Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur, the tenth of Tishrei, is the holiest day of the Jewish year, the climax of the Ten Days of Repentance that begin at Rosh Hashanah. Its biblical charter is Leviticus 16, which prescribes an annual rite in which the high priest enters the innermost sanctuary, the only day he may do so, and makes atonement for the whole people; two goats are chosen, one offered and one, the "scapegoat", sent into the wilderness bearing the people's sins. The Torah commands that on this day the people "afflict" themselves and do no work.

With the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE the sacrificial rite ended, and the rabbis reshaped the day around prayer, confession and repentance (teshuvah) in place of the offerings; the synagogue liturgy's Avodah section recites the vanished Temple service as memory. A principle central to the day is that Yom Kippur atones for offences between a person and God, but for wrongs against other people it does nothing until one has sought out the injured party and made it right, so the season before it is traditionally a time of seeking reconciliation.

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.