Yom Kippur: The Scapegoat We Have Misunderstood

We all know what it means to scapegoat someone. Something has gone wrong, but instead of confronting the complicated causes—or acknowledging our own responsibility—we find someone else to blame. The scapegoat becomes the convenient target upon whom we place our anger, fear, and frustration.

Few peoples know this phenomenon better than the Jews. For centuries, Jews have been blamed for problems they did not cause: plagues, economic crises, political instability, military defeat, even natural disasters. Disturbingly, the phenomenon has not disappeared.

Today, Jews are still scapegoated in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. In some places, they are blamed for the policies of the State of Israel, even when they had no role in shaping them. In other circles, Jews are portrayed as beneficiaries of systems of racism and oppression; in yet others, antisemitic conspiracy theories depict Jews as secretly controlling governments, universities, the media, or global institutions.

The accusations may come from very different ideological directions, but the mechanism is the same: complex social problems are reduced to a single convenient target. The Jew becomes that target.

But we in Israel are not immune from the same tendency.

We too often look for a group to blame for what is wrong with the country: the settlers, the left, the right, the courts, the protesters, the media, the Kaplanists, the Arabs. Each group can easily become the explanation for everything that frustrates us about Israeli society.

But perhaps scapegoating is legitimate? After all, the very term “scapegoat” come from the Yom Kippur ritual described in the Torah. On Yom Kippur, the High Priest took two goats: one was sacrificed to God, while the other—the se’ir la’azazel—was sent into the wilderness.

The Torah describes the ritual as follows:

“Aaron shall place both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the Israelites, all their transgressions and all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat; and he shall send it into the wilderness” (Leviticus 16:21).

At first glance, this sounds remarkably similar to what we now call scapegoating. Israel sins, its sins are placed upon an innocent animal, and the animal carries them away. Read this way, the Torah seems to provide precisely what modern scapegoating seeks to provide: a way to place our failures upon someone—or something—else and thereby absolve ourselves of responsibility.

If so, perhaps scapegoating is not merely a human weakness. Perhaps the Torah itself institutionalizes it.

But that is actually a misreading of the ritual.

The crucial word in the verse is והתודה — “and he shall confess.” Before the sins are placed upon the goat, they must first be acknowledged. The High Priest does not accuse the goat, blame an outsider, or claim that another group caused Israel’s failures; he confesses Israel’s own sins over the goat.

The ritual therefore begins not with blame but with ownership: these are our sins. Only after the sins have been identified and confessed as our own can they symbolically be placed upon the goat and carried into the wilderness. That changes the meaning of the entire ritual.

The biblical scapegoat is not a mechanism for avoiding responsibility; it is a mechanism for moving beyond failure after responsibility has been accepted.

Modern scapegoating says, “The problem is theirs.” The Torah’s ritual says, “The sins are ours.”

This is also the logic of Yom Kippur itself. Again and again we confess: Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu. We have sinned, we have betrayed, we have stolen—not they, but we.

That is why there can be no justification for scapegoating in the contemporary sense based upon the Yom Kippur ritual. If anything, the ritual teaches the opposite lesson: before we blame anyone else, we must first ask what belongs to us. Before we condemn another community, we must first examine our own.

That is an especially important message for Israel today. Before the right lists the failures of the left, it should examine its own; before the left lists the failures of the right, it should do the same. Before religious Israelis explain what secular Israelis have done wrong, they should ask whether they have always represented Judaism in ways that inspire rather than alienate, while secular Israelis might ask whether religious communities have always felt that their deepest commitments were treated with respect.

Sometimes others really are responsible, and justice requires us to identify wrongdoing where it exists. But the first question cannot always be, “Who is to blame?” Yom Kippur insists that we first ask, “What have we done?”

That is the great irony of the Yom Kippur scapegoat. For centuries, we have borrowed its name to describe the act of placing our guilt upon someone else, yet the Torah allows the goat to carry away Israel’s sins only after Israel has first had the courage to confess: They are ours.

Perhaps that is exactly the lesson we need this Yom Kippur. We will not repair Israeli society by finding the perfect group upon whom to place our failures. We begin repairing it when we learn to ask, before blaming anyone else: What is ours to confess?

Gmar Chatima Tova.

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