Yom Kippur 2011 - Room to Swing a Chicken!

"The homes are unusually noisy.  The fowls, their legs tied, cluck and crow at the top of their voices.  It generally happens, too, that a rooster gets excited and begins to run and fly all over the house, despite his bound feet, and there follows a long struggle to subdue him.

First the fowl is held in the hand and everyone read selections from certain Psalms, beginning with the words, "Sons of Adam".  Then the fowl is circled above the head nine times, the following being recited at the same time:  "This is instead of me, this is an offering on my account, this is in expiation for me, this rooster, or hen, shall go to his, or her, death and may I enter a long and healthy life.

The greatest ado is in the yard of the shochet, the ritual slaughterer, where the Kaparos are taken to be slaughtered after the above ceremony has taken place.  Only the poorer Jews carry there Kaparos to the shochet, however.  The well-to-do have the shochet call at their home and dispatch the fowls there.  For there should be no time lost between the Kaparos ceremony and the slaughtering of the fowl."

(Hayyim Schauss, The Jewish Festivals, p.150)

Hard though it may be for us to believe, this ritual, described here by Hayyim Schauss, is a Jewish ritual for Yom Kippur.  The Kaparot ritual originated in Babylonia in the tenth century and was particularly popular in Eastern Europe in the late middle ages and, although frowned upon by Progressive Jews and many Orthodox Jews too, it is still practiced today in certain communities.

Atem Nitzavim: A Yom Kippur Ode

"Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnei Adonai Eloheichem"

"You stand this day, all of you, before the Eternal One your God"

Atem nitzavim…

You stand up to show respect to others and in a place of worship to show respect to God.  You stand up to recite certain prayers and confessions, as a physical expression of a cognitive process.  You stand up at other times to begin a journey, in fact, you start every day by standing up.

Atem nitzavim…

You stand before God, standing in prayer, standing together as a community, standing as an individual, standing still, just being you.

Parashat Ha'azinu: The Power of Listening

"Give ear, O heavens, let me speak!"  (Deuteronomy 32:1)

During the Ten Days of Repentance, we seek to make amends for all our transgressions of this past year.  The hardest and the most important place to do this is in our relationships with others.

When we have a disagreement with a colleague, when we distance ourselves from a friend, when a family feud develops with a relative; we form a narrative in our own mind.  This narrative tells us what happened and why we are angry or hurt but it rarely tells us why the other person is angry or hurt.

Relationships break down, crimes are committed and wars are fought because everybody walks around with a set of narrative so strong that it leaves no space for alternative versions.

Yom Kippur Sermon 2009

I have an Israeli friend and like most Israelis who are not ultra-orthodox, he is almost completely secular.  His family gather for big meals when they have a day off work for the festivals but the idea of attending Synagogue or observing Shabbat is completely alien to her.  He is Israeli before she is Jewish.

He once told me about a time when he had spent the summer in England and had picked apples with a group of other young travellers on a farm down in Kent.  One night, their caravans were raided by the Immigration police and those without work permits were put into prison cells for a couple of nights before being sent back to their own countries.

When I heard this, I was fascinated to hear what it must be like in an English prison.  I wanted to know everything!  How big was the cell?  What were the beds like?  Were there bars on the windows?  And finally, the most important question of all: What is British prison food like?

“Oh,” he said casually, “I don’t really know. It was Yom Kippur!”