Opinion: A beginner’s guide to atonement for Yom Kippur

Rosh Hashanah has come and gone and with it, the joy of welcoming a new year. What follows is the great Jewish anti-celebration: Yom Kippur.
The most important day on the Jewish Calendar, Yom Kippur – or the day of atonement – offers the chance to ask for forgiveness. It concludes the “10 Days of Awe” that, sandwiched between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, gives a brief window for Jews to perform “teshuvah,” or repent.
Growing up, I had a sort of begrudging appreciation for Yom Kippur. The services were long and the fasting uncomfortable, but I valued the way it demanded stillness. While there was always more prayer for those who sought it, my family usually returned home after the main service and let time move lazily until the sun set. We traded notes on the sermon and waited eagerly for the oversized Costco muffins that usually appeared at our community break fast.
This year, as the world feels increasingly un-still, the chance to dedicate a day solely to solemn reflection feels particularly important.
Yom Kippur dictates a generosity of spirit, imagining that God will see the best parts of us and that we might be able to locate them ourselves. In the name of that generosity, I am offering up a guide – to Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike this year.
Here’s how to hack atonement.
If Yom Kippur demands one thing of us, it’s an acknowledgment of our fragile grasp on life. At the center of the holiday is a reading, Unetaneh Tokef, that imagines – literally – how any worshiper might die in the coming year.
Look at the sharp edges of the world, it seems to say, see how you might impale yourself? Don’t think yourself too big, too invincible: You might forget that life is a precious thing to be honored with good living.
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But the good life imagined on Yom Kippur is not predicated on indulgence – it demands acts of loving kindness: excess wealth shed to those in need, patience for friends in times of struggle, sticking your arm out to stop the subway doors so a rushing commuter can make it inside.
The world is, ultimately, more likely to be repaired with small bits of spackle than with a grand remodeling.
“We all live with a gun to our head and no one knows when it’s going to go off,” Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles told a New York Times columnist in 2018.
Yom Kippur offers us the chance to suspend our retinol-fueled quest for eternal youth and humbly acknowledge that no tomorrow is ever guaranteed, despite our best efforts.
Asking for forgiveness also requires humility. Yom Kippur is not a passive holiday. You have to take your atonement out into the world, humble yourself in front of others, and offer sincere apologies without the guarantee that you will be granted forgiveness.
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In doing so, worshipers must perform good acts without the safety of reward on the other end.
Goodness cannot exist as a mere gateway to acknowledgment or affirmation; it has to be self-propagating.
There is a reason Yom Kippur exists side by side with Rosh Hashanah. We look back on our shortcomings – individually and as humanity – for the purpose of ushering in a better year.
The hope that emerges becomes then not just a blind wish, but a more honest endeavor, guided by the knowledge of where we went wrong.
That’s the hope that we as Jews channel as the sun sets on Yom Kippur each year. It’s a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the unlikeliness of good, and a solemn vow to pump our lives, our communities, and our world as full of it as we can.
Anna Kaufman is a search and optimization editor for USA TODAY. She covers trending news and is based in New York.