The observance is built on a set of five restrictions, kept for roughly twenty-five hours from before sunset to after nightfall: no eating or drinking, no washing for pleasure, no anointing, no leather shoes, and no marital relations. The complete fast, and the wearing of white (some wear the kittel, a white robe also used as a burial garment), set the day apart from all others and lend it a rehearsal-of-death solemnity; many spend almost the whole of it in the synagogue.
The liturgy runs from the eve's Kol Nidre, an Aramaic legal formula annulling certain vows, chanted to one of the most famous of Jewish melodies, through the confessions (Vidui and the alphabetical Ashamnu and Al Chet, recited in the plural so that the community confesses together), to the closing service, Neilah, "the locking [of the gates]", sung as the day ends with a sense of the final chance for the year's prayer to be sealed. A single long blast of the shofar ends the fast. Even many otherwise non-observant Jews keep Yom Kippur, making it, with the Passover seder, one of the two most widely observed days of the Jewish year.