T

o those who fully open 
themselves to it, Yom 
Kippur is a life-transforming 
experience. It tells us that God, who 
created the universe in love and 
forgiveness, reaches out to us in love 
and forgiveness, asking 
us to love and forgive 
others. God never 
asked us not to make 
mistakes. All He asks 
is that we acknowledge 
our mistakes, learn from 
them, grow through 
them and make amends 
where we can.
No religion has held such a high 
view of human possibility. The God 
who created us in His image gave us 
freedom. We are not tainted by original 
sin, destined to fail, caught in the grip 
of an evil only Divine grace can defeat. 
To the contrary, we have within us the 
power to choose life. Together we have 
the power to change the world.
Nor are we, as some scientific 
materialists claim, mere concatenations 
of chemicals, a bundle of selfish genes 
blindly replicating themselves into the 
future. Our souls are more than our 
minds, our minds are more than our 
brains, and our brains are more than 
mere chemical impulses responding 
to stimuli. Human freedom — the 

freedom to choose to be better than 
we were — remains a mystery but it 
is not a mere given. Freedom is like a 
muscle, and the more we exercise it, the 
stronger and healthier it becomes.
Judaism constantly asks us to 
exercise our freedom. To be a Jew 
is not to go with the flow, to be like 
everyone else, to follow the path of least 
resistance, to worship the conventional 
wisdom of the age. To the contrary, to 
be a Jew is to have the courage to live in 
a way that is not the way of everyone. 
Each time we eat, drink, pray or go to 
work, we are conscious of the demands 
our faith makes on us to live God’s 
will and be one of His ambassadors to 
the world. Judaism always has been, 
perhaps always will be, countercultural.
In ages of collectivism, Jews 
emphasized the value of the individual. 
In ages of individualism, Jews built 
strong communities. When most of 
humanity was consigned to ignorance, 
Jews were highly literate. When 
others were building monuments and 
amphitheaters, Jews were building 
schools. In materialistic times, they 
kept faith with the spiritual. In ages 
of poverty, they practiced tzedakah 
so that none would lack the essentials 
of a dignified life. The Sages said that 
Abraham was called ha-ivri, “the 
Hebrew,
” because all the world was on 

one side (ever echad) and Abraham 
on the other. To be a Jew is to swim 
against the current, challenging the 
idols of the age whatever the idol, 
whatever the age.
So, as our ancestors used to say, 
“’Zis schver zu zein a Yid,
” It is not 
easy to be a Jew. But if Jews have 
contributed to the human heritage out 
of all proportion to our numbers, the 
explanation lies here. Those of whom 
great things are asked, become great — 
not because they are inherently better 
or more gifted than others but because 
they feel themselves challenged, 
summoned, to greatness.
Few religions have asked more 
of their followers. There are 613 
commandments in the Torah. Jewish 
law applies to every aspect of our being, 
from the highest aspirations to the 
most prosaic details of quotidian life. 
Our library of sacred texts — Tanach, 
Mishnah, Gemara, Midrash, codes 
and commentaries — is so vast that 
no lifetime is long enough to master 
it. Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, 
sought for a description that would 
explain to his fellow Greeks what Jews 
are. The answer he came up with was, 
“a nation of philosophers.
”
So high does Judaism set the bar 
that it is inevitable that we should fall 
short time and again. Which means 
that forgiveness was written into the 
script from the beginning. God, said 
the Sages, sought to create the world 
under the attribute of strict justice, but 
He saw that it could not stand. What 
did He do? He added mercy to justice, 
compassion to retribution, forbearance 

to the strict rule of law. God forgives. 
Judaism is a religion, the world’s first, 
of forgiveness.
Not every civilization is as forgiving 
as Judaism. There were religions that 
never forgave Jews for refusing to 
convert. Many of the greatest European 
intellectuals — among them Voltaire, 
Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, 
Nietzsche, Frege and Heidegger — 
never quite forgave Jews for staying 
Jews, different, angular, countercultural, 
iconoclastic. Yet despite the tragedies 
of more than 20 centuries, Jews and 
Judaism still flourish, refusing to grant 
victory to cultures of contempt or the 
angel of death.
The majesty and mystery of Judaism 
is that though, at best, Jews were a 
small people in a small land, no match 
for the circumambient empires that 
periodically assaulted them, Jews did 
not give way to self-hate, self-disesteem 
or despair. Beneath the awe and 
solemnity of Yom Kippur, one fact 
shines radiant throughout: that God 
loves us more than we love ourselves. 
He believes in us more than we believe 
in ourselves. He never gives up on us, 
however many times we slip and fall. 
The story of Judaism from beginning 
to end is the tale of a love of God for 
a people who rarely fully reciprocated 
that love, yet never altogether failed to 
be moved by it.
Rabbi Akiva put it best in a mere two 
words: Avinu malkeinu. Yes, You are 
our sovereign, God almighty, maker 
of the cosmos, king of kings. But You 
are also our father. You told Moses 
to say to Pharaoh in Your name: “My 
child, my firstborn, Israel.
” That love 
continues to make Jews a symbol of 
hope to humanity, testifying that a 
nation does not need to be large to be 
great, nor powerful to have influence. 
Each of us can, by a single act of 
kindness or generosity of spirit, cause 
a ray of the Divine light to shine in 
the human darkness, allowing the 
Shechinah, at least for a moment, to be 
at home in our world.
More than Yom Kippur expresses 
our faith in God, it is the expression of 
God’s faith in us. 

This is an extract from the Koren Sacks Yom 

Kippur machzor.

Yom Kippur: How 
It Changes Us

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

34 | OCTOBER 10 • 2024 

