Yom Kippur 5787

Kol Nidrei, Erev Yom Kippur 5787 (2026)

There is a phrase we hear often when people speak about forgiveness: forgive and forget.

But I am not entirely convinced that this is what forgiveness asks of us.

Forgetting can sometimes be impossible, and sometimes, it could even be wrong. There are experiences that leave their mark upon us, things that have been said or done that cannot simply be made unreal. Forgiveness does not require us to pretend that something did not happen, it does not require us to deny the pain it caused, to excuse behaviour that was wrong, or to restore a relationship that is no longer safe or healthy.

Forgiveness actually asks something entirely different.

There is a teaching (from At the Well) that suggests that we might think about forgiveness as a way of lightening the load we carry, because resentment has weight.

Old anger has weight, old arguments have weight. The conversations we continue rehearsing in our heads, sometimes years after they actually happened, have weight.

Sometimes we become so accustomed to carrying that weight that we scarcely notice it any more.

Maybe forgiveness should be understood as a gift we give ourselves. Not because another person necessarily deserves it, and not because what happened suddenly becomes acceptable, but because we may eventually decide that we no longer wish to carry it in quite the same way.

And perhaps that leaves us with a pertinent question for this evening:

What are we holding on to that no longer serves us?

And who might we become if we were no longer beholden to old hard feelings?

Those are difficult questions, because forgiveness rarely happens all at once.

There is another beautiful teaching (offered again by At the Well) about the Hebrew word mechilah, forgiveness, and its association with machol, a circle or a dance.

Whether we understand that as pure etymology or as wordplay, the image remains powerful.

Forgiveness is simply not a straight line.

We do not begin here, walk steadily forwards, and one day arrive at a place where everything is resolved.

We circle.

We return to memories we thought we had made peace with. We discover that an old wound still hurts. We forgive someone, and then find ourselves angry with them again. We forgive ourselves, and a week later the old guilt returns.

I would like to suggest that that does not mean that we have failed.

Perhaps forgiveness is something we circle through again and again, each time carrying the hurt a little differently, each time holding it a little more loosely.

And Judaism really knows something about circles.

Every year we return.

We return to Rosh Hashanah. We return to Kol Nidrei. We return to Yom Kippur.

We return to the same prayers, the same melodies, the same questions.

We confess sins that sound remarkably similar to the sins we confessed last year. We ask again for forgiveness. We again make promises.

Perhaps the wisdom of this season is precisely that it never expected us to become finished human beings.

Teshuvah means return, and so we return because human beings need to return.

Crucially, we do not do this circling alone.

Tonight we stand together. Tomorrow we will continue together. We confess in the plural: ashamnu, bagadnu. We have done wrong. We have betrayed. We have missed the mark.

The work is deeply personal, but it is never entirely solitary.

So perhaps, as Kol Nidrei begins and another Yom Kippur opens before us, we might ask ourselves what we are ready to carry differently.

There may be things we cannot yet forgive. There may be wounds that require boundaries rather than reconciliation. There may be memories that should never be forgotten.

But perhaps there is something we can loosen our grip upon.

A resentment.

A regret.

An old version of another person.

An old version of ourselves.

We do not have to erase the past in order to stop living inside it. That is one of the possibilities this sacred day offers us: The possibility of entering the circle once again, to put down, if only a little, of what has become too heavy, and to begin again.

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Yom Kippur Morning 5787 (2026)

Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year - this much we probably all know - and that holiness can sound intimidating.

It can suggest something distant from us, something demanding, perhaps even something frightening. A day on which we are weighed and measured. A day on which we are asked to catalogue everything we have done wrong. A day of fasting, and confession, and judgement.

I would, however, like to suggest that holiness actually might mean something gentler.

Perhaps holiness begins when we make enough space to hear what we have been unable to hear before.

Enough space for the noise to quieten.

Enough space for the distractions to fall away.

Enough space that, perhaps, we can finally hear what our own soul has been trying to tell us.

Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi described Yom Kippur as “a recalibration of one’s entire system”, and I love that image, because recalibration is not replacement.

When something is recalibrated, we do not throw it away and begin again with something entirely different. We recognise that, somewhere along the way, things have moved slightly out of place. The instrument is still the instrument, but it needs adjusting so that it can once again do what it is supposed to do.

That, I think, is what Yom Kippur is actually asking of us.

Not that we become somebody else.

Not that we reject who we have been.

But that we ask whether the way we are living is aligned with the person we know ourselves capable of being.

Where have we drifted?

What have we neglected?

What have we allowed to become normal that should never have become normal?

And what, beneath all the noise of everyday life, do we already know needs to change?

This is the work that our tradition calls teshuvah.

We often translate teshuvah into English as “repentance”, but repentance is a difficult word. It has gathered centuries of associations that do not always sit comfortably with the Jewish idea behind it: guilt, punishment, self-denial, even the idea that we must somehow become worthy again after having failed.

