Yom Kippur (‘Day of Atonement’) is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. This year it will be from sundown on October 11th until sundown on the next day. The Jewish community spend 25 hours without food or drink, engaged in prayer and reflection.
Alongside the related holiday of Rosh HaShanah (Jewish New Year), Yom Kipppur is one of the two components of the High Holy Days of Judaism.
In an article in the Washington Post entitled ‘The thin joy of the new year, the horror of the one just concluded’, Ruth Marcus writes that ‘all the apples dipped in all the honey in the world cannot erase the bitterness of the year just concluded or offer reassurance of a year to come that will be any less painful or precarious.
She quotes from the prophet Jeremiah, in a passage used in the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah, ‘a cry is heard in Ramah – wailing, bitter weeping – Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted for her children, who are gone’.
(So much wailing – for Jewish people, for Palestinian people, for our global community)
She writes:
‘We weep, we must weep, for all the children. Because it is also true: No fast can be easy when so many Gazan children are dead and maimed. Their fates are something I will mourn, and for which I will atone in synagogue this week, because our sins are collective as well as individual”
On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jewish people listen to the piercing sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn. It is usually understood as a wake-up call, to jolt us out of complacency and ponder our deeds.
‘This year for the first time in my life, this teaching doesn’t work’, said Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt. ‘We’re already awake. We’re on edge, and we’re shaken to our cores. This year, the shofar sounds more like wailing to me – a ritual that captures the utter sorrow and pain and unimaginable loss of this year. The shofar is a representation of the wordless anguish that hovers over us and in us. Anguish that we cannot turn away from. Anguish that we cannot close from our ears or our hearts. But it is also our teacher… What if this year the shofar is a call to us from thousands of years ago asking us to find another way forward, to end the sacrificing of our children and to cling to life?’
An excerpt from the article by Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post, 8th October 2024