Yom Kippur is, once again, almost upon us. For many Jews the world over, the cataloguing of the year’s transgressions is well underway, and people are searching the recesses of their minds for ways to improve themselves in the coming year. Luckily, I don’t have that problem.
This is not because I’m faultless, far from it, but rather because my father can be trusted not only to keep an encyclopaedic record of anything I do wrong, but, inevitably, to also bring it all up in the run-up to Yom Kippur.
As usual, this year he spoke about the al cheit (confession) and encouraged me to think about all the sins listed in the prayer, and examine myself in that context. When he asked me what I thought, I stole a line that my brother, in response to the same question, came up with when he was a remarkably sharp little boy (he’s still remarkably sharp, he’s just a grown man now).
“Some of those I’ve done, so I’m sorry. Some I haven’t done, so I’m not sorry. Some of those, well I’m really looking forward to trying them out,” I replied.
“Well,” said my father, you’d do well to give this one a second look,” and he pointed to the line asking forgiveness “for the sin which we have committed before you by casting off the yoke.”
For those of us who didn’t grow up on a kibbutz with a wide knowledge of agriculture, a yoke is a wooden beam that binds oxen (again for the non-kibbutznikim, oxen are like docile bulls) together so that they can cooperatively pull a plough.
The symbolism was not lost on me. Clearly, my father is worried about the erstwhile nature of my Judaism and is warning me away from “casting off the yoke” of Jewish tradition and losing that benefit of cooperation.
The thing is, Jews are not oxen, and I’m not just referring to our generally low levels of towing strength. We are people, who won’t always appreciate a yoke around our necks.
Furthermore, while many of the traditions of Judaism that I grew up with were wonderful and valuable; such as the family bonding time of Friday night Shabbat dinners, which I was never allowed to miss, or the community of friends that it gave me (not to mention the bar mitzvah presents), there are also problematic traditions that need to be reworked and updated.
Sometimes the yoke must be broken in order to progress.
Albert Einstein would never have made the amazing discoveries that he did and advanced humankind so far had he been shackled by the constraints of the concept of a 6,000-year-old earth, and he could never have reconciled relativity theory if he had been bound to a static, divinely created universe.
Had Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel not rejected the concept of Judaism’s monopoly on truth, he would never have been able to persuade the Catholic Church to alter its anti-Semitic liturgical stance on Jews. Maybe he wouldn’t have become such an influential civil rights figure, marching with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma if he hadn’t rejected the biblical stance on slavery and minority rights.
Arthur Goldberg would never have been as influential in the death penalty debate during his time in the U.S. Supreme Court had he not turned his back on the biblical acceptance of the practice.
In fact, it is precisely this willingness to sometimes leave the harness of dogma behind that has made Jewish tradition so enduring and the legacy of the Jewish people so strong. There is, however, still a long way to go. The homophobia of traditional Judaism is something that is not compatible with many Jews’ modern belief systems, nor is enforced gender segregation.
We need desperately to repair the rifts between the various factions of Judaism worldwide, and do everything in our power to end the Orthodox stronghold on religious government in Israel.
We need to challenge the yoke from time to time and luckily, it’s our specialty. Let’s stop ostracizing the progressive and making them repent on Yom Kippur, and start seeing progress for what it is - something fundamentally human and certainly no sin.
Josh Mintz is completing his degree in International Relations and Middle Eastern studies and is the communications director at Friend a Soldier, an NGO that encourages dialogue with IDF soldiers.
