PROFESSOR CARLOS EIRE (speaking to class at Yale University): In 1517, something happens that has happened many times before…

BOB FAW, correspondent: Carlos Eire is at a pinnacle of the academic world. With an endowed chair at Yale, where he teaches religious studies, he’s also written six books, including the memoir “Waiting for Snow in Havana,” which won the National Book Award. But just as remarkable as his rise from Cuban refugee to professor of distinction is Carlos Eire’s spiritual odyssey.

EIRE: It is an incomprehensible and in many ways an indescribable experience. What had been scary to me, what had been frightful, suddenly turned into the most beautiful thing.

FAW: In pre-Castro Cuba, Eire’s was a life of privilege—the festive holidays and lavish birthday parties at grand estates befitting the son of a wealth and influential judge and a gorgeous mother. But their Spanish Catholicism terrified young Carlos.

EIRE: There was no place in the world scarier for me as a child than a church. Actually my worst nightmare was being locked in a church all night long, because the images were so frightening.

FAW: What tormented him most, Eire recalls, was his father’s collection of icons of Christ.

EIRE: The crown of thorns on his head bleeding. It was in his study, right near the Jesus plate with the eyes that followed you.

FAW: Eire’s comfortable life came crashing down when Fidel Castro seized power. Only 11, Eire knew his life had changed when the new regime prevented him from seeing a Walt Disney film, “20000 Leagues Under the Sea,” that he had already seen seven times.

EIRE: That was the turning point for me. I really felt like someone was trying to steal my soul, not just invade but claim it as their own, some authority outside of me, and that’s when I just began to see everything in a different light.

FAW: Fearful, their world collapsing, Eire’s parents sent him and his brother, Tony, to the United States in 1962, two of 14,000 Cuban children airlifted from Cuba in an operation dubbed “Pedro Pan.” Like many of the other children, Carlos and Tony lived with foster families. Never again would they see their father, and their mother would join them only years later. When Carlos left Cuba, his parents gave him a book which they said would bring him comfort.

EIRE: It was “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis—for centuries had been a very popular text in Spanish-speaking cultures. It’s all about self-denial. It’s about not being part of the world. It’s very monastic in its outlook.

FAW: You wrote in the Miami book, “It scared me half to death. It is the most depressing book ever written by any human being in all of human history.”

EIRE: From a child’s perspective, yes, definitely.

FAW: But in Miami, living with foster parents who were Jewish but who made him go to a Catholic church every Sunday, Eire was unshackled for the first time from the Catholicism of Cuba and its troubling images of pain and suffering.

EIRE: After I had come to the US and seen churches that were free of such images, I realized that Spanish Catholicism and Latin American Catholicism was very different from American Catholicism in that respect and sort of put a less scary pall over religion.

FAW: Later, when Eire and his brother moved in with his uncle in Illinois, there were no more gory images of Jesus.

EIRE: My uncle had this very Protestant image of Jesus above his armchair—totally unscary, a friendlier, more accessible Jesus.

FAW: Though liberated from the demons of his youth, Eire says he was still plagued, even crippled by what he calls “the void.”

EIRE: It attacked me, because it seemed to come from outside of me. it was a feeling of utter abandonment and emptiness and having no connection to anything or anyone, and having no one or anything beyond one’s self. Everything was turning dark.

FAW: But as Carlos Eire so movingly writes in his second memoir, “Learning to Die in Miami,” that overwhelming despair was shattered on Holy Thursday 1965 in a profound religious experience.

EIRE: It was at that period when I started reading “The Imitation of Christ,” not just little passages, but actually getting into the meaning, and it brought me to this experience, a profoundly religious experience. I think it’s fair to call it a conversion experience.

FAW: “Everything changes,” you wrote. “Everything changes from top to bottom. A void rips loudly and light pours through.”

EIRE: Up until that point I always thought that spirit was insubstantial. It’s with that experience that I realized that spirit is more substantial than matter, because it is connected to eternity. Time stops. All there is is now, and this now is forever.

FAW: After experiencing what he calls “that presence,” Carlos Eire says religion became his salvation and he was able, he says, “to let go.”

EIRE: Thinking that there’s something beyond this life helps one immensely in letting go. Without some other dimension, letting go, to me, is too painful—impossible.

FAW: You wrote, “He who knows best how to let go will enjoy the greater peace, because he is conqueror of himself.”

EIRE: Letting go of your attachment to things and even your attachment to your own will and your own attempt to make sense of the world your own way and kind of open yourself up to something higher.

