4.

Begging
Forgiveness

DR. DANIEL GORDIS Special To The Jewish News

y

om Kippur. The Day of
Atonement. On the surface,
the idea seems simple. Jews
take an entire day, from
sundown to sundown, to take an
accounting of the year that has just
gone by, and to ask for forgiveness.
We spend an entire day in prayer,
abstaining from creature comforts
like food, drink, sex and washing,
and devote ourselves to repentance,
seeking atonement.
But the more we think about it,

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the more complex Yom Kippur
seems. After all, if it were a simple
proposition, why would we need the
whole day for the task? Why couldn't
we just go to synagogue, take a little
time to think about the worst thing
we've done, ask forgiveness and be
comforted by the tradition's assurance
that if we're genuinely sorry, we'll be
forgiven, almost automatically?
In these days before Yom Kippur,
it's worth thinking about why we
need the whole day, so that we can

use the time well and do the spiritual
work that genuinely needs to be
done.
The phrase "spiritual work" sounds
strange to us. American culture has
trained us to expect spirituality to be
easy, totally comforting, almost ethe-
real. But Jewish tradition says other-
wise. If spirituality is about building
a relationship with God, there's no
reason to expect this relationship to
require less work than other relation-
ships that truly matter to us.