True atonement is difficult because we are not always aware of our sins against others, and from whom to ask forgiveness. The Tefilah Zaka meditation goes, “I know that there is no one so righteous that they have not wronged another,” and that is my point of departure for Viduy (װידױ). Few people set out intentionally to sin against others or against their understanding of morality or of God (not always the same thing). In the long history of human misery, the villain who sits before a mirror pledging to do evil is, in fact, a statistical anomaly.

They have existed, of course, and they have perpetrated inconceivable suffering; we might call them unbalanced – as they surely were – but evil, even at its most horrific has historically been more the province of the sane doing what they believe to be the right thing than the deranged comic book villain.

One can imagine the terrorists of 11 September 2001 approaching their gates at Logan, Newark, and Dulles Airports flush with thoughts of divine guidance and moral rectitude. The historian Christopher Browning noted that the “willing executioners” of the Nazi killing fields of Operation Reinhard in occupied Poland were Ordinary Men, motivated by camaraderie and a sense of duty rather than ativistic malevolence (no matter how much Daniel Goldhagen might demur).

In The Nazi Conscience, Claudia Koonz reminds us that the nigh-inconceivable enormity of the Shoah could not have been perpetrated solely by a tiny cabal of homicidal maniacs around the table at the Wannsee Conference, or huddled deep in the Führerbunker. The trains that Adolf Eichmann directed im Osten from rail yards throughout the Third Reich were operated by ordinary people who felt no more than the usual animus against Jews – and certainly not Goldhagen’s imagined “eliminationist antisemitism” – who were just being good citizens and doing their jobs.

There is a large plaque at Paris’s Gare de l’Est that reminds travelers that this was the location from which 70,000 French Jews were transported to the death camps. Like many other memorials across France, the inscription concludes “n’oublions jamais” – “never forget” in the imperative first-person plural. We will never forget, we must never forget, as a nation and as a society. It is a commandment as much as a promise to remember.

The Holocaust memorial is just one of four plaques that also commemorate the “hundreds of thousands of French youth” who were sent from the station to slave labor camps, the prisoners of war who returned in 1945, and the railroad workers of France whose “zeal and hard work” made that return possible. Nowhere, in any of these memorials, is there any mention of the fact that the Nazis were only able to deport Jews, Roma, political prisoners and slave laborers thanks to the “zeal and hard work” of hundreds of thousands of collaborators in both occupied France and Vichy and the passive acquiescence of many millions more French men and women.

Years ago, I had the chilling experience of transcribing an oral history interview conducted with a nice, elderly German lady from the city of Lübeck about her experiences in Nazi Germany. She had been the young wife of a prosperous German merchant who had, until 1935, a Jewish business partner. The Nuremburg Laws that stripped Jews of their civil and political rights allowed him to take full control of the shipping firm for a song, leaving his erstwhile associate penniless.

“That was the law,” she said, “and we always did our best to abide by the law.” Besides, she continued, “if we hadn’t done it, someone else would have, to our disadvantage. At least we treated [the Jewish family] better than strangers would have.” As time passed, the nice lady from Lübeck watched her family grow, as her young son joined the Hitler Jugend, and as her Jewish neighbors disappeared. Some fled the country after Kristallnacht, as the doomed novelist Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz did in 1938. Silbermann, the hopeless protagonist of his novel The Passenger, did not, and I cannot fail but link his fictional fate to the lady from Lübeck’s neighbors.

The city’s Jewish community was never large, numbering maybe a thousand souls at its peak just after the Great War. Yet it was large enough to accommodate a number of shuls, including the great synagogue where Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach had presided. Lübeck’s last 85 Jews were deported to the Riga Ghetto in 1942 and then, with virtual certainty, to the crematoria at Auschwitz when the ghetto was liquidated the following year.

“It breaks my heart to remember them,” the lady from Lübeck said. “It is very hard to remember them, knowing what happened. But, you understand, it was the law, and we always have a duty to observe the law. We are good people, you know.”* Koonz reminds us that the Shoah was not merely the work of maniacal men in jackboots, but of 80 million good Germans who acquiesced and actively collaborated, as much as it might break their hearts to remember it because, they believed, it was the good and moral thing to do.

