By the time Ne’ilah begins, Yom Kippur has taken its toll. The sun is beginning to set. The room looks different than it did at Kol Nidrei the night before. People who stood straight and attentive hours earlier are leaning against walls or shifting tiredly in their seats. We have been fasting all day. We have confessed the same sins again and again. We are hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and watching the final minutes of the holiest day of the year disappear. And yet Ne’ilah may be the most dramatic prayer service of them all. The ark remains open. We are asking God to hear us, to accept our prayers, and to answer us before the day comes to an end. The language becomes urgent. We speak as if the gates of heaven are beginning to close, and there is a feeling that everything has narrowed down to these final moments.
Right there, in the middle of all of that exhaustion and urgency, we recite theological statements that are almost impossible to ignore. I was following along last night, at the end of Yom Kippur, when I noticed this line in the machzor, the traditional prayer book used for the High Holidays: “You desire the repentance of the wicked, and You do not desire their death.”
It is an extraordinary statement. Not simply that God is willing to forgive the wicked. Not even that God will accept them if they somehow find their way back. God wants them to return. And I found myself wondering how seriously we are supposed to take that word: wicked. Surely there must be a limit. Surely there are people who have done things so terrible that we no longer want to speak about repentance. Murderers. Monsters. People whose actions cannot be repaired and whose victims can never be restored. But there is no qualification in Ezekiel’s words.
As I thought about that question, I immediately remembered one of my favorite courses on Bible Plus, Sepha Kirschblum’s four-part series on Cain and Abel. Cain is not a theoretical sinner. He is the first murderer in the world, he murders his own brother. There is no attempt in the biblical account to minimize what he did. Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. Cain is punished. His actions have consequences that cannot be undone. And yet we continue reading about Cain after the murder.
Sepha spends the final part of the course asking what happens next, and what Cain’s life after Abel can teach us about repentance. She brings a remarkable teaching from the sages and then looks closely at details in the biblical text that I had read many times without ever thinking about in quite the same way. I do not want to give away her interpretation, because it is worth hearing her build the argument herself. But she asks a difficult and important question: What could repentance possibly mean after you have done something that can never be undone?
Cain cannot bring Abel back. He cannot erase that fatal moment in the field. Whatever teshuvah, repentance means, it cannot mean pretending the past did not happen. That is why I kept thinking about those words during Ne’ilah. After an entire day spent confessing what human beings are capable of doing wrong, we reach the final moments of Yom Kippur and hear God’s words through Ezekiel: שׁוּבוּ שׁוּבוּ. Return. Return. And return can happen for any of us.
The gates are closing. The day is almost over. And still, God is calling the sinner back. Perhaps this is one of the most radical ideas we recite during Yom Kippur. There are actions whose consequences cannot be erased. There are things we break that we may never be able to repair completely. But God’s desire is still not for the sinner to remain forever the person who committed the sin. He wants the person to return.
Sepha Kirschblum’s course on Cain and Abel is one of my favorite Bible Plus courses because she takes this question seriously in the context of one of the most difficult stories in the Bible. Bible Plus is filled with courses like this, classes that help you slow down, notice what you may have missed, and discover just how much more there is to learn in the biblical text. You can learn more about Bible Plus here.
