Viduy: Permission to Cry

Viduy is utterly private – you are speaking only to God, who knows all your thoughts and feelings anyway, and who loves you more than you can possibly imagine.

In that private and emotionally safe space you need to go deeply enough into an awareness of yourself, not only the potential you have, but how you have damaged your potential.

Of course real teshuva must show up in action, but on Yom Kippur our action is that of sincere and heartfelt prayer, but specifically the viduy prayer, the confession.

We will say the confession a total of ten times, which in itself is significant, as ten is the ultimate number of completion.  At ten we begin again with zero.

So what is the viduy?

Let’s not focus here on what we are confessing, as those are too many to go into.  You have all day to contemplate the details.  Let’s focus on the attitude of viduy, the type of prayer it is.  Because there are many forms of prayer (ten, in fact).  But this form is unique, in that it is linguistically a kind of drone, where as most of the Hebrew prayers are a constant stream of poetic imagery.  But this long and boring list!  This “who’s who” of evil!  How droll, how we struggle to sing together “and all of them, we have sinned… etc etc.”  Of course it’s not a joyous type of prayer experience… but what is it intended to be, just a good dose of pure guilt?

God forbid.

Unnamed Guilt breeds fear, the mind killer.

We can accomplish anything really, that we set our minds to, once we’re heading our bodies, minds and soul all together in the same direction.

We would all like to be better people, and live in a better world.

Yom Kippur asks us to ask ourselves, what is holding us back?