Today is Yom Kippur, the culmination of the high holy days that extend from the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, to the day of atonement, Yom Kippur.  

Ms. Brous: It’s return. It’s literally returning to a right path. And, I mean, the whole Jewish notion of sin is you’ve just gone astray and you can turn it around. And, you know, the principle, the fundamental principles of teshuvah, of return, is that human beings have free will. We have the capacity to make great mistakes. And we have the capacity to turn it around. And of course, there are certain things that there is no full teshuvah that can be affected for because the damage is irreparable, things like murder and sexual assault, and some kinds of public humiliation, that it’s impossible to ever fully turn back.

But for everything else, our tradition says it’s possible to turn your life around and to make amends in a way that will heal the breach that you’ve caused in the relationship, either, you know, with yourself, with God, with someone in the community, with the world. And that’s really, I think, also, the ultimate challenge of Rosh Hashanah, which is, we call it, you know, it’s — in the prayers, we say, “Hayom harat olam” — “Today is the birthday of the world.” And Rosh Hashanah is this, it’s this moment in which we celebrate the creation of the world, which meant nothing to me, you know, when I heard that growing up is …

Ms. Tippett: Right. Right.

Ms. Brous: “Today, we celebration the creation of the world,” that means nothing.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Brous: But what does mean something to me is the fact that each one of us participates in creation every single day, when we make a choice about how we want to live in the world. And then, you know, there are ways in the liturgy and in the religious — in Jewish religious practice, in which every single day, we strive to kind of identify the things that need to be transformed in our lives. But the tradition also gets that it’s not enough to, you know, that doing it every day sort of, it might lose some of its power. And so we need to have this, you know, this moment in time that’s part of the calendrical cycle, that’s, you know, sort of built in to the calendar.

Ms. Tippett: This kind of dramatic High Holy Days — where everything stops.

Ms. Brous: Exactly, in which we stop everything.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Brous: And, I mean, even many — you know, secular Jews or people who don’t identify, oh, will still stop and kind of recognize it’s Rosh Hashanah or it’s Yom Kippur. And we have this shofar, which blasts in our ears. And it’s not supposed to be beautiful and melodious. It’s supposed to really wake you up and say, ‘Look at yourself. Are you the mother you want to be? Are you the friend you want to be? Are you the American you want to be? Are you the human being that you want to be in the world?’
(Sound bite of shofar)

Ms. Tippett: The call of the ancient ram’s horn, or shofar, punctuates the 30 days of introspection leading to Rosh Hashanah and the 10 Days of Awe through Yom Kippur. The sage of the Talmud, the 12th-century philosopher Maimonides, interpreted the call of the shofar at Rosh Hashanah in this way: “Awake, you sleepers, from your slumber. Examine your deeds. Return in repentance and remember your creator.” Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services build on prayers and confessions of mistakes, transgressions, and ethical lapses, both individual and communal.

Ms. Brous: My sense is that a lot of what’s happening in the liturgy and this incredibly rich and complex liturgy of High Holy Days is that the rabbis are trying to very cautiously push us to confront the parts of ourselves that we are simply not open to confronting when we walk in the door. And so it’s, in some ways, it’s very subtle, what they’re trying to do. But listing, there’s the Viddui, the confessional, which is always said in the plural “Ashamnu, bagadnu,” “We did this, we did this” and …

Ms. Tippett: And you go through, is it right, you go through every single letter of the alphabet, am I right?

Ms. Brous: Yes. Yes, that’s right, and over and over and over. We do the Viddui multiple times over the course of the day of Yom Kippur. And the idea is, ‘I didn’t do that.’ You know, you sort of walk in and someone gives you a list of sins that you’re supposed to publicly state that you committed.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Brous: And this is intensely countercultural, because all of our impulse and all of the norms of society push us to deny and reject responsibility for the things that we’re doing wrong.

Ms. Tippett: You know, or I think to — you know, to get over it, to move on once, right, and not relive it every year.

Ms. Brous: And this says, ‘We did these things. Each one of us did these things.’ And even if you personally didn’t do it, someone in this community did it. So …