I am meditating on this, the day before I fast in atonement of my own sins on Yom Kippur. It is my Tefilah Zaka, a pure prayer or meditation on the nature of evil, since what is sin but the commission of an evil? I ponder what Hannah Arendt called its banality in her attempt to understand all the good Germans, like the Lübeck lady, who just went along with genocide.

And that’s the problem: we are all complicit in evil, though perhaps rarely an evil as great as the Shoah. We all sin. “Every person has merits and sins,” the great 12th century rabbi Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah “If a person’s merits are greater than his sins, he is considered a righteous person. If his sins are greater than his merits, he is considered a sinful person. If his merits and sins are equal, he is called a beinoni (half righteous half sinner). The same applies for an entire country, if the total merits of its dwellers are greater than their sins, the country is judged righteous. If their sins are greater, the country is judged wicked. The same is true for the continents and for the entire world.”

Even the righteous sin. No matter how much I try, or anyone tries, to be good, and even if we are not conscious of our transgressions, or do not remember them, we have all caused pain and injury, done violence, or stood by when violence was being ommitted. We can rationalize these transgressions as the inevitable consequences of impossible choices between law and right, or between their pain and our own, as the Lübeck lady did, but we still bear responsibility for them.

Viduy, the public confession, can be performed at any time of year – and should be the moment one realizes one’s transgression – and not only at Yom Kippur. But it is also collective; “’For we have all sinned,’” Maimonides wrote, “is the essential part of the Viduy.” And it is only on the Day of Atonement when stand together in collective complicity to recite the Al Chet, the centerpiece of the Yom Kippur service:

For the sin which we have committed before You under duress or willingly.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by hard-heartedness.
For the sin which we have committed before You inadvertently.
And for the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance of the lips.
For the sin which we have committed before You with immorality.
And for the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly.
For the sin which we have committed before You with knowledge and with deceit.
And for the sin which we have committed before You through speech.
For the sin which we have committed before You by deceiving a fellowman.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by improper thoughts.
For the sin which we have committed before You by a gathering of lewdness.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by verbal [insincere] confession.
For the sin which we have committed before You by disrespect for parents and teachers.
And for the sin which we have committed before You intentionally or unintentionally.
For the sin which we have committed before You by using coercion.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by desecrating the Divine Name.
For the sin which we have committed before You by impurity of  speech.
And for the sin which we have committed before You by foolish talk.
For the sin which we have committed before You with the evil  inclination.
And for the sin which we have committed before You knowingly or unknowingly.
For all these, God of pardon, pardon us, forgive us, atone for us…

The Al Chet does not provide any place to hide behind mitigating factors, impossible decisions, unintentionality, duress, or ignorance. Sin and evil are common aspects of humanity, characteristics shared by the most malevolent reshoyem and the saintliest tzaddiks. This, for me, is the most profound meaning of Yom Kippur, and why I eagerly anticipate my fast every year. It is then I feel most flawed, imbued with the most imperfect humanity, no matter how good I aspire to be.

I was taken aback when a friend whom I greatly respect posted a Yom Kippur prayer by Rabbi Avi Weiss entitled Ahavnu Viduy, a confession of the good that we do. It begins:

We have loved, we have blessed, we have grown, we have spoken positively.
We have raised up, we have shown compassion, we have acted enthusiastically,
We have been empathetic, we have cultivated truth…

Rabbi Weiss suggests that “we find room alongside our negatives, to feel good about our accomplishments both as individuals and within our community,” and perhaps that is a good and constructive thing to do. But not at Yom Kippur. In fact, finding room for self-congratulation like this strikes me as a corrosive intrusion of New Age positivity culture, profoundly incompatible with atonement, and deeply sacrilegious. Yom Kippur is not an occasion to feel good about oneself, nor should it be.

