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Jews celebrate Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement
09-10-2008
Moscow, October 8, Interfax - Russian Jews will celebrate Yom Kippur also known as the Day of Atonement, the time for repentance and confession, on Wednesday.
Parishioners of the Moscow Jewish Community Center dressed in Jewish ritual cloths will come to a prayer hall at 06.30 p.m. and light the candles, one for each member of the family and one more for the late relatives. Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar will read a prayer.
Yom Kippur crowns ten days of repentance in the month of tishrei when the destiny of a man is defined for the coming year (its first day is Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year). The Bible considers this feast as a day of atonement before God and instructs not to work and to "exhaust soul." However, Yom Kippur is not a day of sorrow and grief.
Rabbi Lazar offers believers to think over the core of sincere repentance and reminds that one of the Hebrew meanings of the word ("tshuva") is "coming back." According to Lazar, a person through repentance comes back to God "he left in his sin" and he does it "at a new level having an experience of parting."
"Doing this, a person comes back to himself because he abandons himself in his sin. Sin is an eclipse, a perversion, a corruption of nature created by God. When conquered, sin becomes an instrument of spiritual growth as problems and crises give new possibilities," the Rabbi said.
Lazar also compares struggle against sin to a decision of a man who was always late and once missed his plane to overcome his vicious habit. He decides to leave home 15 minutes earlier than usual. According to the Rabbi, "this will be sincere and therefore efficient repentance" because "a move of soul should become an action."
"But what to do with being late for the plane? Whatever you are doing now, the fact of being late remains absolute: you are never late now, but you were late then! The contradiction is easy to remove: you've changed in your repentance, now you are a different person, a sin committed in the past is not yours, in is made by a man you no longer are," the Rabbi says.
