Yom Kippur
“Here am I, poor in deeds,” it begins. Where did it come from and, more importantly, what does it say to us?
It wants to stop ultra-Orthodox Jews from slaughtering chickens.
The Nobel-Prize winning Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon was one of the pioneers of twentieth-century Hebrew literature. He is known for the sophisticated, allusive, sometimes. . .
The custom of swinging a chicken over one’s head on the eve of Yom Kippur, slaughtering it, and giving it to a poor family was. . .
Why should we confess, particularly on Yom Kippur? Why in public? And why so many times?
How a central prayer of the New Year liturgy reveals the day’s true spirit of awe and fear.
Purim, the most joyous and raucous holiday on the Jewish calendar, has been linked with Yom Kippur, the most solemn and holiest day. Why?
The words entreating forgiveness in the Yom Kippur liturgy suggest that the slate cannot be wiped entirely clean.
Repentance demands not only the recall and the confession of past sins but the willingness to let them go.
The disgraced Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer want to return to public office. Have they repented? And have they atoned?
The concept of a divine ledger in which God inscribes the fate of each Jew during the High Holy Days stretches back to the shared. . .
