Why Plural on Yom HaKippurim
The Torah never once calls this day Yom Kippur. Every time, it says Yom HaKippurim, atonements, plural. That small letter looks like a grammatical detail easy to skip past. But four separate traditions, from four separate directions, have stopped right at that letter, and each of them, standing there, found something deep enough to take hours to unfold. I want to stop there too, the same way, without rushing.
Three Separate Atonements, One Day
Open the sixteenth chapter of Leviticus, and you’ll see the verb to atone applied to three distinct things on this one day. The first, in verse sixteen, is the atonement of the Sanctuary and the holy objects inside it. The second is the atonement carried out through the goat sent into the wilderness. The third, in verse thirty, is the cleansing of the people themselves, from all their sins before God.
Sit with why these need to be three separate things for a moment. The Sanctuary is a structure built by human hands, stone and gold, but tradition holds that over the course of a year, the people’s sins settle onto it like dust in the air. The place itself becomes contaminated, even if no one sinned inside it, simply for standing at the center of a sinning people. The goat carries something entirely different, not a concrete list of wrongs, but sin itself, loaded onto a body and physically carried away. And the third, the hardest of the three, is the cleansing of what sits inside a person, not just actions, but intention, desire, thought.
Three different kinds of contamination call for three different kinds of cleansing. You can sweep a building. You can load a sin onto an animal and send it off. But cleansing your own heart carries no outside shortcut. This is exactly where the third atonement breaks from the other two, because only the person themselves, turning inward, can do it.
That plural, then, isn’t just a count. It’s the trace of three different contaminations, three different languages of cleansing, standing side by side on the same day, without touching each other.
Meat Thrown to a Hungry Dog
The second atonement, the goat, carries its own story too, one far deeper than it first appears. The Zohar says the goat sent into the wilderness doesn’t go to God at all, it goes to Samael, to Sitra Achra, the Other Side, and it says this openly, without flinching. It tells how God, out of mercy for Israel, taught them how to protect themselves from the heavenly prosecutor, by giving him a portion of his own. The Zohar’s own image is striking, Satan becomes so occupied with the portion thrown to him, the way a hungry dog is absorbed by a piece of meat tossed its way, that he forgets to accuse that day. A later layer of the Zohar even names this outright, a bribe.
But don’t mistake this bribe for some distant drama playing out only in the heavens. A teaching left by Rabbi Avraham Brandwein carries this same mechanism directly into our own chest. In Kabbalah, the highest lights, the lights of chochma, can only be drawn down through a powerful desire to receive, and that desire belongs to the left side of the sefirot, the side of judgment, the very ground where Sitra Achra sits. Holiness, by its nature, is giving and emanating, the right side, the side of the goat set aside for God.
Now, no person can say, I want nothing for myself, let everything be for the sake of Heaven, because the very essence of being human is the desire to receive, to eat, drink, and sleep, even in order to serve God at all. In Parashat Kedoshim it’s written, be holy, for I, your God, am holy, and Rashi comments, My holiness stands above yours, because only God can exist purely by giving, without ever receiving. And here comes the heaviest line Brandwein left behind, what we take for ourselves is the very portion we hand to the Sitra Achra standing inside every one of us, without which holiness could not exist at all. So the bread we eat each day, the sleep we take each night, is the small goat sent to the small Azazel in our own chest.
The Ascent of Malchut
A third layer, the Arizal’s teaching, ties that same plural to an entirely different mechanism, one that also explains why we fast.
On Kabbalah’s own map, there are ten sefirot, ten steps through which divine light descends toward the world, each carrying its own quality. At the very bottom stands Malchut, Kingship, our own world, the side that receives. At the very top stand Chochmah and Binah, Wisdom and Understanding, the intellectual sefirot. Binah itself, in Kabbalah, is also called Teshuvah, return itself, because every letter, every light, returns to its source through Binah.
On an ordinary day, Malchut is fed by an external light from the six sefirot above it, like a small point beneath Yesod, with no independent voice of its own. But through a process laid out in the sixth gate of Etz Chaim, Malchut rises across the year, through several stages, first gaining its own independent structure, then drawing closer to the level of Tiferet, taking in a bit more light. And on Yom Kippur, it reaches the highest point of that ascent, the level of Chochmah, Binah, and Da’at, the intellectual sefirot. On that day, Malchut no longer merely receives, it stands on equal footing with the highest lights.
This is exactly why we fast. On that day, the body isn’t fed from outside, because Malchut itself is fed directly from Binah’s own inner breath, without needing the bread on the table. By the end of Ne’ilah, the closing prayer that ends the day, this structure is complete, the lower feminine form has received all her own parts, from head to foot.
Kippurim being plural is the trace of the layers inside this one single ascent, the world itself, rising step by step toward the intellectual sefirot, and from there, toward a silent breath.
A Day Like Purim
The fourth reading comes from the Vilna Gaon, and approaches the matter from an entirely different direction. Every festival, by tradition, is split, half for God, half for the person, half for prayer and study, half for eating and joy. But two festivals break that rule completely, Yom Kippur belongs entirely to God, Purim entirely to the person. The Gaon says this isn’t really an exception at all, because the word Yom Kippurim itself can also be read as Yom K’Purim, a day like Purim. The two festivals aren’t as separate as they appear, they’re two halves of the same calendrical whole, one entirely for God, the other entirely for the person, and only together do they complete that old balance of half for you, half for God.
All of It, At Once
All four readings stop at the same letter, and each descends into a different depth. One toward the text’s own function, one toward the hidden bribe in our own chest, one toward the layers of the cosmos, one toward the calendar’s own hidden symmetry. But all four say the same thing, this day never agreed to be only one thing.
Today, saying Yom HaKippurim, I no longer want just one atonement. I want the Sanctuary, the goat, and my own soul, all cleansed at once. I want to stop giving the small Azazel in my own chest more than it needs. I want to rise, like Malchut, from a point diminished across the year, toward the silent breath of the intellectual sefirot. And maybe, at the very same time, a little of Purim’s joy too, because this day was never only weight.
