Vidui

Confession. The Jewish 'high holy days', Rosh Hashanah, New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, have passed. I do not enjoy them. To be honest, you are not supposed to actually 'enjoy' Yom Kippur, atonement, but you get the general idea. I attend synagogue and with some effort eschew work. With any luck I get to do Security duty and, with tabard and walkie-talkie, pass the time making small talk with those who are arriving late or departing prematurely. It is difficult to take myself entirely seriously in this role but I am easily seduced by the equipment and the chance to get a bit of fresh air. I much prefer Friday evenings or the less major more family-oriented festivals, Passover, and Chanukkah.

There are however, some high points to the Yom Kippur service, Yizchor, the memorial service, and the repeated confessional prayers, Vidui. The confessional prayers are powerful, psychologically and ritually, well tuned to the moment and to their purpose. Confession imposes no strictly religious obligations, simply a recognition of the gap between behaviour and the person one aspires to be, a difficult enough task without introducing theology.

There are two principal confessional prayers 'Ashamnu' and 'Al Chet'; the shorter and the longer confession.

Ashamnu is organised as an acrostic. In other words it is a recitation of sins organised alphabetically, in Hebrew. There is no immediately obvious english equivalent, 'A is for Avarice, B is for Bullying' perhaps. Taking the form of a 24 item list it is supposed to be useful at the moment of death when an aide memoire for past sins might come in handy. Thus: "we have betrayed", "we have stolen", "we have spoken falsely", and so on.

Al Chet is reserved only for Yom Kippur and has a more complex structure also containing an alphabetic motif. It has 44 lines but is different in important respects from Ashamnu. The core of the recitation takes the form "For the sin we committed before you through (trans: by way of, by means of) ..." and then "ignorance", "compulsion", and so on.

I have always found the Al Chet much the more meaningful of the prayers. Not simply because I need the longer opportunity to confess, although obviously ... Rather, because it is so much easier to recognise the errors that lead to the offence. It is somewhere on that slippery slope of 'through', 'by way of', 'by means of' that I, at least, fear losing my my moral compass.

Atonement and confession are not the same thing, of course. They are however bound together. Perhaps I did not entirely waste a day then, though there was a lot of email to catch up on.