MISHNA: Seven days prior to Yom Kippur the Sages would remove the High Priest, who performs the entire Yom Kippur service, from his house to the Chamber of Parhedrin, a room in the Temple designated specifically for the High Priest during that period. And they would designate another priest in his stead to replace him lest a disqualification due to impurity or another circumstance beyond his control prevent him from entering the Temple on Yom Kippur.
I
have a bit of news your rabbi might have neglected to share with you:
One of Judaism’s major holidays is actually about time travel. No,
really.
Every
Jewish holiday has a central ritual. Rosh Hashanah has the shofar.
Sukkot has, well, the sukkah. Passover has matzo. After completing
Tractate Yoma, the Talmudic volume about Yom Kippur, I am left wondering
what exactly lies at the center of the Yom Kippur experience. Before
you answer “fasting,” undoubtedly the Yom Kippur ritual that we have
learned to dread the most, understand that it is only given a few pages
of mention within the entire tractate. Kol Nidre, the contemporary
staple of the start of Yom Kippur services, is not even mentioned at
all. What then lies at the center of Yom Kippur? I believe a hint lies
in the very name of this tractate: Yoma. Unlike, Tractate Rosh Hashanah
(about, you guessed it, Rosh Hashanah), Sukkah (about Sukkot), Megillah
(about Purim), or Pesachim (Pesach—but plural), Yom Kippur’s tractate
uses an invented name, Yoma, meaning The Day. And this I believe is the
first hint in unraveling the great mystery of Yom Kippur’s significance
and enduring power. The ritual at the heart of Yom Kippur is time
itself. Reading Tractate Yoma is a mystical journey. But the question is
not where Tractate Yoma takes us, but when.
Most
of Tractate Yoma revolves around the brilliant preparation and
choreography of the ritual of the Kohen Gadol, the high priest, on Yom
Kippur. Unlike any other Temple service, nearly the entire ritual can
only be performed by the Kohen Gadol. In fact, the tractate begins with a
discussion of what happens if the Kohen Gadol dies. There are many
unique features to this service, aside from the fact that they all must
be performed by the Kohen Gadol. Most notably, the Kohen Gadol enters
the Kodesh Kodashim, the innermost sanctum of the Temple. At no other
time of the year was anyone, including the Kohen Gadol, allowed to enter
the sanctum which houses the Ark of the Covenant. On Yom Kippur, the
Kohen Gadol enters a total of four times, most notably to perform the
incense service. During each of the Kohen Gadol’s confessions, he pronounces
the tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God. Normally, there is a
prohibition to pronounce this name. Jews pronounce this name of
God—comprising the Hebrew letters yud, hey, vav, and hey—as Adonoi, my master. On Yom Kippur, however, the Kohen Gadol pronounces the tetragrammaton name 10 times.
The Yom Kippur of Tractate Yoma is indeed baffling. The destination of
The Day may be unclear, but it is certainly taking us elsewhere.
Great
is repentance, as one’s intentional sins are counted for him as merits,
as it is stated: “And when the wicked turns from his wickedness, and
does that which is lawful and right, he shall live thereby” (Ezekiel 33:19).
Which brings me back to the time travel bit.
According to James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History,
the notion of traveling through time is a fairly modern concept. He
gives credit for the idea of applying the term “time travel,” normally
reserved for spatial change, to H.G. Wells’ 1895 work The Time Machine.
As the unnamed protagonist in Wells’ classic explains, “Any real body
must have extension in four directions: It must have Length, Breadth,
Thickness, and—Duration.” Ten years before Einstein’s theory of
relativity, time as the fourth dimension was born. Gleick, as opposed to
some other authors
on time travel, is convinced that time travel is impossible. The only
concession he is willing to make about the possibilities of time travel
is through memory. He cites Nabokov, “time is but memory in the making.”
When we remember, we travel into our past. Memory is our personal time
machine. And, explains Gleick, nothing powers that movement to our past
like regret. “Regret,” he writes, “is the time traveler’s energy bar.”
And on Yom Kippur this is the main course.
There
are two philosophical schools of thought on the merits of time travel:
presentism and eternalism. Presentists, broadly speaking, only believe
in the reality of the present. Eternalists, however, believe that the
past, present, and future all exist. To believe in time travel, one
likely needs to be an eternalist. For time travel to even be possible,
there needs to be a reality of a future and a past to even journey
toward. Wells himself wrote as much. In a passage in the original
serialized story that was later removed in the final published version
of The Time Machine, Wells writes, “To an omniscient observer
there would be no forgotten past—no piece of time as it were that had
dropped out of existence—and no blank future of things yet to be
revealed.” Teshuva, loosely translated as repentance, is an act
of time travel—journeying into our past to remediate our wrongs. No
wonder, that before we recite the Yom Kippur vidui,
the liturgy that delineates our past sins, we affirm God as the
omniscient observer. “Nothing is concealed before You, nothing is hidden
before Your eyes.” Before, we address our past we must first
acknowledge that it continues to exist.
