It is said that the Gates of Repentance, the Sha’arei Teshuvah, open during the High Holy Days. Maimonides, the famed medieval philosopher, taught extensively on teshuvah, making clear that repentance was not a one-time act, but rather an intricate process. According to his teaching, there are six steps to what he calls “complete repentance”: Recognition, Remorse, Recitation, Restitution, Reconciliation, and Resolve. Throughout these High Holy Days, our kavanot, taken from our High Holy Day worship supplement, “Days of Awe” (available at our High Holy Day services and online by clicking HERE) will consist of reflections from your clergy on each of these six steps.
Remorse
by Rabbi Sari Laufer
In the course of the 25 hours of Yom Kippur, we will rise multiple times for the Vidui, for the confessional section of the service. And, as we do, we will confess 44 sins—failures of love, failures of justice, failures of truth. We are asked to own up to the things we said that we regret, the things we did that we wish we had not, the people we harmed in word or deed. And, as we rise together, we also confess our communal sins, speaking aloud wrongs of which we ourselves might not be guilty, but wrongs done around us, through us, with our awareness or complicity.
The ritual of this public confession, what Maimonides calls recitation, dates all the way back to the Torah. In the Book of Leviticus (16:24), we read that “Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins.” Here, one person is responsible for naming—publicly—all the sins of the people. In this ritual, it seems, our individual sins are elided by the communal, each of us wrapped into a bigger bundle of misdeed and misstep. Later, the Temple ritual imagined that the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies not once, not twice, but three times—confessing first for himself and his own household, then for the House of Aaron (the priests and leaders of the community), and then, finally, for the whole House of Israel—for the entire congregation. All of this was done, if not wholly publicly, at least aloud. And while our ritual is certainly not the same—there are no goats and no bells, at the very least—the power of the action may well be.
What does it mean to speak these aloud, to make our wrongdoings—or at least our missed marks—manifest, to bring them into the world?
Professor Brené Brown writes: “Here’s the bottom line with shame. The less you talk about it, the more you got it. Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment.” Shame cannot, Brown teaches, survive being spoken; it cannot survive empathy.
And so we stand on Yom Kippur, again and again, and name the sources and outcomes of our shameful thoughts and actions—and in the naming itself, we find empathy for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for our community.