October 2, 2024: From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur

This evening marks the beginning of Rosh Hashanah and the start of the Jewish High Holy Day season. Rosh Hashanah commemorates the Jewish New Year and within the tradition, marks the date of the creation of the world. It also begins the “Days of Awe,” a ten day period culminating in Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—in which concepts of forgiveness and repentance are particularly emphasized.

To better understand the significance of these holidays and to contextualize them within a higher education setting, Interfaith Chaplain Adam Kirtley (pictured, left) sat down for a conversation with Richard Middleton-Kaplan (pictured, right), Director of Whitman’s Academic Support Services, a Lay Rabbi and Advisor to Kehillat Shalom, Whitman’s Jewish student organization.

Adam: Thanks, Richard, for carving out time in the midst of these busy days. Let’s jump right in. To my understanding, these holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are connected or linked by the Days of Awe, and yet these bookends seem very different. The New Year feels like a celebration—a time to give thanks and eat honey and apples in hopes of a sweet new year. But ten days later, the tone is very different—a solemn time of repentance? How might we best understand this juxtaposition?

Richard: That's a good characterization. But I am going to add that at the end of that period of repentance, there should be a feeling of uplift, joy, even ecstasy by going through the process of the observance. We're celebrating the birth of the universe. This is the day, in Jewish tradition, on which God created the world and created your namesake, Adam, and Eve. So we’re commemorating that, and it is “sweet” to think about that. As you said, we eat apples and honey, hoping for a sweet new year. 

And then the Days of Awe is a period of ten days of self-reflection and consideration of how I’ve conducted myself in the past year in relation to those around me, and in what ways I want to wipe the slate clean and start over. So part of that is thinking about the things that I’ve done that were good, that I want to be proud of and and I want to continue. And then also thinking about who I’ve wronged and making things right with them. During these ten days I should be asking forgiveness of God for sins committed against God. But the liturgy teaches us that God cannot forgive sins committed against other people. God can only forgive for sins committed against God. So, Adam, if I wronged you, and then I went to God and asked for forgiveness and then felt like I had been forgiven, but I never talked to you…I don’t know how you would feel about being left out of the equation, right?

Adam: So what I’m hearing, though, is that while my framing of the initial question may have some accuracies, it would be wrong to imagine that the Jewish holy days are about moving from joy to despair. Is that right?

Richard: That’s right. So the point of this self-reflection is not self-laceration, you know, beating oneself up more. I mean, there needs to be honesty, but despair is decidedly not the point. The point is to seek reconciliation. I need to go to the people that I have wronged, and I need to say what the wrong is that I’ve committed, and I need to ask their forgiveness. And if I do that in the right way, then by the end of those ten days and by the end of Yom Kippur, I should feel cleansed. I should feel as if I am beginning with a fresh start, because I’ve reset the relationships in which I’ve wronged people. That confers a sense of renewal. 

Now, also during that period, people who sense that they’ve wronged me will be coming to me asking for my forgiveness. And there is a whole series of teachings about how we handle this, because forgiveness is not automatic. But you can imagine that at the end of that process, if you really did it right, how restored you would feel in your relationships both with God and with other people. And so then you would emerge from that in a kind of joyous state. And when else in our lives do we get to take the time to really pause and step back from the world for that kind of serious reflection and self-examination?

Adam: I remember in seminary, my Hebrew Bible professor speaking about the relational—the insistence on the relational qualities to Yom Kippur and the Day of Atonement. He asked us to look at the word “atonement” and to think about it as “at one ment.” Right? And so it’s this idea of taking something that had been fractured and pulling it back together.

Richard: Oh, that’s great. That’s right, that’s right. So I’m celebrating the birth of the universe, this new creation, the creation of Adam, and also the opportunity to recreate myself in this moment—to step freshly into the world. 

That opportunity for re-creation is held in balance with the somber rituals of Yom Kippur. We fast on this day and it serves several purposes. 

The fast reminds us that we are capable of mastering the impulses of our bodies! [chuckles] We are capable of controlling our physical appetites. And fasting is also a way of showing that we’re capable of extending ourselves to things that we didn’t think possible. And, you know, at the end of that day, there’s the sounding of the ram’s horn, the shofar, in which the shofar player holds the note as long as they can, a kind of symbol of how we've extended ourselves over the long day of fasting and prayer and intense concentration. And when you hear it played, it’s a beautiful sound, but it comes out of this ram’s horn that is, you know, all twisted and bent in its shape. And maybe there’s an analogy to the fact that we’re twisted and bent in our souls by the things that have been done to us, or perhaps things we’ve done. But just like the shofar is twisted and bent and still capable of producing great beauty, so are we. 