FAW: Not all those haunting images from his past have been excised. He anguishes, he says, over what is happening in Cuba today.

EIRE: I could not, in a sense, stop feeling the pain. The so-called free education and free medical care come at the cost of slavery. Cubans right now are no different than slaves in a plantation in the American South before the Civil War. Europeans and Canadians who go to Cuba to have a good time—I can’t understand it. It would be like vacationing in the Third Reich and having a good time and ignoring Auschwitz.

FAW: And while Cuba, he says, “is a wound that will not close,” the scars from his earlier religious trauma have healed.

EIRE: Yes, there is pain and suffering, but it can be transcended, and it can be redemptive. I was able to let go of everything I had lost, including my parents, and I was able to focus on what the purpose of life should be. Not as regaining everything I had lost, but rather giving one’s self to others.

FAW: Carlos Eire—a long way from Cuba, but waiting no more.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in New Haven, Connecticut.

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BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a powerful story today about punishment for juveniles who commit crimes. The Supreme Court has thrown out the death penalty for such young people, but in 44 states they can still be sentenced to life in prison without parole.  Is that just for children – even for the worst crimes? Tim O’Brien reports from Tampa, Florida.

TIM O’BRIEN: Twenty-three-year-old Kenneth Young is serving life in prison with no possibility of parole for a series of hotel robberies in and around Tampa, Florida. It was June of 2000. Young had just turned 15 and was acting at the direction of 25-year-old Jacques Bethea, a neighborhood drug dealer with a long arrest record. Bethea would hold the gun. Young would take the money:

KENNETH YOUNG: The only thing he told me to do was get the money and the tapes, and that was it.

O’BRIEN: What tapes?

Mr. YOUNG: Like video tapes from the video cameras.

O’BRIEN: The security cameras?

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: And you did that?

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young says he had little choice. His mother was addicted to crack cocaine and had stolen drugs from Bethea. He believed her life was in danger.

Mr. YOUNG: He threatened to hurt my Momma.

O’BRIEN: What did he say he’d do?

Mr. YOUNG: Kill her.

Mr. YOUNG: Yes, sir.

O’BRIEN: Young’s mother, who says she’s been off drugs for more than three years, blames herself for the fix her son is in.

O’BRIEN: If you didn’t go along?

STEPHANIE YOUNG: Yes, I do, I do, because if it wasn’t for the drugs, me being on drugs, then my son wouldn’t be where he’s at today.

O’BRIEN: Young is being held at a maximum security prison in central Florida. Under Florida law, juveniles charged with serious crimes are tried as adults, and serious crimes — like armed robbery — can bring life in prison. And in the courtroom of Judge J. Rogers Padgett, being a child didn’t seem to help. It can even hurt the child who behaves like one, as Kenneth Young did.

Judge J. ROGERS PADGETT (Hillsborough County, Florida Circuit Court): So what we see is what we get in the way of a defendant. We get a person who shows no remorse. We get a person who is smiling in court, thinks it’s funny. We have a person who, while he is under consideration for a life sentence, is flipping signals to people in the gallery.

O’BRIEN: He’s only 15, barely.

Judge PADGETT: We have a person who gives no appearance of deserving any slack whatsoever and sentence him. So we give him a life sentence.

O’BRIEN: Enter law professor Paolo Annino, who runs the Children in Prison Project at Florida State University. Annino has been trying for years to get the Florida legislature to allow parole consideration for all juvenile offenders in the state to give them a second chance, his arguments as much moral as they are legal.

(to Prof. Paolo Annino): Is it your position that no juvenile should be sentenced to life without parole?

Professor PAOLO ANNINO (Florida State University): Oh, absolutely, and I think we’re immoral, ultimately, as a nation. This is no different from slavery or other major moral issues. Placing children in adult prisons for life is a death sentence for children. Do we want to do that as a society? Do we want to ignore our Western traditions? I mean, we do have Western traditions, and one part of our Western traditions is called redemption, and for many people in our culture redemption is an important value.

Judge PADGETT: There are some crimes that these people have committed that simply have no redemption. The victim and the public in general who know about the crime are looking for retribution.

O’BRIEN: It’s all about retribution.

Judge PADGETT: Retribution, right.

O’BRIEN: According to Human Rights Watch, the United States is the only country in the world that regularly sentences juvenile offenders to life in prison without parole. There are now more than 2,500. Pennsylvania has the most with 444. All but these six states allow life without parole for those under 18 at the time of their crimes.

