You wear a shroud and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. You summon the desperate strength of life's last moments. A great wall of speech is hurled against your heart again and again; a fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime. You are a human being, guilty of every crime imaginable. Your heart is cracking through its shell to be reborn. Then a chill grips you. The gate between heaven and earth has suddenly begun to close. The multitude has swollen. It is almost as if the great hall has magically expanded to include an infinity of desperate souls. This is your last chance. Everyone has run out of time. Every heart has broken. The gate clangs shut, the great horn sounds one last time. You feel curiously lighthearted and clean.Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.
(Psst - don't tell anyone, but the gate isn't locked till Hoshana Rabbah.)
An Al Cheyt. This was written a year ago - unfortunately some of those to whom it speaks won't be in shul.
Yom Kippur is one of the four times a year that the Yizkor memorial service for relatives and martyrs is observed - more about Yizkor here.
Sometime in the afternoon we read the funky story of Jonah. Jonah is one of those smug self-righteous social activists whose identity is threatened when things actually do get better. He's also a kvetch and a Peter Pan, and although God gets pretty fed up with him, he really is a prophet. Jonah can also be read as a metaphor for our unexamined loyalties to our old behavior patterns. If you think religious scriptures are simplistic, read Jonah.
UPDATE: Via Protocols: how the "self-affliction" demanded on Yom Kippur is different from asceticism. Also via Protocols, everything you need to know about Yom Kippur.
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