{"id":4352,"date":"2009-09-25T16:16:44","date_gmt":"2009-09-25T21:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=4352"},"modified":"2013-12-04T10:30:17","modified_gmt":"2013-12-04T15:30:17","slug":"september-25-2009-rituals-of-yom-kippur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2009\/09\/25\/september-25-2009-rituals-of-yom-kippur\/4352\/","title":{"rendered":" Rituals of Yom Kippur"},"content":{"rendered":"

RABBI IRWIN KULA<\/strong> (National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership): The central ritual on Yom Kippur, besides prayer itself, that\u2019s most well-known, is fasting. What fasting does is it says I\u2019m not going to concentrate on my physical body right now. I\u2019m going to concentrate on a different kind of food. Rather than nutrients for my body, I\u2019m going to concentrate on the nutrients for my spirit, and my heart, and my ethical way.<\/p>\n

So when you feel hungry at two o\u2019clock in the afternoon, the feeling of hunger is not so that you\u2019ll be in pain. The feeling of hunger is to stimulate two things: What am I really hungry for\u2014because it\u2019s more than just food. What am I really hungry for in my spiritual and ethical life? And who really is hungry that I need to feed? And if you take those two insights from the practice seriously, it\u2019s working. That\u2019s what atonement\u2014that is what \u201cat-one-ment\u201d means.<\/p>\n

\"\"Kol Nidre is the first prayer of the Yom Kippur service. What we do on Kol Nidre is the confrontation and the challenge of having to look at every promise and obligation and commitment that I have in my life and starting by saying okay, fine. You have none of them. You have no obligations, no promises. Kol Nidre\u2014all the promises are null and void. Okay, now what? It\u2019s very frightening to imagine that we have no obligations, because it is our obligations, our promises that define who we are.<\/p>\n

The rest of Yom Kippur, in a sense, is taking back the obligations, reassessing them. Okay, I am married\u2014do I want to be married? What does it mean to have that obligation? Hey, I am a father\u2014what are the obligations that come with being a father that may have gotten distorted in between last Yom Kippur and this Yom Kippur? What are my obligations to my work and my craft and my calling? What are my obligations,\u00a0what are the promises that I\u2019ve made to myself? So Kol Nidre is a very profound method and technology for stripping us of all promises and obligations that may distort us, so that we stand there naked, just us, with the ability to take back promises, take back obligations over the next 25 hours.<\/p>\n

The focus of the High Holiday period is not on death. The focus is on life. It turns out that one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death. That just turns out to be the paradox. So if on Yom Kippur we fast, if on Yom Kippur we deny ourselves certain bodily pleasures and engage in a kind of deep introspection on the moral, psychological, and spiritual level, well, it turns out we will become better people. I mean, that\u2019s just what happens. But, again, there are no guarantees. You can go through everything on Yom Kippur and go through the motions, and on the other hand you can sit in Yom Kippur and never use a prayer book but just really think about who you are and it can make a difference in your life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rabbi Irwin Kula of the National Center for Jewish Learning and Leadership says Yom Kippur and the High Holidays are about life, not death. The paradox, he says, is that “one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death.” More →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":16707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6357,1368,6209,17918,6252,985,6246,2165],"class_list":["post-4352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-atonement","tag-fasting","tag-high-holy-days","tag-jewish","tag-kol-nidre","tag-prayer","tag-rabbi-irwin-kula","tag-yom-kippur","topics-belief-and-practice","faith-jewish","spotlight-jewish-high-holy-days"],"yoast_head":"\nSeptember 25, 2009 ~ Rituals of Yom Kippur | September 25, 2009 | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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