Yom Kippur, Rediscovered

During the years of my childhood I would spend the Yom Kippur  service devoutly attending to the hands of my watch. A little bit of mental math became an imperative—how many pages were left, divided by how long each page took, and then how many hours were left in the fast. I imagine that this calculus is not so unusual, and that Jewish children (and not a few adults) have been performing it in one form or another for millennia.

Just because everyone does it doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel guilty about doing it. Wishing time away always feels like a shortsighted posture that ages poorly. Plus, expiating a year’s worth of wrongdoing in 25 hours is an arduous enough undertaking without hurrying along the minutes. The convergence of the most serious day on the calendar with the most impatient approach to time is a constant challenge—and then there is the hunger, of course. 

Every part of the Yom Kippur prayers seemed supersized, except the afternoon break, which passed by in a flash. A whole prayerbook for a single day. Rosh Hashanah, itself no slouch, is like a trailer for the main event. I set off for my post–high school year in Israel—at Yeshivat Har Etzion—just as the Jewish community of Gaza was being removed. Israel was awash in orange, a society fraught with feeling and emotion. It felt like everyone was singing and crying.

Yom Kippur landed in this moment of contested territory—when the boundaries of the state were being redrawn, the question of its promise debated, allies converging and diverging in jagged and jarring ways. The fate of Gush Katif felt like not only a geopolitical event but also a religious and spiritual one. Hundreds gathered in a Beit Midrash, many with guns slung over their shoulders, asking for forgiveness in the face of the unknown. 

That year I gained an appreciation for not only the stakes of Yom Kippur, but also for the beauty of its melody and liturgies. Song became a way to express not only the words but what was inside, behind, and underneath them. The prayers became three-dimensional, spaces to inhabit rather than mere words to read. That is not to say that focus was a given, only that once it was lost it would come back around, with redoubled vigor.

It was the Avodah section in particular that I found compelled me anew. I saw, as if for the first time, the spectacle of it all — the script, the reenactment, the trembling of the kohen gadol on his day of devotion. The miming of the high priest became a way to repeat the past—and rehearse for a dreamed-of future. Given the upheavals in contemporary Israel, it suggested that the deep drama of Jewish history was ongoing. Biblical chapters were still being written.

My appreciation for Yom Kippur—and for the value of all prayer—has recently been drawn into even sharper relief by the increasingly rapid saturation of technology into life. The boundary between the world and ourselves is increasingly a smooth screen. Attention is fractured and fragmentary. The very thing that makes Yom Kippur challenging—its call to reach for a stripped-down self alone before the Creator—is what makes it essential.  

This article appears in the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.