Parshah Commentary

In this week’s double parshah, Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, we are introduced to the ritual of Yom Kippur as it was practiced in the Tabernacle and Temple: a performance of the High Priest involving intricate vestments, a series of sacrifices, several ablutions, and verbal confessions enacted in order to intercede on behalf of the people and cleanse them and the sanctuary of their sins. The ritual also includes two goats, upon whom lots are cast: one which is sacrificed as a burnt offering to God, and one which the priest “lays both his hands upon” in order to “confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites” before sending it off to the wilderness “to carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible land.” As the Torah portrays it, this ritual seems to effect something of a magical transformation: The sins of the people are deposited upon this lone creature—what came to be known as the “scapegoat”—and disappeared into the wilderness (or, as per rabbinic literature, pushed off a cliff), leaving the people purified of all transgression.

Perhaps discomfited by the idea that absolution can simply occur through ritual transference, without sincere internal work and external repair, the rabbis carefully circumscribe the application of this switch-flipping version of purgation. In Mishna Yoma—the tractate that details the rules of the Yom Kippur service—they declare that Yom Kippur can only automatically atone for transgressions we’ve committed against God; for sins against another person, atonement must entail making amends with the individual who was harmed. Repentance thus comes to fill part of the void left by sacrifices in a post-Temple world. But it is hard to fully abandon a model in which magical transference can clear us of culpability. In medieval Ashkenaz, people began to practice the ritual of tashlikh, a custom that involves reciting liturgy and tossing bread crumbs into a body of flowing water between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, symbolically achieving the “casting away of one’s sins.” According to Shadal, a 19th-century Italian rabbinic scholar, tashlikh follows the same logic as the scapegoat ritual, in which sins are transferred to an external object that is then sent away to nature’s depths.

For centuries, many rabbis fervently opposed the practice of tashlikh, largely because they feared that people might interpret it as effecting absolution in and of itself, incorrectly assuming that throwing some bread crumbs in a river meant they were now purified of all transgression and freed of the obligation to do sincere repentance. Some who upheld the tradition proffered rationales that avoided magical efficacy: For example, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, a preeminent 16th-century halachic authority, argued that the awe and fear inspired by standing before immense bodies of water can itself prompt people to contemplate God’s majesty; realizing that the entire world and its wonders exist only at God’s will inspires people to align themselves with the Divine and repent of their wrong-doing. It is through the repentance that tashlikh inspires, rather than the ritual itself, that their sins are then “cast into the depths of the sea.”

The Rambam offers another framework for understanding the role of this kind of ritual in his discussion of the scapegoat. Ever the rationalist, he was unconvinced by the idea that the animal metaphysically assumes our transgressions: “Sins,” he writes, “cannot be carried like a burden, and taken off the shoulder of one being to be laid on that of another.” Instead, Rambam explains, the ritual is “of a symbolic character, as if saying, we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible.” In this view, the power of a ritual like the scapegoat (or, by extension, tashlikh) lies in the image of sins as separable from ourselves—in imagining what it would look like, what it would feel like, for our transgressions to be truly lifted. To be sure, believing this too wholeheartedly can lead to the trap tashlikh’s opponents feared, in which a person abdicates responsibility for their misdeeds and for the tangible action needed to address harm they’ve caused. But at its best, this act of aspirational imagination can involve not only a casting-off but also a taking-on—a release of unproductive guilt, a vision of what it would feel like to be truly clear of all harm I have caused or allowed, and an assumption of the responsibility for enacting the repair required to achieve such a vision.

In activist circles, we often wrestle with the advantages and limits of the language of complicity and guilt. On the one hand, we know that we must recognize our participation in systems of supremacy and see how that recognition can spur us and our communities to urgent action. On the other hand, excessive self-castigation can become self-defeating, a navel-gazing practice that’s paralyzing rather than motivating. Ideally, the tashlikh ritual, like the scapegoat before it, can be a model for striking a balance: In casting off demobilizing guilt and shame, we become able to more productively assume the responsibility for sincere, effective teshuva. No symbolic gesture can clear us of our sins, let alone dispel the harms to which we contribute; only concrete action can do that. But the radical act of imagination may help us move toward true repair.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.