Most of the crimes that bring life in prison without parole are far worse than Kenneth Young’s armed robberies. Most involved murder, often the murder of other children — crimes that shock the conscience and break the heart.

DAWN ROMIG (testifying): Good morning. My name is Dawn Romig.

O’BRIEN: In Pennsylvania, a Senate committee held hearings last October to consider doing away with life sentences for juvenile offenders. Lawmakers got an earful from opponents like Dawn Romig, whose 12-year-old daughter had been murdered by 17-year-old Brian Bahr.

Ms. ROMIG (testifying): We learned that Brian had made a list. It was called 23 things to do to a girl in the woods: “Beat her, check; rape her, check; kill her, check.” Everything on that list was carried out. It was an adult act he planned and executed. Why should these juveniles not get life in prison? Age cannot excuse what they have done.

JODI DOTTS (testifying): I never got to say goodbye to Kimmie. I never got to see her in a casket. I now talk to her at her grave still, 10 years later, on Mother’s Day. I’d also like to add, as I was sitting here listening to people saying they need second chances, my daughter didn’t have a second chance. She wasn’t given that choice whether to live or to die and I’m here to fight to make sure that these juveniles do not get released. Thank you.

O’BRIEN: What do you say to the parents of a child — whose child is murdered?

Prof. ANNINO: Well, it’s tragic and it’s very difficult, and I turn to a group that I’m associated with, and it’s called Mothers Against Murderers Association — and their children have been killed

O’BRIEN: MAMA Inc., a remarkable support group in West Palm Beach. Seventy-three women, all of whom have lost a child to murder, meet at this storefront office every other Thursday. The walls are lined with the photographs—the mother with her lost child.

On this day, Paula Bowe will be joining MAMA’s poignant photo gallery. Her daughter was shot to death by an ex-boyfriend—

PAULA BOWE: And he shot her. He shot her twice at point blank—once in the face, once in the neck.

O’BRIEN: What makes this association so remarkable is that, despite their grief, members do not seek retribution. Instead, they speak out against it.

ANGELA WILLIAMS (Founder, MAMA Inc): That’s one thing I tell my moms all the time: the only way they’re going to move on, they’re going to have to learn to forgive, you know, and if they don’t learn to forgive, then they’ll never be able to move on to the next step.

O’BRIEN: And Angela Williams should know.

Ms. WILLIAMS: I lost seven. I lost five nephews and two nieces in my family, and that motivates me to keep going to help others. Gun violence — all killed by guns.

O’BRIEN: MAMA is supporting Kenneth Young’s petition for clemency on the premise that any child should be given a second chance, even for murder.

O’BRIEN: Sylvia Manning is a preacher whose son was shot to death. She believes there’s hope for his killer, who has yet to be apprehended.

Reverend SYLVIA MANNING: I feel as though whoever did this to my son, they can be redeemed. I mean, if they know Jesus they can be redeemed.

O’BRIEN: It’s a religious issue to you?

Rev. MANNING: Not really religious. It’s what my heart says.

O’BRIEN: Linda Battle is a Palm Beach County deputy sheriff whose son Eric was run down and killed by a drug dealer.

LINDA BATTLE (Deputy Sheriff, Palm Beach County, FL): I worked in the jails, and I see the juveniles come in there for major crimes, and they’re just babies, and I don’t know what got them to that point.

O’BRIEN: What got them to that point? The U.S. Supreme Court, in rejecting the death penalty for juvenile offenders four years ago, relied in part on the growing body of psychiatric evidence that shows why children often fail to act as responsibly as adults,

Dr. RICHARD RATNER (American Psychiatric Association): In a nutshell, it is that the brain has not really matured. You do not really have an adult brain until you are in your early 20s.

O’BRIEN: You have actual, empirical evidence of that?

Dr. RATNER: We do.

O’BRIEN: Ratner says that magnetic resonance imaging — MRIs like this one — show that juveniles use a different part of the brain in the decision-making process than adults, making them more likely to act irrationally, less likely to appreciate the consequences of what they do.

Roughly 25 percent of the juvenile offenders serving life with no parole for murder never murdered anyone; rather, they were following the lead of an older adult. But under what’s known in the law as the felony murder rule, they are just as guilty as those who pull the trigger and often sentenced just as harshly.

Prof. ANNINO: They follow these older adults, and then the adults commit a murder. So the kid never has the gun in his hand. The kid never touches the gun. Many times—

O’BRIEN: But he’s still charged with murder?

