There’s a reason why, despite all the things that we’ll bluster about, Jewish theology is something that we try to approach with circumspection. In brief: it’s complicated, and we don’t know very much about even some simple stuff. For instance, this afternoon we were reading an outsider’s perspective on experiencing Sukkot in one Los Angeles’s Jewish distict. We came across this statement:
How long does [Sukkot] holiday run? I believe it lasts 8 days. AND it is a Jew’s final chance for the year to atone their sins (atonement started a few weeks earlier with Yom Kippur).
And we thought “no way that’s right”. Obviously, the part about atonement starting on Yom Kippur is silly – even we know we’re supposed to start feeling really bad about ourselves on Rosh Hashana. And Sukkot is seven days – it sounds like he’s a little confused between Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur (eight days spanning the beginning and ending of the period of atonement) and Yom Kippur/Sukkot.
But (and here’s where this morning’s brief moment of learning comes in, it turns out that the issue isn’t as clear-cut as that. We imagine 90 percent of you are nodding your head condescendingly and don’t need to be told this, but it really is Sukkot – and not Yom Kippur – that is the final chance for atonement. Contrary to the impression we were under, there’s apparently a kind of juridical loophole between judgment on Yom Kippur and confirmation of that judgment at the end of Sukkot. Are we the only people who didn’t know about this option? Why aren’t more people taking it and blowing off Yom Kippur? Is there extra atonement paperwork that needs to be filed or something (is this like a tax extension?) It sounds like a fantastic deal – get to ‘do atonement’ by partying for seven days instead of fasting for one day? Are we crazy, or is this not the solution to David Frum’s observation that Yom Kippur is partly responsible for Judaism flunking the market test over the past 2,000 years.
