There’s a story Rabbi David Woznica tells about Yom Kippur when he was a child. His parents, with all good intentions, explained that during the Vidui — the confessional prayer — you’re supposed to strike your chest only for the sins you actually committed.

So, each year, with the Mahzor in hand, he would go down the list:
“We have sinned against You by speaking recklessly” — yes, did that.
“We have sinned through bribery” — nope, not me.
“We have sinned through arrogance” — okay, maybe a little.
“We have sinned through impure thoughts” — yeah… definitely a few of those.

And so it went, a kind of personal moral inventory, careful and honest.

Then one year, he attended a more traditional synagogue. And during the Vidui, as usual, he was judiciously striking his chest when appropriate. But then… he noticed something strange.

The guy next to him was hitting his chest on every single line.  And then — the guy on the other side too!  And in front of him — and behind him — everyone was doing it!

He began to think: What kind of people go to this synagogue?! Are they all that bad?

Slowly, it dawned on him that perhaps he didn’t have an accurate understanding of what this prayer, this ritual of beating one’s heart, is about.  

This story made me wonder how many of us really do have a deep understanding of Vidui, our communal confessional.  Did you know that someone who is present in synagogue for the entirety of Yom Kippur and participates in the Vidui every time it is recited, and strikes their heart every time that it is traditional to do so, will end up striking their heart 660 times? That is a lot of heart-striking.  No wonder Jewish tradition gets the reputation for being really focused on guilt!

(Though I should note parenthetically: my sense is that you are much more likely to think that Judaism is all about guilt if you only come to synagogue on Yom Kippur.  Because Yom Kippur really DOES focus on guilt.  But if you came to synagogue only on Tu Bishvat, you would think that Judaism is all about environmental consciousness.  If you came to synagogue only on Purim you would think that Judaism is all about partying and drinking.  Each Jewish holiday has its own themes, and you get the full emotional spectrum and full experience of Jewish values only if you experience the entire holiday cycle.)

So, why do we say “we” when so many of the sins on that list are not ours? This is a deeply Jewish question. It touches something essential about what it means to stand in a room like this, on a night like this, and pray together.

We know that teshuvah — repentance — is, in many ways, a personal process. The great medieval sage, Maimonides, teaches that there are steps to the teshivah process, requiring introspection, remorse, then confession, and lastly, a commitment not to repeat the mistake.

And yet, every time we confess our sins on Yom Kippur, we say “We have sinned.” Not “I.” Not “they.” But we.  

We may have heard that Yom Kippur comes to atone for all the wrongs that we haven’t been able to repent for, whether it is because we haven’t had time to, so because the other person wasn’t interested in hearing our apology, or because the only person we hurt was ourselves.  Perhaps this was a sin of omission, something we could have done but didn’t. Yom Kippur is our way of acknowledging the burden of all those misdeeds, and making ourselves accountable to a compassionate, forgiving, yet all-seeing God.

But there is more to Yom Kippur, clearly.  Why are we also atoning for sins we haven’t done?  Isn’t this like collective punishment?  Haven’t we enough to feel guilty about, to punish ourselves for?  

In Judaism, we recognize there is something beyond individual sin – there are societal and communal and institutional wrongs, sins that we permit or overlook in others, sins of prior generations that stain our present.  These may require communal recognition and apology. 

Yes, I am talking about reparations, which is incredibly complex to understand, discuss, and undertake.  What I want to say about that, simply, is that Judaism has ancient mechanisms for reflecting on and addressing the sins of the past, sins we ourselves didn’t commit, but which continue to shape our lives and our world currently.  This is how it began, in Leviticus 16:17: “Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness through a designated agent.”

We will be reading this verse tomorrow, from a Torah portion concerning the scapegoat.  This text acknowledges that at times our collective sins are too much to bear alone.  It offers us release, albeit at the expense of an innocent goat.  It is important to say that even though this ritual  employs a scapegoat, it is not a way of bypassing responsibility – the people and their leader are committed to doing teshuvah – recognizing and regretting our collective sin, ceasing from wrongdoing, and committing not to repeat it again. 

But sometimes that is not enough, especially with communal sins.  We need that release – and that is where Yom Kippur comes in.  We no longer have a High Priest, or a Temple, or a scapegoat, for that matter, but we do have Yom Kippur.  And we do have each other.  