Prof. ANNINO: He is charged with murder and gets the exact same sentence.

O’BRIEN: An accessory is as guilty as the principal?

Prof. ANNINO: In the state of Florida it is exactly the same, and that’s the felony murder rule, and we have it not just in Florida, but around the country, and the felony murder rules denies the individuality of the child. It ignores the fact that you have a child here, and you’re treating the child just like an adult.

O’BRIEN: Among those who have problems with that, we were surprised to find the judge who had sentenced Kenneth Young to four consecutive life terms. Judge J. Rogers Padgett said judges have no way of knowing what might become of the children who appear before them and, at least where the victim doesn’t die, their fate should be left to the Department of Corrections.

Judge PADGETT: If I went and talked to Kenneth, I might have sympathy, too, because I firmly believe the Department of Corrections ought to be given the latitude to determine when these people are ready to go. What do I know? At the time of sentencing, I’m doing a snapshot. So what do I know?

O’BRIEN: But in Florida, as in most states, it’s too late to turn back the clock. Even the sentencing judge cannot reopen this case decided more than seven years ago.

Ms. YOUNG: It’s hard. It’s so hard — the sleepless nights that I have had. And every time I go to see my child, and I have to leave that prison without my baby, it just takes something out of me. It hurts. It hurts so bad.

O’BRIEN: Unless Florida changes its law, or the governor commutes the sentence, Kenneth Young will die in prison. He will never get out.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Tim O’Brien in Tampa, Florida.

Sin is central to the holiday of Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is literally the Day of Atonement, and so to atone for sins is the centerpiece of Yom Kippur. The most common Hebrew word for sin is Cheyt. Cheyt means something akin to going astray. It’s actually a term that is used in archery, so if you can imagine an arrow being shot from a bow that is directed towards a bull’s eye that is the trajectory of our lives. Unfortunately, our lives don’t go straight towards that bull’s eye. We get pushed to the left, to the right, up, down and those are the sins, the ways that we have gone astray. We have stepped away from the path that we should ideally be on. The purpose, then, of Yom Kippur is to come back to the path, to repent. Teshuvah means return. Repentance really is return and to come back to that path so that our arrow is again directed towards the bull’s eye.

Teshuvah, repentence means that we have really become a different person. Once we have repented, we are no longer the person that we were who would have committed such an act. In order to become different people — this is quite a task. The steps of teshuvah are this: First, we have to come to an understanding that we have done wrong. Then we need to approach those people who have been harmed by our mistakes. If I, for example, hurt you in some way, I would need to approach you and ask you for forgiveness for specifically how I had hurt you. If there was some damage, I need to make restitution. If I had stolen something that was yours, I need to return it. My repentance is not even begun until I have made peace with you.

The steps of teshuvah, of repentance, involve understanding how you had hurt someone and then approaching that person for forgiveness. That person would need to grant forgiveness; the request for forgiveness must be full and sincere, and the granting of forgiveness needs to be sought after. Once forgiveness has been achieved between the people, then there is still an understanding that the mistake, the error, has caused a rift, a separation between myself, let’s say if I’m the sinner, and G-d. So the repentance then needs to include asking G-d for forgiveness as well. This is the holiday of Yom Kippur, the holiday on which we ask G-d for forgiveness.

There are times when it is impossible to get forgiveness from other people, people whom you might have harmed. This does not mean that G-d will not forgive you. You need to have sought that forgiveness from other people, but if you have truly sought that forgiveness, the true mark of repentance is, have you made yourself into a different person? And if you have truly made yourself into a different person, then absolutely G-d forgives. This is one of the great promises of Jewish life, of Jewish religion, that G-d is a forgiving G-d, and if we earnestly and honestly ask for forgiveness, forgiveness is granted. But let’s understand what that means. It means we are different people. So, if I have become a truly different person, not the person who would have done those acts, then yes, G-d forgives.

There is in Judaism no idea of original sin. Rather, there is an understanding that we as human beings are in a challenging situation. We make mistakes, we err, and it is then our responsibility to learn from our mistakes, to grow from our mistakes, and to become better people from our mistakes. But at our base, our essence, we are not understood as sinners.

You can be sinful in thought. Some Jews actually don’t think that is covered, but it is. They think that it’s only actions, but thoughts, too, can be sinful. There are ways that our thoughts may lead to actions or our thoughts can create a climate in which sin is more readily available to people. So, yes, even our thoughts, which are very difficult to control, can be understood as sins.

