Mental Health In The Parsha – Yom Kippur: The Hardest Person to Forgive
There’s one name that never seems to make it onto my list of people to forgive. My own.
I can forgive almost anyone else. I can believe, most days, that Hashem forgives me. But somewhere in the middle there’s a person I keep holding responsible for everything, replaying every failure, refusing to let off the hook. Me. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
Yom Kippur is the day that comes for exactly that.
We say it as “we”
All day we confess. We stand and we go through the long list, the viduy, and we tap our chest. But look at the grammar of it. על חטא שחטאנו. For the sin that we have sinned. Not I. We. The whole confession is in the plural, said out loud, together, the entire room reciting the same list, including things most of us never did.
Why? There are a lot of answers, but here’s the one that matters to me. Nobody has to stand up alone and say, this one is mine. We say all of it together, so that the person carrying the heaviest, most private shame in the room can say it hidden inside a crowd, tucked into a “we,” never singled out, never exposed, never alone. On the day we face the worst of ourselves, Judaism makes sure we never have to face it by ourselves.
So if we walked in today feeling like we’re the only one who’s this broken, it’s worth looking around. The whole room is saying the same words we are. We are all in the same confession. Not one of us is the only one.
Kol Nidrei
The whole day opens the night before with Kol Nidrei, which is, of all things, a legal formula for releasing vows. We stand and we annul the promises we made and couldn’t keep.
And the vows most worth releasing are the ones we never said out loud. The quiet ones we’ve made about ourselves. I’ll never change. I always ruin things. I don’t deserve good things. I’m too much for everyone. Those are vows too. We made them, sometimes years ago, and we’ve been bound by them ever since, living our whole lives inside a sentence we handed down on ourselves.
Kol Nidrei says those are annulled as well. Released. We are not bound by the cruel things we once swore about ourselves. Not this year.
White as snow
The navi has a line that gets me every Yom Kippur. אם יהיו חטאיכם כשנים כשלג ילבינו. Even if your sins are like scarlet, they will turn white as snow.
Not managed. Not quietly filed away. White. Gone. A clean page. The day insists that we actually get to be clean again, all the way, even the parts of ourselves we’re sure are permanent stains.
Which means the real question of Yom Kippur isn’t whether Hashem will forgive us. The day already promises that. The question is whether we’ll let ourselves accept it.
The hardest forgiveness
Because here’s the strange thing so many of us do. We believe, genuinely, that Hashem wipes the slate clean. And then we walk out of shul, pick the slate right back up, and keep punishing ourselves for the exact things we just heard were forgiven.
We hold ourselves to a standard we would never hold anyone else to. We’d forgive a friend in a heartbeat for the very thing we’ll punish ourselves over for ten years. And if Hashem, who knows everything we did and exactly why we did it, is ready to call us clean, then the only one still holding the grudge is us. We’re the last one in the room who won’t let us go.
I’m not saying it’s easy to put the slate down. I’m saying that Yom Kippur is Hashem gently taking it out of our hands and saying, that’s enough now. You’ve carried this long enough. Let it be white.
What we can carry into the year
None of this is me having it figured out. It’s just what I want us to carry off this day and into the year.
Let’s try and accept the forgiveness, not just believe in it. If Hashem is ready to call us clean, let’s try not to argue.
Let’s try and release the vows we made about ourselves. Especially the cruel ones. Kol Nidrei covers those too.
Let’s try and remember we said it as “we.” Whatever we’re most ashamed of, we were never the only voice in that room. We never are.
And let’s try to finally forgive the person we’ve held responsible the longest. Ourselves. Gently. It’s time.
May we all be sealed for a year of life, of health, of letting ourselves be forgiven, and of never carrying it alone. Gmar chatima tova.
If any of this is sitting close to home, please reach out. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any hour of any day. In Israel, ERAN’s emotional first-aid line is 1201. Wherever you live, a local crisis line, your doctor, or one person you trust is a good place to start. On the day of forgiveness, that includes forgiving ourselves, and none of us has to do it alone.
Dedicated l’ilui nishmat Zev (Will) Shakin, z”l, who loved Israel and lived v’ahavta l’reacha kamocha. May his memory be a blessing, and may his light keep reaching the people who need it.
Mental Health in the Parsha is a weekly series on the weekly Torah portion and what it can offer us right now. These thoughts are meant for reflection and conversation, not as a replacement for professional mental health care.
