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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #226 - Yom Kippur: Afflicting Your Soul for Repentance, Nehemia hosts a webinar on Yom Kippur to explain the reason for the name of the holy day, and how prayer and fasting could be an abomination to Yehovah, all while exposing the so-called “ingenious” Rabbis.

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Nehemia: There is this profound message in Isaiah 58, which is, in some ancient and even modern cultures, this idea that true righteousness is fasting, and constant prayer, and what’s called asceticism. You deny yourself, and that’s what is true righteousness. You’re up on a mountaintop, you don’t participate in the world, and that’s true righteousness. And the Torah teaches us, and the Tanakh reiterates this, is righteousness is to interact with the world in a righteous way.

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Nehemia: Shalom, everybody, and I hope you’re having a productive and easy fast, for those who are fasting. And so, someone asked here, during the kind of pre-session chat, “Why are you celebrating Yom Kippur today, when in the Rabbinic calendar it was,” you know, in the Jewish count, the Hillel calendar, “it was celebrated two days ago?” So, that has to do with the way the calendar functioned in ancient Israel. And I have a lot of teachings on my website about that, so I’m going to refer people to that.

So, the short answer is that, observing Yom Kippur today, the Day of Atonement, is based on the sighting of the new moon in Israel, and determining when the year begins is based on the aviv barley. So, there’s a whole bunch of teachings on that. I used to do that quite a bit, and I’ve stepped back from that, let other people handle that, and… but yeah, I’m observing it today. And I have friends who observed it a month ago. So, you know, and a lot of family who observed it two days ago. So, I just want to do the best I can with the information that I have.

All right, so, there was a request: “After Yom Teruah, come back and do something for Yom Kippur.” I’m going to do it a little bit different today; I’m not going to do the PowerPoint thing. And so, you’re going to have to jot down verses and look them up yourself, although we’ll read some of them. And, because I don’t have any water today, because I am fasting… I’m doing a food and water fast, not eating or drinking. They also call this a dry fast in English. In Hebrew, it’s just called it a tzom, a fast. So, I’m going to have Lynell read some of the verses, which is what we do in our morning Bible study.

Alright, Yom Kippur. So, what is Yom Kippur all about? And if I had to answer it in, like, one sentence, or sentence fragment, I would say, “Fasting, repentance, prayer, confession, asking for forgiveness, and resolving not to do it again.” That’s what they call… the young people call that TLDR; too long, didn’t read. So, now for some more details. So, Yom Kippur is first mentioned, although not by name, in Exodus chapter 30 verse 10. It talks there about chatat hakipurim, the sin offering of atonement, which is brought once a year. Doesn’t say the date; doesn’t really tell you too much about what it’s about, but it tells you there is such a thing.

And then Exodus 30:15-16, a few verses later, has the half-shekel for atonement. Which is the way in ancient Israel… they were commanded not to take a census and count people. But rather, they were commanded to give the half-shekel, which would go to the Tabernacle, and later the Temple, and be used for the service there. The sacrifices and everything, and that was an atonement. So, that also is related.

So, we have two references, essentially, to Yom Kippur, and then we have the big one. And all of this is before the phrase “Yom Kippur” ever appears in the Torah. The really big one is Leviticus 16. I’ve done teachings on that before, but that’s not the direction we’re going to go today. Maybe during the Q&A we can discuss it a bit.

But Leviticus 16, the entire chapter, is the ceremony for Yom Kippur. But it never uses the phrase, it talks about… It’s really interesting; Lynell and I were reading over this yesterday. It has the root… Hebrew, or all Semitic languages, are based on three-letter roots, and the three-letter root for Kippur means atonement. And we were reading the JPS translation, the 1995 New JPS in Leviticus 16. We read through the whole chapter. It took us about three hours, for some reason. We had a lot of sidetracks, or what I call “rabbi trails”.

So, we noticed that it has three different translations for the word… for the root Kaf-Pei-Reish, atonement. It has purge, expiate, or expiation, and atonement. So, the same root, within a span of a couple of verses, two or three verses, it was three different translations. And that kind of tells you that this word doesn’t have a perfect correspondence to English. You know, people who only speak one language, they think, “Well, there’s one word in, let’s say in English, and that has an exact word in Spanish, and one word in English, and that has an exact word in German.” But once you learn some languages, you realize that that doesn’t always work that way. That you might have something that… there’s one word, let’s say in English, and there’s, you know, three words in Hebrew, or there’s three words in English and one word in Hebrew.

And it’s a bit misleading in Western culture, because the European languages were in such constant contact with each other that they developed a lot of words to correspond to the word in another language. Right? So, you will be able to have the words line up really nicely in European languages, but that doesn’t really work in ancient Hebrew as well. In Modern Hebrew it works great, because if we don’t have the word for it in Modern Hebrew, we generally will translate it and invent a word. Or famously, the Germans have a word, schadenfreude, which means the pleasure of watching somebody else… I don’t remember exactly what it means. Is it watching somebody else fall or something, or fail? I don’t know exactly. But I just had to say a whole sentence in English for that, right?

All right. So, all that’s to say kippur means something like atonement, purification, purging. The phrase that we often will have in Leviticus is, there’s atonement, which leads to forgiveness. I’m going to focus today on the forgiveness. Leviticus 23:27 is the first time we have the word, or the actual name of the holiday, Yom Hakippurim. So, everybody in English knows it as Yom Kippur. It is not called Yom Kippur in the Tanakh, or the Torah, it’s called Yom Hakippurim. Let me read it: Ach be’asor lachodesh hashevi’i hazzeh</