of Leviticus commands that on the tenth day of the seventh month the people shall afflict themselves and do no work, and that the high priest shall make atonement for the sanctuary, the priests and the people. In the Temple in Jerusalem the ritual was the most solemn of the year: the high priest, on this day alone, entered the Holy of Holies, the innermost room, to sprinkle the blood of a sacrifice, and two goats were chosen by lot, one sacrificed and the other, with the sins of the people confessed over its head, driven into the wilderness, which is the origin of the word scapegoat. When the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD the sacrifices ended, and the rabbis reshaped the day around what remained: fasting, prayer and repentance, which the prophets had said God wanted more than offerings anyway.
The ten days
Yom Kippur is the end of a sequence. Rosh Hashanah, the new year, is the day on which, in the liturgy's image, God opens the books and writes each person's fate; the ten days of repentance that follow are for setting things right; and on Yom Kippur the books are sealed. The tradition is precise about what can be atoned for and how: sins against God are forgiven by repentance and the day itself, but sins against another person are not forgiven until the person wronged has been asked, which is why the days before the fast are spent apologising, and why a person who refuses to forgive after three sincere requests is held to have taken the fault on themselves. The day's practices:
- •The fast: no food or drink from before sunset to after nightfall the next day, about 25 hours, from which the sick, the pregnant and children are excused
- •The other abstentions: no washing for pleasure, no anointing, no leather shoes, no marital relations, and no work, as on the Sabbath
- •White clothing, the colour of purity and of the shroud, and for some the kittel, the plain robe in which a Jew is buried
- •Five services, from Kol Nidre at the start, a chanted annulment of vows that is the day's most famous music, to Neilah at the end, as the gates are said to close
- •The confession, Vidui, recited ten times through the day in the plural, we have sinned, with a hand striking the chest at each item
- •The shofar, the ram's horn, blown once at the end, and then the breaking of the fast
What atonement means
The Hebrew word, kippur, is related to a word meaning to cover or to wipe away, and the theology is not that the fast earns forgiveness but that repentance, teshuvah, a turning back, does. Maimonides in the twelfth century set out the steps: to stop the wrong, to regret it, to confess it in words, and to resolve not to repeat it, with the test of true repentance being that a person faced with the same temptation refrains. The day is not mournful; the Talmud calls it one of the two happiest days of the year, since it ends in forgiveness, and the liturgy holds together the severity of judgement, the litany of who shall live and who shall die that the prayer Unetaneh Tokef recites, with the assurance that repentance, prayer and charity avert the decree. The confession's plural is deliberate: the community atones as a body, and each member speaks for the whole.
The day in the world
Yom Kippur is the day on which the most Jews attend synagogue, including many who go on no other, and its music, Kol Nidre in particular, has been set by Bruch and Schoenberg and quoted in the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer of 1927, whose plot turns on a cantor's son choosing between the stage and the synagogue on the eve of the fast. In Israel the day has a second meaning since 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked on Yom Kippur while the country was at prayer, and the war that followed is named for it. Sandy Koufax's refusal to pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on the fast is the American Jewish community's best-known parable, and the empty highways of Tel Aviv, on which children ride bicycles down the middle of the road once a year, are the modern country's.
The takeaway
Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, the tenth day of the Jewish year and the holiest, on which the sins of the community were once carried off by the Temple's scapegoat and are now addressed by a 25-hour fast, five synagogue services, a collective confession and the repentance that the tradition holds actually works, provided that wrongs against other people have first been put right with them. It ends the ten days of repentance that begin at the new year, closes with the shofar, and is kept even by many who keep nothing else.