The Torah never once calls this day Yom Kippur. Every time, it says Yom HaKippurim, atonements, plural. That small letter looks like a grammatical detail easy to skip past. But four separate traditions, from four separate directions, have stopped right at that letter, and each of them, standing there, found something deep enough to take hours to unfold. I want to stop there too, the same way, without rushing.

Three Separate Atonements, One Day Open the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus, and you’ll see the verb to atone applied to three distinct things on this one day. The first, in verse sixteen, is the atonement of the Sanctuary and the holy objects inside it. The second is the atonement carried out through the goat sent into the wilderness. The third, in verse thirty, is the cleansing of the people themselves, from all their sins before God.

Sit with why these need to be three separate things for a moment. The Sanctuary is a structure built by human hands, stone and gold, but tradition holds that over the course of a year, the people’s sins settle onto it like dust in the air. The place itself becomes contaminated, even if no one sinned inside it, simply for standing at the center of a sinning people. The goat carries something entirely different, not a concrete list of wrongs, but sin itself, loaded onto a body and physically carried away. And the third, the hardest of the three, is the cleansing of what sits inside a person, not just actions, but intention, desire, thought.

Three different kinds of contamination call for three different kinds of cleansing. You can sweep a building. You can load a sin onto an animal and send it off. But cleansing your own heart carries no outside shortcut. This is exactly where the third atonement breaks from the other two, because only the person themselves, turning inward, can........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)