"In the Jewish soul, we have always heard, there is a Jewish point awaiting its day," Nathan Alterman wrote many years ago. He was under the impression that it didn't matter what kind of a Jew you were, "Ignorant or learned, bright or an imbecile … friend or foe … the best or the worst … you cannot be a Jew without some Jewish point," he wrote.
On Yom Kippur, more than anything else, we discover that "Jewish point." The Israeli culture, which has chosen what to stress on many Jewish holidays in the Hebrew calendar – the festival of Shavuot as a harvest celebration, Hanukkah as a holiday of heroism, and Tu B'shevat as the Jewish arbor day – hasn't touched Yom Kippur. The constant and sometimes disturbing tension between Israeliness and Jewishness has largely refrained from interfering with the holiest of holy days in the Jewish calendar – Yom Kippur.
Even author Aharon Magged, who has often been ambivalent about institutionalized religion, told me before his death a few years ago that whether he wanted to or not, his entire being was colored by Jewishness. He said that just like a black person can't change the color of his skin, he – Megged – couldn't escape his Jewishness, even if he tried to "for good reasons or bad ones."
"You can," Megged explained, "be wiped out, assimilate, change your ways, but you will never be free of your Jewish 'skin.'" His words corresponded well with Alterman's "Jewish point."
Yom Kippur, as a day of people removing their shells and returning to themselves and their God, leads us to the same Jewish point – the meaning of Jewish existence, beyond mere survival. According to our sages, Moses received the two tablets of the Ten Commandments on Yom Kippur, and to mark the 40 days he stayed on Mount Sinai, there are 40 days from the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul and Yom Kippur.
Indeed, Yom Kippur the private introspection allows every one of us to get to know the Jewish collective of which he or she is part. Looking inward and getting to know the "I" is one of the better ways to get familiar with the Jewish collective to which we, as individuals, belong. Anyone who does the opposite and first tries to straighten accounts with others could wind up forgetting about his own concept of self and the ties to the collective will weaken.
Forty-five years ago, the Jewish collective and Jewish individuals were reminded of what linked them. The 1973 Yom Kippur War gave the holy day its first brushing of Israeli "color," which only emphasized the shared Jewish fate. Its first awful days, which threatened our existence, forced us – as individuals and a collective – to loosen existing systems and coordinate our intentions.
"A Jewish autumn in the land of my forefathers sends me hints of Elul," says a poem by Avraham Chalfi, which the late composer and musician Arik Einstein turned into a song.
"The little birds inside me that tweet the sadness of Yom Kippur are already aflutter. Then the shofars that open the gates of Heaven will blow, and Jewish faces from the Diaspora, in a sad gray, will appear before the throne of glory, with many pleas and prayers and sparks in the depths of their eyes," the poem continues.
