The Zohar’s Short But Profound Story of Yom Kippur

The Daily Zohar for the day of Yom Kippur tells a simple but incredibly powerful story which portrays not only the essence of this most holy of days, but also the entire drama of our existence:

“A king was angry with his son and decreed that as punishment that he should go away from him into a faraway land. The queen heard it and said, since my son is going to a faraway land and the king threw him out of his palace, I shall not leave him. The two of us shall either return to the king’s palace or together dwell in another land. After a few days the king visited the queen but did not find her because she left with his son. He said, since the queen is there, let both of them return.” (Zohar III 297b).

King, queen, and son – God is One, and these are all aspects of Himself. This familial drama is a metaphor for the nature of this reality. The King represents the aspect of God that is beyond the world (Atzmus or Ein Sof). The Queen represents the aspect of God that descends into the world (Shechina). The son is the aspect of God that has been so concealed that it feels itself to be a separate individual (humankind).

The son is sent into the world because his father is “angry” with him. But God is not subject to emotion, and He does not get angry. He begets a son in order to create an other to whom He can express His love, as the Sages teach, “teva hatov l’heitiv/it is the nature of Good to do good” (Emek HaMelech, Shaar Aleph). This son, unaware that he is but a concealed aspect of God Himself, experiments, stumbles, rebels, as is the nature of a child. He is then “punished” and sent away from the palace. But this is simply the dramatic tension of the narrative and the thick of the plot – unbeknownst to him, he is sent away so that he can convey his parents light into the dark places.

The queen, the aspect of God that is capable of contracting itself so that it can fit, so to speak, into the confines of a limited world, refuses to let her son go alone. She is the part of God that will never abandon His children, and so she descends with the son into exile. The King, as the story continues, desires His wife, and, realizing that she will not return without her son, welcomes both the queen and the prince back to the palace. In the analog, this is God, identifying the piece of Himself that is hidden within His children, and rescuing Himself, so to speak, from the exile to which He originally subjected Himself.

The point of the story – your story, my story, and the story of the whole of creation – is that God does not forsake us, reject us, or banish us. He loves us completely. He is not only with us always, but He is within us always.

True Teshuvah is the recognition of the Godliness within us. We feel remorse for all of the time that, in forgetting our essence, we have dragged God’s image through the mud. And we resolve to try in the future to live every moment in a manner befitting the royalty that we are. The King then welcomes us back into the palace with open arms, but we do not stay long. For we know that there is an entire kingdom that needs to be illuminated. So after we embrace our Father throughout the day of Yom Kippur, we head back into the world, our mother the queen at our side, to assist all of the other people of the land to uncover the royal Godly light that is hidden within them as well.

— Pnei Hashem is an introduction to the deepest depths of the human experience based on the esoteric teachings of Torah. www.pneihashem.com