To Pardon All Our Fucking Iniquities

“In a world awash with human evil, some are guilty, but all are implicated.”

-Chancellor Ismar Schorsh, of the Jewish Theological Seminary

Until I was seven, there were certain words I was not supposed to say. Although I regularly heard my parents muttering things like “damn,” “hell,” and “Jesus Christ,” I understood that if I ever said any of the really bad words (“bitch, “shit,” the horrendous F word) I could expect to have my mouth washed out with my mother’s green medicinal soap in about two seconds flat.

And for the sin we committed against thee by offensive speech…

But then my parents got divorced, and when that happened, everything changed, including the words I wasn’t supposed to say. Because, until I was seven, my Catholic mother and my Jewish father were both pretty unobservant. They were hippies, poor, in their early twenties, and very suddenly parents.

My father was a socialist, so religion was not the biggest concern of the day. If it wasn’t the opiate of the masses, it was at least a kettle of fish better left alone. I did go to Hebrew School on Sundays, but only because it made my grandparents happy. That was religion.

After the divorce, my mom started going to church, and she also started muttering “shit” and “fuck” instead of “hell” and “damn.” When I once happened to say “Oh, Jesus!” my mom got really upset.

“I don’t want to hear you taking the name of the Lord in vain!”

For the sin we have committed against thee by defaming thy name…

Which was confusing, because I hadn’t. He wasn’t the Lord. At least, not at my Hebrew school. Very suddenly, the rules of the game had changed.

From that point on, a lot of things were different. My father found himself a new synagogue, a real one. His kitchen became kosher and he started wearing hats. He made new friends. And my mother became the head of the liturgy committee at her church. In the summers she went away to a Trappist monastery for two weeks and painted watercolors in silence. When she remarried, she married a Catholic man. And that was all fine.

But as I got older, I had to make up my own rules. Raised in a leftist community but bat mitzva’d at a massive reform congregation (where I could find no signs of any political conscience), a lot of the pieces didn’t fit together very well. My best friend (who was Catholic) got involved with Catholic Worker activities, but I couldn’t seem to find a young Jewish world that resembled the radical Catholic movement. In high school, I just ignored the problem. I pushed away from religion and embraced politics instead.

For the sin we have committed in thy sight by scoffing…

I protested against animal testing and the Gulf War. I demonstrated for gun control, abortion rights, and divestment in South Africa. I gave up meat, joined Earth First, stuffed envelopes, donated my allowance to Greenpeace and Amnesty International, and boycotted green grapes, Coca-cola, and Hormel. I wrote terrible poems.

And for the sin we have committed against thee in passing judgment…

And then I was in college, and I took a few religious studies classes. I discovered that whatever else religion was, it was most of all interesting. I discovered my own ability to shape a Judaism that made sense of my political interests and my aesthetic. I went to Israel and Rome. I read a lot of books. I considered critically. I argued with everything, and I loved it.

Now, through a strange stroke of fate, I work at Hillel on the University of Iowa campus, and I find myself surrounded by other Jews for the first time in my life. I work in a building full of Jewish books and I live by the Jewish calendar. And I live in it the best way I know how, by examining and analyzing and arguing.

Which brings me to this season of awe — to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. And here I am, trying to find a way to put my own sensibilities to work in this Jewish place. Trying to understand the texts, customs, and catchphrases. Trying to read this strange book called the Torah, to make it matter in my life.

My childlike understanding of this holiday has always been that Yom Kippur is about forgiveness. I have always known that during this season, we ask forgiveness from those we’ve harmed, and that on Yom Kippur the book of life is sealed. But I haven’t always seen an obvious awareness of the holiday in the people around me, the ones who look more comfortable than me in their Jewish shoes.

They say the words, fast, maybe even avoid wearing leather. They bang their chests and chant the rhetoric of a Hebrew they can read and can’t understand. Do they know what they’re saying at all? I know that no member of my family, no Jewish friend of mine, no professor, has ever asked me for forgiveness. Nor, I realize, have I asked them.

For the sin we committed by contempt for parents or teachers…

But I’m interested in this chest banging, this physical prayer, this rhetoric of forgiveness. So I’ve been asking around, trying to uncover the reason for this custom. It’s called the Vidui. The Vidui is said in unison, standing, during the Yom Kippur service. While we recite the Vidui, we bang our chests. Really, the Vidui is a list of sins for which we ask forgiveness, and it’s notable that the Vidui is recited in alphabetical order, from aleph to tav. Because, “Language, the very instrument used by God to create grandeur out of chaos, can be misused by us to revert the world back to chaos” (Ismar Schorsh).

Even more interesting than the alphabetization is that we say the Vidui aloud, in first person plural. We drum on our bodies and chant it as a community, because the Vidui is not a litany of individual sins, but rather a list of communal sins. Judaism recognizes that most of us haven’t committed these particular sins, but that if one of us has committed any one of them, than we are culpable and we must all ask forgiveness for the community.

For the sin we have committed in thy sight by casting off responsibility…

And it seems especially important in these times of war and economic hard times. The Vidui should remind us that we all have a shared responsibility for the sins of our community. We are all culpable for the mistakes made by the administration we elect, the choices made by our religious leaders, the products our economy produces —

For the sin we committed in thy sight by oppressing a fellow man…

— along with the products our economy neglects to produce. Because the Vidui is not only a list of positive sins, crimes we’ve committed by collusion. The Vidui (like the list of 613 Jewish commandments) also begs forgiveness for our other sins, the crimes we’ve committed by omission and accident.

And this is what I’m really interested in — intention. The Vidui is a string around the finger — a symbolic reminder that this New Year is a time to look carefully at all the missed opportunities, the things we meant to do but didn’t do in the year we are leaving behind.

And for the sin we committed in thy sight unintentionally…

The Vidui offers a chance to cop to all the mistakes we’ve made as individuals and as a community. It gives us a day to beat our chests, to apologize to others, ourselves, and also (if we like) to God, for our mistakes and our missed chances. And then, the Vidui offers forgiveness. Because on Yom Kippur, if you ask your sister (or anyone else for that matter) for forgiveness three times, and she refuses you, it’s as if she forgave you anyway. That’s the rule. No matter what. It’s the proverbial new leaf. The clean slate. Which is nice. Right?

Because you can forgive yourself the same way, or at least I think I can. If I examine my life, and I’m honest with myself about the mistakes I made last year, and I resolve to do better, and I ask forgiveness for myself and my community, than I get a do-over — if I bother to ask.

David thy servant said to thee: “Who can discern his own errors? Of unconscious faults hold me guiltless.”