The Day of Atonement

Every year around Yom Kippur I talk about one of Roshi Bernie’s most impactful teachings. I’d always thought about atonement as making amends. Bernie suggested that atonement meant quite literally “to be at one with.” To be at one with what? With all the ingredients of my life – all of them, not just the pleasant and the pretty. This teaching has changed my relationship to Yom Kippur and to the Gatha of Atonement, but it took many years for it to occur to me that the Gatha should be transmuted to embody Bernie’s teaching, to point to the depths of his teaching. This year we’ve reworked the wording.

All the ingredients of my life,

All my actions and experiences

And those of my parents and ancestors,

Those remembered and those which have left only traces,

Those of which I am proud and those of which I am ashamed or enraged,

Now I am at one with them all.

This is my first Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, with our new wording. I’ve been chanting the new version every morning. It’s now part of my daily routine, a chant to remind myself, every morning before meditation, to embody the wholeness of my life. It’s all of me, all those seeds which pop up spontaneously in the day-to-day.

I’ve been looking forward to spending a whole day with our new Gatha, alone much of the day – will I fast? I’m never sure – at one with all the ingredients of my life, consciously, to be filled with gratitude for my life, all of it, including my awkwardness, my regrets, my fears. I am grateful to be alive, to be able to sit quietly with myself and to take stock. I am grateful to be able to look outward to another year, to look forward to the possibility of doing some things differently than I’ve done before – not necessarily to do better, but differently. I am awed by the way the Jewish ingredients of my life and the Zen ingredients are coming together.