Judaism is a vital, evolving tradition, and we have made room to accommodate new ideas, practices, and values since the return of the exiles in the 6th century BCE. Chicken became meat; exogamy was permitted, prohibited, and then – in some circles – permitted again; we stopped eviscerating animals as part of our religious services when we lost the Temple, and found a better way to daven; we ordained wise men like Rabbi Weiss as rabbis, and then we realized that we should ordain wise women, too; most of us use electricity on Shabbes and drive to shul on yontifs. Our whole history at least since the Council of Yavneh has been about debating, adapting, and surviving.

The fact is that the 613 commandments of the Torah, set down in a vocabulary-impoverished language by Levantine pastoralists in the early Iron Age, don’t always speak clearly or explicitly to modern Jews. Not surprisingly, there is nothing in there about electricity or internal combustion engines; there isn’t even a clear statement about who gets to be a part of the community, or how to convert because, at the time, you were a part of the community if you were circumcised and lived in the community. The Halakhic questions of descent and matrilinearity, and the process of conversion came much later, when our ancestors found that new conditions (like diaspora) demanded adaptation.

The adaptations of the Oral Torah and, later, Halakha were both necessary and precise because the Torah itself is so vague and imprecise. One place where it us absolutely clear, however, is in the practice of Yom Kippur. The Torah declares that “the tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. It shall be a sacred occasion for you: you shall practice self-denial, and you shall bring an offering by fire to God.” (Leviticus 23:27) “For on this day atonement shall be made for you to purify you of all your sins; you shall be pure before God.” (Leviticus 16:30). Citing “the righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression” (Ezekiel 33:12), Maimonides made it absolutely clear that the Day of Atonement is about atonement.

There is no way to make space for Rabbi Weiss’s Ahavnu Viduy in Yom Kippur. Celebrating our good deeds and patting ourselves on the back for them is an absolute contradiction.

As much as I abhor the toxic positivity culture that would make such a prayer seem appropriate to some people, I do believe that we should acknowledge small mitzvas and good deeds that stand out from the banal wallpaper of evil that surrounds us. Arendt recalled hearing the story at Eichmann’s trial of a German soldier named Anton Schmid who saved Jews is Nazi-occupied Lithuania and paid with his life. The revelation was “like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness.”

“How utterly different everything would it be today in this courtroom,” she wrote, “in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all the countries of the world, if only more such stories could be told.”

Yet, the point is, few such stories can be told, and things were not different. The great significance of Schmid’s choice to do the right thing – to be good – despite the cost is that such choices were, and are, possible. “Most people will comply but some people will not.” Yet, if resistance to evil is a choice, then so is complicity. And the latter – just going along, forgetting, giving in – is nigh the universal choice. Arendt continued that, “humanly speaking” nothing more than the choice to resist evil “is required, and nothing more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

The Torah, indeed, the entirety of Jewish ethical teaching holds that doing the right thing should not be exceptional. We are enjoined to pursue justice, to help the needy, to love and support the stranger, to be honest, to act with fairness, and to ensure that Earth remains a place fit for human habitation. Complicity with evil is easy, being selfish, dishonest, and hurtful is easy. Resisting evil is hard, and our tradition holds that you don’t get a cookie for this, you get to call yourself a human being.

That is the value of Yom Kippur for me. It reminds me that, like everyone, I sin, I cause evil, and I hurt people despite my best efforts. Humanity is not, nor should it ever be, regarded as an attainable state of grace, but as an aspirational goal forever just out of reach. That is what reminds us that we have a duty to emulate Sergeant Schmid, Reverend Bonhoeffer, and all the others – that is what makes us human.

So, this day before Yom Kippur I reflect that I do not want a prize for being good, but recognition that I am a deeply flawed human being who, like all humans, is capable of being good. I have contacted, as we do, a number of people whom I know I have wronged in the past year. For those of whom I am ignorant, who I hurt unintentionally and inadvertently, for promises that I failed to keep, confidences I violated, untruths though words and silence, and for everything else, I beg your forgiveness.

Gmar hatimah tovah and if you are observing, may your fast be easy and fulfilling.

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* Martin Luther King, jr. wrote, “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

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Image: Robert Frank, “Yom Kippur, East River, New York,” 1955