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Rabbi Yitz Greenberg

ON YOM KIPPUR

This is the one time the Jewish religion really focuses on death and puts it before you. Yom Kippur is about failure and death. Stop and weigh your life. Have you lived on the side of dignity and what have you done wrong—not just to other people but to yourself? Did you respect your own life: or did you run it down? That’s the dialectic. Celebrate life, but part of celebrating life is not to boast of it, but rather to look at your failures, look at your weaknesses, not in despair or in guilt, but as a corrector. . . . The Talmud says that if you overcome failure, if you try a second time with renewed effort, you’ll reach a higher level than people who have never failed.

Yom Kippur is literally a ritual reenactment of your death. The Jewish version of what it is to die. You don’t eat, you don’t have sex, you’re dead even if you’re living. If your life were going to end tomorrow, where do you stand?