This may be a little off topic for a “Guns & Optics” website, but I figured you’ll forgive me a few occasional small diversions.  Yom Kippur begins at sundown tonight on September 20, 2026.  It is the Day of Atonement, the most somber day in the Jewish year.  I am not an especially observant Jew.  I grew up in the Soviet Union.  I do not keep a full traditional calendar, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.  I pay attention to a few of the major holidays, but do not make a big deal out of most of them.    

Yom Kippur still matters to me though.  For a long time I could not quite say why since it always looked a little hypocritical.  Left to my own devices, I avoid going to the temple like the plague.  I do not follow most of the ritual parts of Judaism (I definitely do not keep kosher).  Yet, the Day of Atonement matters.  Here is the closest I can get to understanding why.

Yom Kippur is a yearly act of defiance against any power that thinks it sits at the top of the pyramid.  It is a reminder that we get to return to what we are, no matter what the insanity of the year behind us made us do.  The tyrants I grew up under are mostly gone (some have changed business cards, but they are not the same as what they were).  We are still here and only G-d is above us.

What most know about Yom Kippur is the ritual.  Twenty-five hours. No food, no drink, no work if you are keeping it that way.  White clothes.  Long prayers if you go to the temple. A shofar blast when it ends.

Yom means Day.  The meaning of the word kippur is about covering, ransoming, wiping clean.  In the Bible the high priest walked into the holiest Temple sanctuary once a year, offered one goat to God, and sent another into the wilderness with the people’s sins named over it.  The house had to be cleaned so Presence could stay in the middle of a people who make a mess.

The physical Temple is gone. The day is not.

There is an old Talmudic story where Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai was smuggled out of Jerusalem besieged by the Romans around 70 CE.  He greets Roman general Vespasian outside Jerusalem and predicts that he will become emperor.  Vespasian grants him one favor.  Ben Zakkai asks him “Give me Yavneh and its sages”.  He essentially asked him for a small town and the right to teach.  That became the center of Jewish learning after the Temple was destroyed. The building was gone. Study, prayer, and return were not. No army can burn that down.

For two thousand years after that Yom Kippur has been inward and interpersonal: return, confession, prayer, charity — and the rule that God does not clear what you still owe another human being.

You do not need to be observant to feel the weight of that. You only need to have lived through a year and have the dedication to stop for a day and reflect.

Why a secular Soviet Jew would still care

The Soviet state had a very simple take on the human being. You and everything around you belonged to the Communist Party.  There was no law superior to the regime.  Religion was either backwardness or a security problem.  Jewishness was an entry in your papers and the limit of what you were allowed to do or to be in the Soviet Union: a reason you did not get the job, a university placement or the exit visa.  In the Soviet Union, your ethnicity (Jewish is both religion and ethnicity) was recorded in your identification document.

Yom Kippur refuses the premise of the primacy of the state.

Not with a manifesto, but with a day that does not belong to their calendar.  With a fast the state did not schedule. With the old idea, older than Moscow or Rome or DC, that only God is above us.  Commissars are not.  General secretaries are not.  Whatever the current thing happens to be is not.

I am not religious enough to want to try to unpack “only God is above us” in any sort of a doctrinal sense.  It is still the most accurate sentence I have for this idea that we are all made in G-d’s image and no human is above the other.  There is a limit to what any government, any psychotic year, any burst of collective insanity is allowed to make of you.

The USSR wanted all of us to be state property, yet merely remaining a Jew was already a kind of insubordination.  They did not care about anyone’s individual piety.  That 5^th line in the passport was not theological: you were Yevrei (Russian version of Hebrew) whether you kept Shabbat or not.  The state could punish us for that, but it could not quite extinguish what we are.  Tyrannies are not very good at planning for eternity.

In a very strange way, for me, Yom Kippur, in part, is the annual discovery that all the empires of history who promised to outlast us are all gone, yet we are still here.

Return, not performance

The Hebrew word everyone translates as repentance is teshuvah. The root is return.

A year of ordinary life asks you to become a lot of things you did not choose.  Some of that is ordinary adult compromise.  Some of it is moral cowardice.  Some of it is what you do to get through a system that wants everything from you: your speech, your hopes, your dreams, your life, and eventually your children.

Yom Kippur is the moment when you get to shake that year off and return to what you were.

It is not a conversation you have with another human.  Walking back toward what you are when the noise drops: a Jew, a free person, someone whose first loyalty is not to the last demand made on him is a conversation you get to have with G-d and with yourself once a year.  

Maimonides, who would not have been terribly impressed by my marginally existent piety, still defined the work in terms a secular person can use.  Name the act. Feel its weight. Say it. Resolve hard enough that you would be embarrassed to repeat it next Tuesday.  If another person has a name attached to the damage, start there.  Yom Kippur does not atone for what is between you and another person.  It is between you and G-d.