But
Tractate Yoma does not frame Yom Kippur as a travel into our past.
Instead, Yom Kippur is a journey into our future to reshape our past.
That is why specifically on Yom Kippur the Kohen Gadol over and over
again pronounces the tetragrammaton. The present is divisive. Looking at
God’s world through the lens of a present moment is like peering
through a peep hole. You only see a slice of the picture—and in that
picture there is suffering, absence, loss, and evil. The four-lettered
name of God is a mashup of the Hebrew words haya, hoveh, v’yihiyeh—the past, present, and future. Until the end of times, we are forbidden
from pronouncing that name because it undermines the very reality of
the unredeemed present world we live in. The evil and wrongs that exist
prevent us from fully declaring the name of the Omniscient Observer. We
can read it and know it’s there, but it can’t be fully expressed. On Yom
Kippur, the Kohen Gadol journeys into our collective future where the
divisions of each moment cease. Yom Kippur is the expression of the tetragrammaton as articulated through time. As Rav Yitzchak Hutner describes,
“the Jewish experience of the Day of Atonement is an anticipation, a
foretaste, a temporal and temporary incursion into history, of the
end-time.” Yom Kippur is our time machine into the future.
And this is what he would say in his confession: Please, God, I have sinned, I have done wrong, and I
have rebelled before You, I and my family. Please, God, grant
atonement, please, for the sins, and for the wrongs, and for the
rebellions that I have sinned, and done wrong, and rebelled before You, I
and my family, as it is written in the Torah of Moses your servant:
“For on this day atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you of all your sins; you shall be clean before the Lord” (Leviticus 16:30). And the priests and the people who were in the courtyard respond after he recites the name of God: Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom forever and all time.
Why
do we travel to our future in order to address our past? Normally we go
to the past to change the future—on Yom Kippur we travel to the future
in order to change our past. Eventually, the Talmud explains, the world is headed toward teshuva.
The world yearns for reconciliation, but right now we are stuck in the
middle of our fragmented unfolding stories. Skipping to the end of a
book shows you what kind of narrative you are in the middle of reading.
Yom Kippur reminds us that ultimately the entire narrative of the world
is headed toward a redemptive future that we, through teshuva, can become a part of. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., “the arc of the religious universe is long, but it bends toward teshuva.”
By embodying our collective future on Yom Kippur, we reimagine the arc
of our past mistakes. Our failures become merits—each messy step of our
past brings us closer to our conciliatory future. By glimpsing ahead,
each moment of our imperfect past becomes a chapter in our perfected
future. The ending of Yom Kippur changes the narrative trajectory of our
lives.
Enter the Kodesh HaKedoshim. The service in the inner sanctum, the Kodesh HaKedoshim,
features prominently throughout the Kohen Gadol’s Yom Kippur service.
To glimpse into that future time of redemption, the Kohen Gadol walks
alone, intimately into the one place on earth of complete unity. In
there, alone with God, on the holiest day of the year in the holiest
place in the world, the Kohen Gadol can grasp our anticipatory future
and bring it into the present. And even though we don’t have the rituals
of the Kohen Gadol anymore, we can still access that inner sanctum in those private moments in our hearts
on that most holiest day of the year. Absent a Temple, we each become
the Kohen Gadol, peering into our future from the inner sanctum of our
hearts. On Yom Kippur, like the Kohen Gadol described in Yoma, we wear white clothes.
As Yom Kippur closes, during the Neilah service, it has become a nearly universal custom to say seven times “Hashem hu HaElohim,”
Hashem—the tetragrammaton—is our Lord. We are exiting the time machine
and returning to the world of multiplicities, as that plural name of
God, Elohim, suggests. Hashem hu HaElohim. We are all wearing white clothes of purity today, tomorrow is back to the basic wardrobe. Hashem hu HaElohim. Even though a redeemed future has not yet arrived, we can bring that possibility into our present. Hashem hu HaElohim. Our past, however ugly, can have a new ending. Hashem hu HaElohim. To embrace Yom Kippur is to believe that your life is part of the redemptive narrative of the world. Hashem hu HaElohim. Even in the mundane tomorrow, Yom Kippur demonstrates our capacity to transcend. Hashem hu HaElohim. If we can connect to our future, we can transform our past. Hashem hu HaElohim. Even after we exit the inner sanctum, its vision endures.
הדרן עלך מסכת יומא והדרך עלן
