Contemplating past, present, and the long winding road toward repairing a broken world on the holiest day of the Jewish year.
Tomorrow is Yom Kippur, and I wanted to take a moment to revisit some recent thoughts.
I wrote this fic back in the spring for Jewish Comics Day, but, sitting in Rosh Hashanah services last week and talking about a lot of the same stuff, I was struck again by just how personal it all feels and how deeply felt the experience of writing it was, even months away from the actual Days of Awe (the time of reflection and repentance between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement).
As the fic notes, Jews atone differently than our Christian and other religious counterparts. Yom Kippur is a fast day, and not eating or drinking for 26 hours can do some weird things to your mind,. The observance is ultimately a long, quiet day of prayer, reflection, and waiting for someone to set down the Torah scroll so you can stop standing come on.
I’m not an especially religious or spiritual person, to be honest, and my Judaism is most of the time more cultural than observant. But I almost always find Yom Kippur quite cathartic—because the point isn’t self-flagellation so much as openly acknowledging the wrongs you’ve done and deciding to do better.
A lot of the holiday-specific prayers involve lists and litanies of sins and wrongdoings (some of which are recounted in the story); even when you’ve tried to be a good person and lead a good life, there’s always a moment where you’re struck by the sins you didn’t think about committing. All these little spaces where you might have had more compassion, more attention, more thought to give but didn’t.
The fic zeroes in on the question of unintended consequences, too, because the idea, at least as I understand it, is simply that we can all do better in our lives. None of this makes us bad people—just human ones. And the catharsis, for me, comes in the moments when you consider what your next year will look like and what you can do, in ways large and small, to continue the work of tikkun olam, of repairing the world.
Obviously, I’m atoning for very different things than my character is and coming from a very different (and, you know, existent) place. But the universality of the holiday’s themes and calls to action still resonate, and I do think there’s a lot of value in working through things in creative writing and art more generally. I remain grateful for the opportunity and the inspiration Jewish Comics Day provided to think through those topics and my own feelings about them, and I hope others ultimately did, too.
To those observing tomorrow, g’mar chatima tovah and may you have an easy fast. To the rest, thank you for reading, and I hope you have a happy and healthy 5777.
