Tell me you have biblically minded children without telling me you have biblically minded children.
I’ll go first.
This past week, we were driving through northern Israel to visit family, over the Sukkot holiday. While we were winding our way through the gorgeous mountains of the Galilee, when my nine-year-old looked out the window and very casually said, “Hey, Mom, look at that cliff over there. That would probably be a great cliff to do the Azazel from.” And, in truth, it probably would have been. I loved that this was what came to his mind as he looked out at the dramatic cliffs and mountains around us (and quite possible fresh on his mind from Yom Kippur) . But his comment also opened the door to a surprisingly good conversation about one of the strangest rituals described in the Bible: the scapegoat sent to Azazel on Yom Kippur. In Leviticus 16, two goats are brought before the High Priest. One is designated “for the Lord” and offered as a sacrifice. Over the second, the High Priest confesses the sins of the people, and that goat is sent away into the wilderness, carrying “all their iniquities” with it.
Of course, a goat cannot literally carry away someone’s sins. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, drawing on Maimonides, explains that this was precisely the point of the physical ritual. Maimonides writes that the ceremony was symbolic, meant to help people understand that through repentance, “we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds” and removed them from us as far as possible.
Rabbi Sacks takes that idea one step further. He points out that Yom Kippur is described as a day not only of atonement, but also of purification. Those are not quite the same thing. Atonement addresses guilt: I did something wrong, I acknowledge it, and I seek forgiveness. Purification addresses something deeper: the feeling that what I did has somehow become part of who I am.
That distinction matters. Rabbi Sacks explains that guilt attaches to an action, while shame attaches to the person. Guilt says, “I did something wrong.” Shame says, “There is something wrong with me.” And if a person believes that his mistakes have become his identity, repentance can begin to feel impossible.
The scapegoat gave the people of Israel something they could actually see. They confessed. They repented. And then they watched as the goat carrying the symbolic burden of those sins disappeared into the wilderness.
The mistakes were real. The responsibility was real. But they did not have to remain forever.
Rabbi Sacks describes Judaism as a religion of hope because its approach to repentance insists that human beings are not condemned to live endlessly inside the mistakes of their past. On Yom Kippur, the entire community participated together in confession, repentance, atonement, and purification.
And suddenly, as we drove through the mountains of northern Israel, my nine-year-old’s observation about a very good Azazel cliff felt a little less random.
That cliff may have been dramatic. But the idea behind it is even more powerful: we are responsible for what we have done, but with repentance, we are not required to carry it forever.