The Hebrew gives us another image.

Teshuvah comes from the root shuv: to turn, or to return.

Return.

That changes the question.

We are not being asked to manufacture an entirely new self.

We are being invited to return.

To return to ourselves.

To return to one another.

To return to the Divine.

To return to the values we claim to hold but do not always manage to live.

To return to the person we recognise in those moments when we are most generous, most courageous, most compassionate, most fully ourselves.

Maybe that is what recalibration means.

We are finding our way back into alignment.

And even that English word, “repentance”, has a more complicated story than we sometimes realise.

The Greek word that appears throughout the texts of the Hellenistic Jewish communities, and early Christian movements is metanoia. It is usually translated into English as repentance, but metanoia carries the sense of a changed mind, a changed understanding, a reorientation of how we perceive the world.

To think again.

To see differently.

To go beyond the way we have been thinking until now.

That is remarkably close to something Yom Kippur asks of us, and excellent evidence that what we are doing today, is neither new, or “modern”.

Return does not mean simply going backwards.

If we return to the same relationships with exactly the same assumptions, nothing has changed.

If we return to the same conflicts still determined to be right, nothing has changed.

If we return to ourselves but refuse to see ourselves differently, nothing has changed.

Teshuvah asks for return, but return with a new understanding.

We come back having learnt something.

Perhaps something about the person we have hurt.

Perhaps something about why we behaved as we did.

Perhaps something uncomfortable about ourselves.

Perhaps something compassionate about ourselves.

It is that very learning something compassionate about ourselves that feels so very important, because honesty without compassion can very quickly become cruelty – even towards ourselves.

Yom Kippur asks a great deal of us. We recite lists of failures, we strike our chests, we name ways in which human beings betray one another, exploit one another, deceive one another, and fail one another.

But we should enter that work with gentleness.

We can tell the truth about where we have fallen short without believing that we are beyond love.

We can acknowledge that we have caused harm without deciding that harm is all that we are.

We can repair.

We can forgive.

We can begin again.

That is one reason I think the physical practices of Yom Kippur are so important – and not just because I am a lover of embodied ritual!

Many of us will fast today; but fasting is not punishment.

We are not trying to make ourselves suffer because suffering somehow pays a debt.

Instead, for those of us for whom fasting is possible and safe, we step away for a day from the ordinary rhythms of the body.

We eat. We drink. We work. We check our phones. We answer messages. We hurry from one thing to another.

But today, even if only for a while, some of those rhythms stop.

Fewer distractions.

Less noise.

More listening.

The hunger itself becomes a kind of interruption. Again and again the body reminds us: today is different, pay attention.

For those for whom fasting is unsafe, it is important to know that tending to the body is sacred too – perhaps some of the most sacred work we can do.

Our tradition never asks of us to endanger ourselves in order to prove our devotion.

Sometimes the sacred act is fasting.

Sometimes the sacred act is eating.

Sometimes holiness means knowing what your body needs and listening to it.

The purpose of today is not punishment.

It is attention.

It is truth.

It is return.

Perhaps we ought to see this as the strange gift of Yom Kippur.

For one day, we practise being fully seen.

That sounds frightening.

Most of us spend a remarkable amount of energy deciding what other people may see.

We curate ourselves.

We explain ourselves.

We defend ourselves.

Sometimes we even hide from ourselves.

But the liturgy of Yom Kippur does not allow us to present only the polished version.

We stand together and say:

We have betrayed.

We have acted wrongly.

We have spoken falsely.

We have hurt.

We have failed.

And still we are here.

Still the doors are open.

Still we are invited to pray.

Still we are invited to return.

There is something extraordinary in that.

Yom Kippur asks us to imagine what it would mean to be fully seen, fully honest, with nowhere left to hide, and then to discover that we are still held.

Held by community.

Held by tradition.

Held, perhaps, by something larger than ourselves.

Held by the possibility that who we have been does not exhaust who we can become.

So as we move through this day, perhaps we can resist the temptation to ask only, “what did I do wrong?”

There are other questions.

Where have I moved out of alignment?

What have I stopped hearing?

To whom do I need to return?

What within myself have I abandoned?

What needs repair?

What needs forgiveness?

What needs to be released?

And what might become possible if I allowed myself genuinely to think again?

Yom Kippur does not ask us to emerge this evening as entirely different human beings.

We will still have our habits.

We will still have our weaknesses.

We will still make mistakes.

But there is always something that can be recalibrated.

Perhaps we can hear something tonight we could not hear yesterday.

Perhaps we can see something differently.

Perhaps we can turn, even slightly, towards one another.

Towards ourselves.

Towards the Divine.

Even that small turning is teshuvah.

And sometimes a small turning is enough to begin the journey in the right direction.

Gmar Chatima Tova, v’tzom kal.