Our society does not readily accept this idea that there should be a prescribed period of time in which you ask for forgiveness. To ask for forgiveness takes a level of humility, to be able to say I have done wrong and to say it out loud. It’s not enough that I realize I have done wrong; I have to say it out loud to you. I have to tell you what I did or tell another person what I did, and that is a very difficult thing for us to do. The process of remaking ourselves is a very difficult process, but when we remake ourselves we truly do look back and say, how could I have done such a thing? We actually want to seek forgiveness for those actions.

Heshbon Hanefesh, an accounting of the soul, literally, is a process that we engage in 40 days before Yom Kippur, from the start of the month preceding the month in which Yom Kippur occurs, and we use that time to examine our deeds, to examine ourselves, and to seek out ways that we can improve.

Judaism understands that we have a variety of inclinations within us, including what’s called the Yetzer Harah, the inclination or the urge to do evil. Now, this urge leads us not only to do evil, but also to do some things that are good. So it is a complicated urge. If we did not have a Yetzer Harah, if we did not have an urge to do evil, we might be saintly all the time. Then we wouldn’t be human beings, but it is the great privilege of being a human being that we could do battle with the various inclinations that we have and successful ultimately overcome the Yetzer Harah and put it to good purpose only.

The al Cheyt is done in the plural. It is understood that the community is collectively responsible for all of the sins of the community. When I recite the al Cheyt prayer, I may be reciting a litany of sins, some of which are all my very own, but some of which are not mine. Physical violence, for example, is not a sin that I can turn back and imagine when I hit my child — I don’t do those things.Yet, we say the prayers in the plural because we understand if these things have occurred within our community, in some ways we are responsible. We are responsible together to create a community atmosphere where these sins would not occur. If somebody has sinned, I actually have a share in the responsibility for that sin.

Tashlich is done on the second day of Rosh Hashanah This is an introduction to the themes of Yom Kippur which occur shortly after Rosh Hashanah. Tashlich is a ceremony which Jews will traditionally join together casting breadcrumbs from their pockets, as it were, to symbolize the sins. The idea is that we are casting our sins out. We are casting them away from ourselves, and this physical action is an important piece of the process to get us to take this process of Teshuvah, repentance, seriously.

In the al Cheyt prayer, there are many descriptions of sin that actually use very concrete, physical, bodily formulas. The sins aren’t just, oh, I’m arrogant, but I have a stiff neck — stubborn, I have a stiff-neck. So the neck, the eyes, the ears — all of these are imposed upon the words of the prayer. It is as if we have been physically deformed almost by our actions, and so what we want to do is physically re-form ourselves. So the physical act of Tashlich, of casting sins out, is all part of this sense that these sins are very much bodily. They exist within us, and we need to change ourselves in a very basic way.

The al Cheyt prayer is a list of sins that are, for the most part, sins that we could easily identify with, and many of these sins deal with misuse of speech, ways that our words have in fact done ill effect, and so this kind of garden variety of sins is what makes up the al Cheyt.

One explanation of why Jews beat their chests during the recitation of the al Cheyt prayer is that all sins come essentially from hard-heartedness, and so in some way as we recite this confession, we want to remind ourselves constantly to soften our hearts, to open our hearts.

In the place in which a person who is truly repentant stands, a person who has never sinned cannot occupy that same place. The idea here is that a person who has sinned and repented has actually done something that is better than never having sinned at all. This person has improved themselves; they’ve made themselves a better person. Well, if you’ve never sinned, you don’t have the opportunity to make yourself a better person, and that is such a struggle and so difficult that having achieved success is seen as a very exalted level.

If I do something that is wrong, and I hurt someone else, one of the things that this does is it distances me from G-d. My relationship with G-d is such that G-d and I both know that I have not been the person that I should be. Not only have I wronged that individual, but I have also placed a barrier between that relationship; it’s not that G-d loves me any less, but rather I have placed a barrier into that relationship. Similarly, I think, as we can understand, if we lie to somebody maybe they never know that we have lied, but we placed a barrier in that relationship. They may not know it, but you know it.

Some people think Yom Kippur is a very somber, unhappy day. They are wrong. It is a very somber, happy day, and it’s happy because the existence of forgiveness, if we come to it in the appropriate way, is guaranteed. So, after Yom Kippur we are truly reborn as new people. We are completely new people, completely free from sin, completely, indeed, reborn. One of the images of Yom Kippur is that of enacting, actually, our physical deaths. This is one of the reasons for fasting. We don’t eat and drink; we pay no attention to our physical bodies. It is as if we die on Yom Kippur and at the end of Yom Kippur are reborn. Wearing the kittel, fasting, abstaining from sexual relations, that’s all part of ignoring the body and having the body, in fact, become reborn.

