What the Heck is Yom Kippur? By Howard Bloom

The Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur arrived at sundown on October 1st.  It’s the holiest day of the Jewish year.

But what in the world is Yom Kippur? It’s the day of atonement.

It’s the day when God takes out the accounting ledger he’s keeping of your life, totals up your sins, balances them against your good deeds, then decides whether or not to write your name down in the Book of Life.

In other words, God judges you on whether you’ve followed the rules in the Ten Commandments and the Torah—the Old Testament–and on whether or not you’ve done good deeds for others.

According to tradition, Yom Kippur goes back to Moses. Three thousand four hundred years ago, in roughly 1440 BC,  Moses had just gotten the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt.  Now Moses needed to establish a religion that would hold the Jewish people together.

First he went up to Mount Sinai, a mountain in the desert east of Egypt.  And the finger of God inscribed the Ten Commandments into two tablets of stone.  That was the beginning of Moses’ new religion.

Then Moses installed his brother Aaron as a high priest.

To worship, Moses had his chosen people build a tabernacle—a portable courtyard wall made of gold-covered acacia wood, expensive blue, purple, and scarlet linens, and ram skins died red.  Inside the courtyard of that tabernacle was a small room containing the ark of the covenant, a gold-covered acacia wood chest containing the original stone tablets inscribed by the hand of God with the ten commandments.

That small room was the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest was allowed inside it.  And that priest was only allowed to enter it one day a year.  Why?

To go through a ritual that would absolve the Jewish people of their sins.

To accomplish this, the priest performed the ritual of the two goats.  He sacrificed one goat to God.  He recited the sins of the people over the head of the second goat and expelled it into the wilderness to carry away those sins.

When was this one day of the year?  The tenth day of the seventh month in the Jewish calendar.  That day was called Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.

But Yom Kippur would soon evolve.  When the Jews ended their forty years of wandering, they settled down in Israel.  Four hundred and forty years later, they built a permanent temple in Jerusalem.  And they continued once a year at that temple to be cleansed by the priest of their sins.  In other words,  they continued to honor Yom Kippur.

Then came disasters.  Two of them.  The Jews were conquered twice by imperialist armies, first by the Assyrians and 136 years later by the Babylonians.

To make matters worse, the Babylonians destroyed the first Jewish Temple. And they did something worse.  They ethnically cleansed the Jews who held Jewish society together—members of royal families, priests, scribes, intellectuals, soldiers, and highly skilled craftsmen.

They yanked these culture-leaders out of their land, Israel, and sent them into exile in the biggest and most advanced city in the world at that time, Babylon.

The result was a new innovation in Yom Kippur.  You no longer had a temple.  Instead of depending on a high priest to absolve you of your sins,  you were required to square things with God on your own.

You reflected on your sins.  You deprived yourself of food.  You carried out self-affliction, the agony of internal self-punishment. And you renewed your faith.

Finally, another imperialist force came along, the Romans.  When the Romans got fed up with the stiff-necked resistance of the Jews to Rome’s dominance, they destroyed the second temple and they ethnically cleansed as many Jews as they could, ejecting them from their homeland, Israel.

That made the Jews all the more reliant on the portable form of Yom Kippur, the form in which you purged yourself of sins rather than depending on a temple priesthood that no longer existed.

And 200 years later, a succession of rabbis, including a stubborn group who had been able to  remain in Israel, took bits and pieces of ancient tradition and came up with the story of God, the bookkeeper, judge, and king, who totaled up your sins, your good deeds, and your charity to others and decided whether or not your name would be inscribed in the Book of Life.

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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT.  Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment.  I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.”   For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute

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