Sin

By the time you read this, it’s probably too late for me.

To repent, I mean.

You might be reading this on the day before Yom Kippur, or on the Day of Atonement itself, and by that time – despite rabbinic lore of last-minute deathbed confessions accepted under the fast-closing doors of Heaven’s pearly gates – if you haven’t been thinking about your wrongs until the final hour then you don’t have a prayer to be saved.

How many shall leave this world
and how many shall be born into it?
Who shall live and who shall die?
Who shall perish by fire/water/
sword/beast/hunger/thirst/
earthquake/plague/strangling/stoning … etc.

Some people look forward to the High Holidays, with their delectable apples and honey, the family ingathering and even, they say, their time in synagogue, which they say is “cleansing.” Imagine that.

I, on the other hand, raised on the fire-and-brimstone imagery of angry angels, an unforgiving God and a never-ending checklist of sins listed in the Machzor prayer book, never overjoyed at the prospect of these holidays.

How could I?

There were too many things I did wrong over the year for me to enjoy the holiday — although what an 11-year-old religious girl could do wrong, in retrospect, seems laughable compared to 30 years later.

Greater men than I have thought about the concept of sin. Rabbis, theologians, philosophers, professors have dedicated tomes to it. But this is a subject that I have been schooled in all my life — one way or another, Orthodoxy, and the departure from it, is always about sin — and I have become an amateurish expert myself, a dilettante of sorts.

My first “sin”: My first official fast, age twelve. It is drizzling, a cool September Brooklyn rain that cools and clears the sizzling summer streets, and portends the torrid winter to come. The night mist spritzes my father and me on our way home from shul. I am wearing my yellow plastic slicker, run-walking, trying not to slip, to keep up with my father’s lengthy paces. I put my right sleeve in my mouth, while my left holds my father’s yanking hand. The rubber is wet. I am thirsty, and it tastes good. I let some more rain gather on the edge of the sleeve, and then suck it off, delicately. My father doesn’t notice. I am drinking. On Yom Kippur. A sin.

Oh, there were many sins for which to repent.

“For the sin we have sinned before You
under duress and willingly,
and for the sin we have sinned before You
through hardness of the heart.
For the sin we have sinned before You
without knowledge,
and for the sin we have sinned before You
with utterance of the lips….”

A sin for every occasion! The Artscroll Machzor lists one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which we recite about ten times throughout Yom Kippur, pounding our hearts in repentance.

There we are, crowded in one row: My mother, her mother and me, sandwiched between my older and younger sisters. On rickety metal chairs with sticky red vinyl cushions, in the basement “break-away minyan,” the five of us stand, sit, stand, sit, each time the ark is opened and closed.

We take our right hands in a fist and pound our hearts for every sin. My elder sister, nearly as pious as God, sways and pounds fervently, like a metronome, carefully iterating every word, loudly. Too loud.

“You’re supposed to whisper,” I tell her.

Another sin. Talking during davening.

My grandmother doesn’t say the words at all. I watch her lips and they aren’t moving.

“You’re supposed to talk them,” I tell her. Me, the little rebbetzin.

“I’m reading them to myself,” she says. Just look at how she pounds her heart — with an open hand, tepidly, as if caressing herself. What kind of repentance is that?

And forget my mother. She pounds her heart perfectly in time. Her hand is just the right shape, but her heart isn’t in it. I see it, but I say nothing. Because how can you tell someone who doesn’t care about sinning to repent?

Although I watch those around me, it is my own soul for which I fear.

Over the years, I’m repentant at times, and questioning at others.

“For the sin that we have sinned before You
through denial and false promises….”

This is the one I have the most trouble with. My false promises.

Year after year, I find myself in shul, making the same promises, having the same regrets, seeing the same failures — with new ones added, to boot. And I grow weary. Wary. How could I be here saying the same things year after year, knowing I won’t keep my word? How meaningless is that?

“For the sin that we have sinned before You
in public or in private,
and for the sin we have sinned before You
with immorality.”

Decades after I leave Brooklyn, I leave behind my girlish desires of hoping not to sin again. On Yom Kippurs, even as I say the prayers, I know I will sin again. I know I will violate the Sabbath, conduct “lewd” acts, eat in a non-kosher restaurant and countless other wrongs. But, I think, who says these are really sins? (Sin: Haughtiness.)

It’s funny: The most pious rabbi, the one who never says an unkind word to a soul and spends all his time studying Torah, cries for days before Yom Kippur. On the other hand, my Sunday school friend eats cheeseburgers on the beach on Rosh Hashana, and thinks, “Hey, I’m a pretty good person. I am nice to my mother, I pay my taxes. What do I have to worry about?”

Which person would you rather be?

One year, in my late 20s, my boyfriend – the first non-Orthodox one in a stream of many — won’t come to synagogue with me. “It’s boring,” he says. I had never thought about it that way. I’d only considered how meaningfully I prayed. But synagogue was boring, if you had a choice in the matter.

So I start to “cut” services. I don’t eat ham sandwiches on the beach or do anything quite so rebellious; I still fast, sleeping in or going for a walk in the park. (Sin: “We have strayed.”)

But still the High Holiday angst does not disappear; it comes regularly, mid-August, like a seasonal occurrence, among the turning leaves and shorter days. I ride it out like a panic attack or a tornado, waiting for the storm to descend, descend, envelop, then disappear by the time Sukkot rolls around.

In my mid-thirties I am invited to a Traditional synagogue. I’d never considered one because my Orthodox upbringing had trained me to disdain other streams of Judaism. But I need not harbor those prejudices any longer.

I arrive just in time for the Musaf service. And it seems as if I have never left. They are reading the same verse as years prior. My heart starts to pound, and I ready my hand for the sin lists. But they don’t beat themselves, as they read aloud: “We abuse, we betray, we are cruel.”

Hey, those don’t seem so bad, I think. “We destroy, we embitter, we falsify,” OK, I can handle this, I say to myself. “We gossip, we hate, we insult….” I don’t recall the prayers being this easy. They aren’t as negative as I remember. Or is it my childhood bogeyman that frightened me so?

As I read through this list of sins, I feel a sense of possibility. Hey, I can do this, I think. I can be this person. I may have a shot at being a good Jew.

I see it not only from a different denomination, but a different perspective – a grown up.

All my life, I worried so about my sins, my wrongdoings, my faults, my failures, that the only image I had was of a vengeful, exacting God towering above us mercilessly.

“For all these sins, forgiving God,
Forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.”

These words are there in every Machzor, but this time, I am old enough — distanced enough? — to hear it. If God is so great and awesome, won’t he be more apt to overlook, excuse, and yes, forgive me for the sins I have committed? Could there be another God than the one that I grew up with?

It’s been three decades since my post-Bat Mitzvah Yom Kippur, and it has taken me this long to learn that when it comes to Judaism, it’s harder to leave than I once believed. I go to shul/don’t go to shul, I pray/don’t pray. I definitely “sin,” but it’s hard to believe anyone is checking, counting, forgiving.

Sin: “We have sinned against you by succumbing to confusion.”

I don’t have an answer, a neat little bow to wrap up my schizophrenic life. Nor do I have questions, either. Belief and skepticism can live in my heart together, because I am no longer Orthodox and I know that life, unlike the Artscroll Machzor, has shades of gray.

A version of this article appeared in the Jewish Journal in September of 2002.