We all make mistakes. Yom Kippur divides sins into sins we have done intentionally and sins we have done unintentionally. Most of us don’t know many of the sins we have committed over the course of the year, and yet we carry around a general sense that we haven’t always done the right thing, and so being able to purge that sense of guilt that we walk around with as a condition of being human is a great blessing.

When I was a pulpit rabbi, one of the sins that is most difficult to gain forgiveness for is leading others astray. When you are in positions of leadership you are in a very good position to lead others astray, again not intentionally but unintentionally. Have I been perfect in my leadership? No, never. As a rabbi that has always been a very awesome responsibility for me. As a Jew, this process of repentance is central to my religious life. It allows me to continue on a path of growth, to understand that G-d is with me on that path, that all of my efforts will be met on the other side, indeed, by G-d. Those are central to my life as a Jew.

If the person you hurt is not around to ask for repentance, you have a difficult situation. There are Jewish teachings that, in fact, if somebody has died, there is a ritual that is not I think observed in its strict sense, but I imagine it is often observed in a looser sense, where you would go to the grave to the person that you had harmed, traditionally with a group of 10 people. You would actually take off your shoes and be barefoot, making yourself humble in a sense before that person, and you would recite out loud at the grave of the person that you harmed, in the hearing of the 10 people accompanying you, what you had done to that person and asking for forgiveness. I don’t think this ritual is observed today typically in the way that is traditionally described, but I do think many people when they visit a grave will recite either out loud or silently to themselves the ways in which they would seek forgiveness from a person who has died.

The Saturday evening prior to Rosh Hashanah there is a selichot service that accustoms us to saying the prayers of forgiveness and putting ourselves in the rhythm of seeking forgiveness. There are then selichot services that are done on a daily basis actually leading up to Yom Kippur.

One of the interesting Jewish teachings on seeking forgiveness is that you are obligated to ask a person for forgiveness three times, and even if they don’t forgive you the first time, you are obligated to go back up to three times. If you have honestly asked for forgiveness three times and the person has denied that forgiveness, then it is understood that in fact they have become the sinner. This all has to take place in a communal context that encourages asking and granting forgiveness. One of the difficulties I think many people have with Yom Kippur is the idea that there would be a special time for asking for forgiveness. Is it really sincere if you just do it because the holiday is coming? The analogy I make is to a birthday. When you give a gift to somebody on their birthday is it really sincere? Well, yes, it’s really sincere. Their birthday is a special time for gift-giving, and in the same way Yom Kippur is a special time for seeking forgiveness.

Seeking forgiveness is actually part of the daily liturgy, so we don’t save up for Yom Kippur and wait to ask for forgiveness. If we have done a wrong, we are asked at that moment, as soon as we realize it, we should be seeking forgiveness, and seeking forgiveness from G-d is done in the daily liturgy as well. But Yom Kippur is a special time dedicated to looking at one’s own deeds and taking a personal account of oneself and remaking oneself.

In the ancient times, this was when the High Priest would go into the Holy of Holies and actually the one time of the year recite G-d’s name, G-d’s name which we don’t know how to recite. And the understanding is actually that each year, with that recitation, it was as if the relationship with G-d was being renewed. There was a new name for G-d that parallels almost the new name we take for ourselves as new people having undergone repentance.

I think part of this is actually a matter of faith, that somebody can truly change themselves. If I look back at the person I was 20 years ago, the kinds of things that I would do and say, and I look at myself now, I don’t feel that I’m the same person.

Different people are going to begin the process of teshuvah at different times. The teaching is that you should repent the day before you die, and since we don’t know when that is, you should repent every day. The High Holiday period is a special time that begins the process of repentance with the first day of Elul, the month that precedes the month in which Yom Kippur takes place, and during that 40-day period, that is a time of intensive accounting of one’s deeds and one’s soul and repentance.

The shofar is understood in many ways, but one of the ways is wake up! It is time to pay attention. The shofar at one time was actually a call to a community gathering. In the same way it is, “pay attention, we have something we need to attend to.” The blowing of the shofar begins in Elul, goes through Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur ends with a long blast of the shofar.

The appropriate state of the universe is a state of unity. A monotheistic G-d understands unity as a core concept, and sin implies separation. So if in some ways we have separated ourselves from G-d, from others, from ourselves, then we have sinned.