High Holidays and Forgiveness

By Shira Novack
KOC Assistant Editor
Binghamton University

I have spent a lot of time trying to come up with something to write about for the high holidays and I find that it is a very difficult topic. There is so much to write about and yet at the same time so little.

As we celebrate the world getting older we are also given the chance to start over and be forgiven for our transgressions. There are many traditions in Judaism that have been used to remove the stain of sin and allow people to start over again. The one that first comes to mind is that when the Israelites were wandering in the desert, they would transfer all of their sins onto a goat and then send the goat out into the wilderness. There is also the method that is probably most familiar to people today, Tashlikh, which is observed on the first day of Rosh HaShanah (except when the first day is Shabbat!) when we symbolically cast off our sins by throwing bread into a moving body of water.

There is one more tradition that I know of called Shlugen Kapores. In this very old tradition, chickens are spun around people's heads and then are killed; the people are free of sins because sins have been transferred to the chicken. This method of transferring sins brings to mind two stories I heard while growing up. One is a children's story called, When the Chickens Went on Strike, a story about chickens who go on strike in an attempt to put a halt to this tradition. The second story is one my grandmother has told me about her father (who was a kosher butcher) who supplied chickens and performed this tradition to families in their neighborhood. The chickens were then slaughtered and at least one was given to his landlord (a non-Jew).

Besides all of these traditions there are also the ten days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, during which we have the time to ask those we have wronged for forgiveness. This one is the hardest acts for most of us to do, but perhaps the most important. With the process of actively asking forgiveness, we are acknowledging publicly that we have committed a sin. If the person does not accept our apology we need to attempt to ask forgiveness two more times and if the person still does not yield, then we are forgiven, for we have tried. In this way, a person who has truly tried to be forgiven is not punished for the hard-heart of another.

All of the traditions that accompany the observance of a new year are important, but asking someone for forgiveness, which has the least amount of ritual associated with it, is probably the most important. Perhaps there are fewer rituals accompanying the act of asking for forgiveness because it is a ritual in itself to keep and build relationships in a community.

Shanah Tovah

[Posted 9/18/09]