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 5th 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.
