The Power of Confession

Jokes about confession abound, but confession is no laughing matter. Judaism takes confession seriously, especially on Yom Kippur. In Judaism, confession is an intensely private affair. It is only between you and G-d. No one else is invited or permitted to overhear your confession. We must confess silently. The public airing of our sins is considered an affront to G-d.

On Yom Kippur, however, confession is built into our liturgy. Moreover, it is common for congregations to chant the confession loudly and in unison: “We sinned, we betrayed, we stole, we blasphemed, we misled,” and on it goes until every letter in the Hebrew alphabet is covered.

This gives rise to two questions:

• Why do we have uniform confessions? Surely, we are not all guilty of all the sins listed in the liturgy. Also, some of us are undoubtedly guilty of sins not listed in this liturgy. Why are these sins omitted?

• Why do we make an exception and confess loudly on Yom Kippur? If laundering our sins in public is deemed disrespectful to G-d, why do we recite this confession out loud? Moreover, we make a spectacle of it. We chant it in a traditional tune that is common to most synagogues around the globe. Why do we make a public spectacle of our confession?

Not Our Sins

The answer is that this liturgy does not represent our sins. It represents the idea of sin. We confess our personal sins in private and never enumerate them publicly. They are strictly between us and G-d.[1]

Moreover, these sins are not even confessed silently on Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year. It is when the high priest, the holiest person among the Jewish people, entered the holy of holies, the holiest place on earth. It perfectly merged the holiest person, time, and space.

We don’t have a Temple or a holy of holies today, but our souls enter that space spiritually. We do not muddy the pristine holiness of this day by airing our dirty laundry before G-d. Instead, we confess our sins before G-d during the ten days of penance that lead up to Yom Kippur. By the time Yom Kippur arrives, we have confessed all our sins and have been forgiven. There is no need to bring them up again and mar the holiness of this day.

Yet, our liturgy is filled with pro forma confessions. These are not our sins, so we may say them out loud. We may even sing them out loud. But if they are not our sins, why do we confess them?

The Stain Remains

Suppose you steal from your friend, return the theft, and beg forgiveness. Suppose your friend forgives you, and you rebuild your relationship and trust. Suppose the relationship has grown even stronger because you now cherish and appreciate it more than you did before you nearly lost it. It would seem that you can put the entire episode behind you.

You have certainly reversed the enmity that previously existed between you. You replaced it with love. But the sinful act—your act of theft—remains in your past. It has not been reversed. The only way to reverse it is by countering it in action. For example, if you catch someone breaking into your friend’s home and risk your safety to stop them, you have counteracted your sinful act with an act of friendship.

The same is true for our sins toward G-d. Even after we confess our sins and G-d forgives us, the stain and stench of our sins continue to sully our past. We can reverse the passion with which we committed our sin by arousing our passion for G-d. But the act of the sin remains.

No one is permitted to taunt us with it. They are encouraged to view us as a changed person, not the same person who committed the sin. Even G-d will not mention a word about it on our day of judgment. But deep in our hearts, we know this stain remains in our past. This will trouble us if we really care about our relationship with G-d.

Jewish law stipulates that if a kosher butcher deliberately sells nonkosher meat, the only way to secure atonement is by going to the same expense to prevent Jews from eating non-Kosher. It is repentance of scale. You do something of equal stature to counter your act of sin.

But (a) not every sin lends itself to a counteraction, and (b) if we had to counteract our every sin, the task would be overwhelming. G-d kindly provided us with an escape hatch. Rather than requiring an action, G-d considers the movement of our lips as a counteraction.

Flapping Lips

They tell a story about monks who took a vow of silence. They were permitted to make one statement every ten years. They ate in a dining room with open windows every day, and the wind would ruffle the curtains. This disturbed one young monk’s concentration. After ten years, when he was finally permitted to speak, he uttered two words: “Flapping curtains.” Ten years later, his overseer replied, “Flapping wind.” Ten years later, the chief monk rebuked them with the words, “Flapping lips.”

The flapping of our lips is indeed a form of action. In His benevolence, G-d allows us to use this action to counteract the act of our sins. When we chant the liturgy of confession, we are not confessing our sins. We are acting with our lips to form actual words that represent the entire spectrum of the Hebrew alphabet, alef to taf. With each letter, we counteract an element of our sinful actions from our past. We chant these confessions ten times during the course of Yom Kippur to complete the reversal.

We now understand why we sing the confession together and out loud. This is not a shameful confession of inappropriate sins. These sins were long forgiven when we confessed them privately before G-d in the days leading up to Yom Kippur. This is G-d allowing us to counteract the actions of our sins and erase them from our past. This is an exciting opportunity, and we embrace it with enthusiasm.

We chant it in unison and celebrate the opportunity to wipe our slate clean and turn the page on a new, pristine beginning.[2]

[1]  The only exception is when we shame or offend someone in public. In those cases, we also confess in public.

[2] This essay is based on Derech Mitzvosecha p, 38b.