A brief Yom Kippur thread: Having worked my way through the regular Al Haytz, the liturgical jeremiad of sins for which one might make atonement ("guilty, guilty, not so much, oh man, unbelieveably guilty, guilty...), I had pause last night to turn the page of my prayerbook...
...and encounter an "alternate" litany of sins which seemed, in this new edition, to have been written explicitly for the very times in which we live. To be clear, these are all accurate listed sins requiring atonement with Yahweh. I am not making this up for Twitter:
1) "We have sinned against You, and Them, by refusing to hear and we have sinned against You, and Them, by betraying friends." Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Kurd...
2) "We have sinned against You by hesitating, and we have sinned by useless conferences..." Hello, Democratic congress.
2) "We have sinned against You by hesitating, and we have sinned by useless conferences..." Hello, Democratic congress.
3) "We have sinned against You and Them by being overcautious and we have sinned against You and Them by not using our power." Seriously, Ms. Pelosi, conservative Judaism is annotating prayer books with your shit.
4) "We have sinned against You, and them, by senselessness, and we sinned against You, and them, by despairing." If you voted for a third-party candidate or sat on your ass in 2016 and are thinking about doing it again, you deserve a Biblical plague. I'll go with boils, a fav.
5) "We have sinned against You, and them, by being patient, and we have sinned against You, and them, by frivolity at dreadful times." Okay, every minute wasted on Twitter these past two years -- including this one -- comes rushing up at me. Guilty.
6) "We have sinned against You, and them, by appeasement and we have sinned against You, and them, by theological rationalizations." Chef's kiss in the direction of the right-wing Christianity, entirely beshitted by its embrace of Trumpism.
7) "We have sinned against You and them by complacency, and we have sinned against you, and them, by communal strife." You think one Democratic leader is as good as another, shame on you. You think in the end you can fail to support ANY Dem leader against Trump, fuck you as well.
Seriously, no lie. Those were the last seven sins -- alternates though they were to usual litany of greed, falsehoods and sexual immorality -- listed in my Yom Kippur prayer book in the Musaf, or additional morning, liturgy. I was slack-jawed at how precise the charges.
"For these sins, forgiving God, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement." I did not go back to synagogue for minchah or niyleh, the last services yesterday. I was afraid of what else I might find in the book.
