On Yum Kippur

Many Jews avoided eating for a day earlier last week, spent a day praying feverishly for forgiveness. Some slaughtered chicken and waived them over their heads in a strange ancient sin transmission ritual. Why?

Most participants did not do so out of a literal fear of God. They did so because it feels good to belong to an ancient tradition; because they believe that such traditions have protected the Jews for thousands of years and should not be abandoned; because these traditions are what they have learned as children.

All these are understandable reasons. Human beings, specks of meaningless dust in the big scheme of things, generally derive a sense of security from linking themselves to others and creating elaborate rituals to celebrate the group’s identity and power. Rituals bring order to chaos, meaning to meaninglessness, a time line to infinite time. Shared rituals are our in-crowd code; they help us tell friend from foe; they signal to ourselves and to others that our group is organized, unified and therefore strong.

Linking ourselves to ancient tradition through ancient rituals also confers confidence because we tend to believe in things that have withstood the test of time.

Finally, People tend to continue the ways of their childhood. This is true for language, religion, politics, geographical location, etc. On all these measures people tend to keep what their parents gave them. What we grew up with tends to be associated with ‘home’ which is usually associated with warmth and safety and order and love. So we keep up the ritual to keep up the feelings that arrive with it.

While understandable, these reasons are also problematic.

First is the problem of false perspective. There’s romance to what is ancient. Many assume that the ancient ways were somehow better, when in fact those who lived in ancient times spent much energy trying to extract themselves from these very ways. For example, those who seek a ‘return to nature’ as a solution to our current problems tend to forget that our ancestors worked for thousands of years to get away from nature, to control and tame it, perhaps for good reasons.
Religious practices at times show a similar dynamic. The idea of incurring the actual wrath of God for infractions was once a commonplace notion, a fact of consciousness. Then came the enlightenment. We learned that lightning is electricity, not divinity; that the earth is not the center of the universe; that antibiotics are more effective than exorcism or prayer. But as the limitations of our current explanatory systems become ever clearer—and every human system has limitations—a misplaced harkening for the supposed remedy of the old ways emerges.

For the American Jew, the truth is that your life now is better than the life of every Jew who ever lived on any conceivable measure. It’s also true that most of this progress is due to inventions, ideas, and political movements that are relatively new, and have no representation in the bible: empiricism, democracy, human rights—life, liberty, pursuit of happiness for all, including minorities and women—checks and balances in a secular governing system , equality, technology, tolerance, personal freedom, and the list goes on.

Second is the literalism trap, which measures ‘connection to the ancestry’ by whether we continue to do what our ancestors did. By this logic, the way to remain connected to our ancestral human legacy is to live in a cave, clank stones to make fire, and etch a mammoth on the cave’s wall for documentation. In fact, a connection to the ancestry is better conceived as a thematic construct. I’m connected to my ancient human ancestors because I live in a protected space, I keep myself warm by the best means available, and I post on the wall of my Facebook page.

The reluctance to think thematically is evident in the strange contortions that observant Jews put themselves through trying to honor ancient rules, like not working on Shabbat, by avoiding trivialities like turning on the stove. Things like making a fire on which to cook used to be hard work in ancient times, and it makes sense to have a day of rest from hard work. But turning a knob does not rise to the level of hard work, and there’s no reason to avoid it.

The third problem is in the bogus equation: old ways = wholesome/strong/good. Older ideas are not inherently deeper than newer ones. The fact that a tradition is enduring may mean that it’s been adaptive, but many bad things are enduring and adaptive. Viruses are very adaptive. Wars are enduring; which is not sufficient reason to celebrate or cherish either. Many things that our parents and ancestors did were bad, uninformed, inefficient, or immoral by the standards of knowledge and consciousness we enjoy today. That doesn’t mean they didn’t survive. It also doesn’t mean they should.

The fourth problem is that the old rituals have not really protected Jews that well at all. The Jews have not been well-protected throughout history. They have barely survived. Adherence to their old rituals often has put them in danger, a fact brought into savage relief by the holocaust and to which the founding of Israel has been a reaction. Jews are not a success story in terms of survival compared to, say, the Chinese. Yet nobody recommends eating your matzo balls with chopsticks.

As for me, I didn’t fast on Yom Kippur. I didn’t kill a chicken and swing it over my head. I didn’t pray to God to forgive me. I prefer to spend my days carrying on the work of the enlightenment, which of all the traditions of thought seems to me to be the most promising for humanity’s future, despite its young age. I like eating regularly and well, which is, by all available evidence, quite good for you. If I hurt someone I’d rather ask for their forgiveness or make amends to them personally. I think that works better between people. There is nothing holy in my consciousness; no holiness, no sacredness, no godliness. Just plain old messed-up humanity, with no one in charge of it and nothing above it. Yom Kippur’s festival of faux self-sacrifice feels forced to me, like mother’s day. Those who really love and attend to their mother don’t need such a day as mother’s day, and their mothers don’t really need it either.

On Yum Kippur, sitting happily and peacefully in my quiet house after a nice meal, I wished for more quiet happiness and peace for us Jews—and less fever, less hunger, less slaughter.