Adam: Do you know how to blow the shofar?

Richard: Yes. I was often the shofar player for my synagogue when I was growing up and have blown it many times here at the synagogue in Walla Walla.

Adam: And can you hold that note pretty well at the end?

Richard: I can, yeah! Being a former trombone player I’ve got the embouchure and the wind to do that. [smiling]

Another really important tradition is the ritual of reciting a list of sins or wrong-doings. And there are 44 of them in the version of the liturgy that we use here. Importantly, we stand up and we say them collectively. It’s unlikely that any single person would have committed all 44 of those in a single year.

Adam: That would have been a hell of a year, eh?

Richard: Ha—right! But we don’t have people stand up singly and individually just for the wrong-doings they did, then sit for the others. And the idea is we are confessing to these things as a community, because as a community, we’re responsible for each other. Also, by standing together, we show our confidence that God will forgive us. The whole service is really animated by optimism. 

Judaism is sometimes misrepresented as the religion of the “harsh letter rather than the spirit of the law”...keep in mind that this is a major holiday that is all about forgiveness, Yom Kippur, that is it. 

The other thing that I think is interesting is that something like a quarter of the wrongs that we confess to have to do with speech—engaging in gossip, telling white lies, offering insincere confessions, foolish talk, false denials and lying, spreading falsehoods about people, etc. The fact that fully one quarter of them have to do with speech suggests how much words matter and how much damage they can do and how carefully we have to think about what we say.

Adam: I often talk to students about how part of what college years are about is interrogating, in some important ways, the religious identity that we may have been given to us by our parents. And that can be a scary thing, especially for the parents. But then on the other side of that is this claiming of something that’s deeply ours. But, I’m curious about when you look back on your journey, if you have any particular memories related to the holy days that are something that you hold dear.

Richard: Well, there was one year I was leading services up here in Walla Walla. And my mother came up from Los Angeles to see me lead services. Great day of pride for her because, you know, there was a period of my agnosticism and even active atheism. I went through that. 

Adam: Well, it leads to another question that I have that may or may not be relevant or even comfortable. Of the Jewish students I support, I think some of them would identify themselves as agnostic or atheist, and I could imagine that some of those agnostic students might want to participate in the traditions or even attend Holy Day services. I don’t exactly know how I want to phrase the question. Like, your own journey through agnosticism to then being a person who leads services…um, how essential is “belief”?

Richard: You know, a friend of mine once said to me, “I don’t believe in God. I believe God.” I took that to mean, I don’t know that I believe in the existence of a thing called God, but I believe in the ethical precepts and the ways of living that we attribute to the thing that a lot of our culture calls God. I believe the truth of those principles, even if I don’t know if I believe in the deity itself. 

You don’t have to believe in a theological entity in order to recognize the value of taking the opportunity once a year to reexamine yourself, to think about whether you’re living and conducting yourself in the way that you want to, and to take an opportunity to reset your relationships with people around you and give them an opportunity to reset theirs with you. And I would also say for people who aren’t observant, you don’t have to do that reexamination, resetting, and renewal during the prescribed “holy days.” It’s an opportunity that’s available to us any time.

Adam: I’m wondering how the lessons of this day overlay a campus environment—a college. And it sounds like you’ve really spoken to that already, but I’m curious if there are any other thoughts that you might have about contextualizing the Holy Days for a campus community.

Richard: You are not defined or contained by your past acts. You and I have talked before about the fact that nobody “is” Is the worst thing they’ve ever done. Right? 

Adam: Agreed! So to wrap things up, are there ways in which the non-Jewish majority community here at Whitman could demonstrate hospitality and accommodation for our Jewish friends and colleagues?

Richard: Oh that’s nice. So the traditional greeting to a Jewish person for Rosh Hashanah is “Shanah Tovah,” which means “Have a good year”. When it comes to Yom Kippur, the traditional greeting is “I wish you an easy fast.” And I guess, you know, people, people could say if they wanted to, “is there anything that you feel that I’ve done in the last year for which I could ask your forgiveness?” Also, I think, you know, going back to the 11 of the 44 wrongs having to do with speech—to just always be thinking carefully that words can do so much harm and they can do so much good. And the same is true of silence.