My teacher from rabbinical school, Rabbi David Teutsch, who is also the editor of the Kol haNeshama prayerbooks that we use here at Kol Emet, writes concerning communal sin: “Sometimes, sins…entail complicity across an entire community.” Perhaps something was said or done, in a communal setting at Kol Emet, that went against our standards and values, but nobody said anything.  Perhaps we were being polite.  Perhaps we did not know what to say at the time.  When that happens, who is to blame?  Rabbi Teutsch says, “Another function of communal confession is its emphatic statement of behaviors the community considers unacceptable. We can understand this as a general form of admonition, by which the community proclaims its expectations to its members. “We” affirm the standards of our community together.”

I love the idea that when we are beating our breast and saying “We have sinned…” that we are stating all in an exhaustive way, publicly, communally, loudly, what we disavow, what we stand against.  And in so doing, we are also stating, in a way, what we stand for and what we strive for.

What we do and permit in shul, or anywhere, for that matter, has repercussions and reverberations far beyond our immediate circumstances.  The idea isn’t that everyone committed every sin, but that the community as a whole bore responsibility. Silence when someone should have spoken. Systems that allowed harm. Habits we inherited but never questioned. In our tradition, the moral weight of the world is shared. One act can move the world toward healing or toward harm.

In tractate Kiddushin 40b, Rabbi Elazar Ben Shimon says, “If a person performs one mitzvah, they tip the scale toward righteousness — not just for themselves, but for the entire world. But if they commit one sin, they tip the scale toward guilt — again, not just for themselves, but for everyone.” 

We have so much power to make change, so much more agency than we realize!  The irony here is that we have to have the humility to see the ways in which we have avoided acknowledging and accepting responsibility.  

Karle Wilson Baker’s poem “Pronouns,” beautifully points to this:

O God, You said,
“Say, ‘We’”;
But I shook my head,
Hid my hands tight behind my back, and said,
Stubbornly, “I.”
Again You said, “Say, ‘We’”;
But I looked upon them, grimy and all awry.
Myself in those twisted shapes? Ah, no!
Distastefully I turned my head away,
Persisting, “They.”
Again You said, “Say, ‘We’”;
And I
At last,
Richer by a hoard of years,
Looked in their eyes and found the heavy word
That bent my neck and bowed my head:
Like a shamed school child then I mumbled low,
“We, O God.”

We are here together tonight, drawn together as a community of support, to be vulnerable, to confess our sins and shortcomings, to find God’s compassion and patience and mercy in the eyes of the other.  For not one of us is perfect, and in that shared recognition of our humanity is our strength.  Teshuvah may be an individual process, but it is not a solitary one.  

Over the course of this Yoma, the sacred day, we strike our hearts not once, not ten times, but hundreds of times. Not because we are personally guilty of every sin — but because someone among us is. And that makes it ours too.

Rabbi Seth Goldstein, my colleague and friend who is a congregational rabbi and creates TikToks in Olympia, Washington, shares a beautiful teaching about the Kol Nidre prayer, which tips off our Yom Kippur observance.  He writes, “Just prior to Kol Nidre, we chant the b’yeshiva shel maalah, which declares that with the permission of the heavens and of our congregation, sinners are permitted to pray with the rest of the congregation. Our Reconstructionist machzor renders it quite beautifully: “We accept into our midst whoever seeks to pray, whether righteous or unrighteous, all shall pray as one community.” The irony of these words is that we are all both righteous and unrighteous.”

With those words, we entered this most solemn and holy day together, convening a holy court above and a holy court below, we draw together to love and accept one another, as we are, as is.  The power of this moment is not just that God permits us to pray together, but that we permit it — we must accept one another.

And that’s not easy in a time like this. These past two years have been filled with heartbreak and anger — over the horrors of the war in Israel and Gaza, global antisemitism, the rise of authoritarianism, fracturing within our own Jewish community.

It seems like everyone has a different definition of who is “righteous” and who is “unrighteous.”

But Yom Kippur reminds us that we all come with broken hearts. We all carry grief, regret, confusion, hope. We all strike our chests. We all say “we.”

We humbly return to saying “We” because we are bound up with one another, whether we like it or not. Because communal sins exist: not just what I did, but what we allowed. Because silence can be complicity. Because our prayer is also a public statement of values — “We affirm that this is wrong. We affirm that we can do better.”

Collective teshuvah doesn’t mean we lose our individuality. It means we recognize our interconnectedness. That healing the world — tikkun olam — isn’t a solo act. It’s something we do together.

On Yom Kippur, we become a people again — confessing, forgiving, growing, together.

And so tonight, like that child in Rabbi Woznica’s story, we may look around and wonder: What kind of people are we?

And I hope the answer is: we are people who are brave enough to say — “We, O God.”