The Soviets were excellent at public confession that was just a performance.  We live in a culture inundated by peformative self-flagellation and that is fluent in other people’s sins and blind to its own.  Modern technology brought us social media that was a boon to both voyeurs and exhibitionists.   This day is the opposite of both.

Most of the people on here are not Jewish.  I assume most of you are either Christian or secular or somewhere in between.   A lot of you are secular in the ordinary American way, which is different from the Soviet way.  Here, you can be secular without buying into the religion of secularism, that is a luxury that was not afforded to us.

Whether Christian or secular, you do not need a metaphysics seminar and you most definitely do not need it from me.  Still, my point here is that once a year, it is not a bad thing to take all the dulling life anesthetics off the table: food, work, social media feed, performance and ask what the year turned you into.  Then ask what you are when that is all stripped off.  Then go figure out how to get back to what you are or what G-d wants you to be rather than what this past year made you.

The traditional greeting in these days is not “Happy Yom Kippur.” It is gmar chatima tova: a good final sealing.

That is probably why I keep this day, why I fast and turn all my electronic gadgets off. Not because I am pretending to be a model Jew.  Because I am still here, and because I refuse to let a year or a state or the feverish pace of life have the last word on what that means.

Gmar chatima tova.

It has been a little time since I talked about Spartan Precision bipods and tripods.  That is largely due to my preoccupation with precision shooting during the last year and a half or so. 

I have two pieces of gear from Spartan: Ascent tripod https://alnk.to/28VEg3S and Javelin bipod https://alnk.to/gVPiEBd Both are very well made and rather quick to deploy, but they are not quite stable enough for the competition oriented endeavors I have been focusing on.  

For competition, it has been predominantly large diameter inverted leg tripods, like Zeiss' Max Duty kit and Triple Pull Ckyepod.  Inverted leg tripods are measurably faster to deploy and adjust when on the clock.  Triple Pull Ckyepod gives me the flexibility to shoot prone, sitting or kneeling in a pinch.

For hunting, however, I have been using the Spartan gear I listed above because it is light, easy to pack, fast to deploy and exceedingly well made.  It also really helps that the legs of the Ascent tripod come off for easier packing and for use as hiking sticks (that is highly useful when packing meat out and I like the idea of not needing to carry around separate walking sticks.

Most of my hunting rifles that I am not willing to attach a bipod to on a mostly permanent basis are set up for Spartan's Magnaswitch adapter.   It is slick, unobtrusive and can be used to snap either a bipod or tripod in.  It is not quite as stable at distance as a proper large diameter match tripod, but it is very fast to deploy and stable enough for my hunting purposes.

In the last few years, tripods have become an indespensible tool precision shooting when terrain is not conducive to shooting prone.  We use tripods for observation and target ID with binoculars and then immediately switch to using them for shooting support.  That is where things start to diverge a bit.

Some people clip the rifle into the Arca head of the tripod (that's what I have been doing lately).

Some keep a tripod table clipped in and do both glassing and shooting off of a bag sitting on top of the tripod table (that's what I started out with originally, but managing extra gear took too long.  I am more efficient now, so it might be time to re-visit this).

Some of the top competitors use two tripods for front and rear support (that's more gear manipulation than I am comfortable with).

When there is a front support, whether a tall bipod or a prop of some sort or just a convenient terrain feature, tripods are routinely used as a rear support to stabilize the butstock of the rifle.  That is what's commonly referred to as "tripod rear".

I have been trying to keep things simple and mostly just shot with the rifle clipped into the tripod.  I got quite competent at it when shooting at the range, but it has been a bit of a struggle in the last two matches (I also had some health issue in parallel, but I suspect that it had more to do with me screwing things up under time pressure than health concerns).

Still, while I continue to practice shooting with the rifle clipped into the tripod, both standing and kneeling, it was time to expand my horizons and try to master various variants of "tripod rear" support.

That is when I stumbled onto Spartan's CP Brace that offers a completely different approach to using a tripod for two point rifle support.

 It is a very clever idea.  They are, essentially, creating a bridge betweeh two legs of the tripod that has a compact tripod head attached to it.  That is the front support.  The rear support is the tripod's third leg where, similarly to the conventional "tripod rear" setup, you use your support hand to anchor the buttstock of the rifle to the leg of the tripod.

Like everythign Spartan makes, CP Brace is not cheap, so I figured I should take one for the team, do some experimentation and let you know what I find.

Either way, it is going to continue to be a mess.

Last month, powers that be issued a solicitation for the HICAR program:
https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/b1a57529aa574e8ba220e0311434733e/view

HICAR stands for "Hypervelocity Improved Capability Assault Rifle"

The solicitation is specific to SOCOM, rather than the larger branches of the military.  However, I strongly suspect that it is a harbinger of smarter things to come than the general issue of anything chambered for the 6.8x51 (aka as 277 Fury in the civilian world).