Yom Kippur | The Day of Non-Judgment

What is the purpose of the great emptying out that we do on Yom Kippur? We empty ourselves of food, festive clothing, keeping time and our will. We suspend all requesting. It is a day of great surrender and emptying. This is scary. It takes us over the edge of everything in which we habitually take refuge, other than the complete ineffable Source of Life.

The Hassidic teachings say, "Yom Kippur does not atone until you appease your fellow-person ... Just as this day united all days, so, too, on it are all souls united."

The emptying out, then, is to empty ourselves of whatever keeps us separated. This includes the separation between you and your "God," and also, "those things that bring about division between people, as in, 'you shall not hate your brother in your heart' (Lev. 19:17).''

On Yom Kippur, called the Day of At-One-Ment , our regrets are healed when the "transgressions [themselves ] find atonement."

— Quotes from The Book of Truth, Sefat Emet, R. Arthur Green

Yom Kippur, literally, means, a day like Purim. Purim is the festival of the third full moon of the solar year (also the time of the Hindu Holi festival and the Christian Mardi Gras), when a core practice is to inebriate yourself to the point that you don't know right from wrong, left from right, up from down.

Purim offers the path of joy, sensory feasting and celebration, to taste a day of non duality, of letting go of judgment.

How is Yom Kippur like such a day? Torah teacher Sarah Yehudit Schneider explained this in her Yom Kippur teaching this year. On Yom Kippur, we surrender our will and everything known to us that brings us comfort and habit. We step out of time and space. We admit that we even don't know up from down.

Yom Kippur is the one day of the year when we stop requesting and open to not-knowing. We enter this holy place of not-knowing, a scary renouncing ( or at least suspending)  of all our habitual preferences for how our life should look, all of our concepts of what would be good, no matter how enlightened we are convinced those concepts might be.

As the 18th century Hassidic teacher puts it, "we leave our begging bowl at the door." * As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, nirvana, the blowing out of all concepts, is the highest freedom.

* Teaching from Sarah Yehudit Schneider, from the 18th century Rabbi, Sod Yesharim, third generation in the Ishbitzer rabbinic line of Hassidism. (Full teaching offered freely on A Still Small Voice website: https://astillsmallvoice.org/yom-kippur-begging-bowl-at-the-door/)

On Yom Kippur, we enter total radical not knowing. It is our day of non judgment. This reminds me of what I heard the Dalai Lama said when a French journalist asked him what he thought of the French Revolution. After a few moments he replied, "It's too early to tell."

Most of us ,when we encounter the Dalai Lama, see that this level of surrender to a greater not knowing has led him to the level of compassion and openheartedness that the world needs.

This is a receptive consciousness, a consciousness that can access meaning and action from beyond our habitual triggers and preferences. On Yom Kippur, we can experiment with actively surrendering our rights and responsibilities of holding preferences. On this day, we step into not knowing what the best possible unfolding for our lives should look like. This is the consciousness that the observances of the day are meant to induce.

Yom Kippur begins in the evening with a powerful chanting ritual, Kol Nidre, releasing all vows. All vows because, truly, we are so caught in the speed and confusion of our lives, in ancestral, traumatic and cultural conditioning, that we aren't even aware of the vows that drive us. We react habitually and our habits become samskaras, grooves in our brain chemistry that zoom us from stimulus to response without our awareness.

We begin this holy day by realizing how constrained our actions and choices are by the boundaries of our limited world views. We let go of vows that we don't even realize we have made. They are out automatic pilots, assumptions about the world that we have made over and over, in confusion.

As Sarah Yehudit says, these habitual thought forms, by virtue of their repetition, have kept us in exile and separation. They have taken on the force of vow. On this day, we release them and taste a new freedom.

 

 

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Nonviolent Communication Practice:
Releasing Habitual Speech Patterns

In everyday life, we habitually use words to describe our ‘feelings’ that actually convey our thoughts, judgments, interpretations and analyses.
The problem with this is that rather than creating self connection or bringing the other person into connection with our experience, the likely result is defensiveness and separation.

A Sampling of Words that Convey Interpretations and Judgments rather than Feelings:

Abandoned * abused *attacked *betrayed *boxed-in *bullied *cheated *coerced *co-opted *cornered *diminished *distrusted* interrupted *intimidated*
 let down* manipulated *misunderstood *neglected *overworked* patronized *pressured* provoked* put down *rejected* taken for granted *threatened *unappreciated *unsupported unwanted* used*

Try a practice of translating these interpretations into your Own Feelings and Needs. For example:

Instead of saying: "I feel abandoned” "I feel abused""I feel attacked""I feel let down" "I feel manipulated” "I feel rejected""I feel unappreciated” "I feel unheard" "I feel unsupported", try:

• I am feeling lonely or despairing or scared I am  probably feeling hurt/disgusted/outraged

,
• I am feeling scared/vulnerable 

I am probably feeling disappointed
• I am feeling grief/upset/frustrated
• I am feeling broken-hearted
• 

I am feeling mournful/sad
• 

I am feeling upset/miserable
• I am feeling overwhelmed/panicky/depleted

Does this get you closer to what you actually are experiencing? Closer to what you want another person to understand about what you are experiencing?

A next step could be to ask yourself:

What do I need, what is so important to me, that I am feeling as I do, or thinking these thoughts?

Give yourself empathy for your feelings and needs.

Embrace these energies of life that are showing up in you, as you.

This is when the possibility of connection arises!

If we think we are feeling ‘betrayed’, perhaps we are needing trust. What request would lead to that? 

If we think we are feeling, ‘abandoned’, perhaps we are needing support.

On Yom Kippur, we don't make requests. We sit in the energy of the needs that our being longs for, we move into receptive mode. After Yom Kippur, we make new requests that emerge from emptying out of the old and stepping into a new source for the responsibility of asking for what we need.

— NVC Practice List, compiled by Roberta Wall, steps2peace.com, with contributions from many NVC trainers and practitioners