No One Stands Alone on Yom Kippur

We have been focusing meaningful effort on considering and addressing the issue of sinat chinam, providing both food for thought and practical action points that can help us begin to demonstrate care for each other and ameliorate our nation’s divisions by adjusting both our thinking and actions. Yom Kippur offers a unique opportunity to address this matter.

One of the essential and uplifting elements of the Yom Kippur experience is its sense of community. Whereas on weekdays, Shabbos, and Yom Tov, we spend some time with the community in shul before going on our own way to work or home, Yom Kippur we try to spend in its entirety together as a community. This is not an incidental result of the length of the prayers; it is essential to the day that we experience it before God as part of our community and nation.

This helps us appreciate why part of the preparation for Yom Kippur is seeking reconciliation with anyone we may have offended or hurt. On the one hand, as we are taught in the mishna (Yoma 85b), God can only forgive us for our offenses towards Him, our religious failings, aveirot she-bein adam laMakom. For our interpersonal failings we need to reconcile with the people whom we have aggrieved. Yet halacha teaches that these interpersonal issues must be addressed specifically before Yom Kippur (see Orach Chaim 606). Rabbeinu Asher (Yoma 8:24) explained that beyond the teshuva component of attaining specific forgiveness from others, it is essential that we stand as one on Yom Kippur with our hearts at peace with the hearts of all the Jewish people, with any differences between us ironed out in advance.

Then, during the very first moments of Yom Kippur, we go further to proactively seek connection with Jews we may have never met as we declare in the enigmatic opening to Kol Nidrei, “…anu matirim l’hitpaleil im ha’avaryanim, with the approval of Hashem and with the approval of the community … we allow prayer together with the sinners.” This allowance signals an invitation to those who are otherwise on the periphery of the community. We reach out to include them because we recognize that to the extent that we fail to bring everyone together in sincere prayer, our own prayers are lacking (see Prisha to OC 619:1 citing Rabbeinu Bachye to Shemos 30:34). Kol Yisrael areivim zeh la-zeh makes us all responsible for and connected to one another such that we may not burrow our heads in our machzorim considering our own personal past and future without considering the spiritual and material wellbeing of every other Jew. We therefore welcome all those whom we can invite to join us, and with that same sense of responsibility bear in our hearts and minds those who will not, whether they are in another shul or in none at all.

No Jew stands alone on Yom Kippur. Those in shuls completely different than ours and those unable or unwilling to be in any shul are included in our prayers. On this holiest of days, we stand as one, every one of us praying for every other one of us, assuming areivut (responsibility) for each other and accepting upon ourselves the mitzvah to love our fellow as ourselves. This, explained Rav Chaim Vital, ensures that our prayers do not either stand alone but rather ascend heavenward along with the prayers of the entirety of Klal Yisrael, empowered by the history and the destiny of our nation.

Yom Kippur is not just a day of spirituality, of purification, and of religious reconciliation. It is a day of forgiveness and overcoming human differences, of community and caring, of standing with each other, thinking of each other, and seeing ourselves as part of the unbreakable and ultimately indivisible Jewish people.

Master of the world, You have one nation on earth who are similar to the angels of service. Just as those angels have peace between them, so it is with the Jewish people on Yom Kippur. (Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer 46)

No Jew stands alone on Yom Kippur.