Human gestures are almost always ambiguous. A person whose hands are raised toward the sky could be praying, cheering, or the victim of a hold up. Without the context and the intention, one cannot know.
So what does it mean when Jews beat our chests in the confessional of Yom Kippur? Is it self-punishment, an attempt through a long day to keep ourselves awake akin to slapping one’s own face, or perhaps, ritual theater?
To me, it most resembles an attempt to jump start our hearts. Moving through the world each day we glide over the possibilities as well as the misdeeds that litter our lives. The modern world is so crowded, with so many stories competing for our attention, with the rapid succession of news, that callousness is a frequent response to the sadnesses of life.
Who can feel a constant outpouring of compassion? We know others are suffering – we suffer ourselves – and yet day after day we grow ever more tired from the parade of need. Gradually, fatigue becomes a habit and even the good we used to do seems too much. Perhaps we survey the result of all our efforts and think that, for everything we have given, there is just too little return in goodness and peace in the world. We make excuses for our inaction because, as the poet Yeats put it, “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.”
Yom Kippur is a chance to break the cycle of empathy-exhaustion. We beat hearts that have grown sluggish from the fray. The Al Chet, the confessional, is a Jewish defibrillator. A few good, sharp knocks to the chest get the heart sensitized anew. We are reminded that each act of kindness, each improvement in our own character and aspiration, makes a difference in the world. Hearts are expected to feel battered and tired; that’s understandable. They are just never allowed to give up – there is too much at stake.
On Yom Kippur, we repent of what we have done, but is it a stretch to say we also repent for what we have not felt? The joys and pains in the world should touch us and move our hearts. Hatred should galvanize us to action, love should energize us to love in return. So we knock on the door of our hearts in the hopes that they will beat more powerfully and compassionately in the year ahead.
