Yom Kippur—The Day of Atonement, a prayer for at-One-ment (CCAR 1923)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (transcription), Unknown and Central Conference of American Rabbis [CCAR]

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4 March 2026 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

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20th century C.E., 57th century A.M., alienation, Aseret Yemei Tshuvah, atonement, English vernacular prayer, teḥinot in English

Contribute a translation	Source (English)
	Be gracious unto me, O God, according to Thy mercy; according to the multitude of Thy compassions, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions; and my sin is ever before me. Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in Thy sight. That Thou mayest be justified when Thou speakest, and be right when Thou judgest. (Psalms 51:3-6)
	Teach me, O Lord, Thy way that I may walk in Thy truth; make one my heart to fear Thy name. I will thank Thee, O Lord my God, with my whole heart; I will glorify Thy name for evermore. (Psalms 86:11-12)
	Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18)
	The Day of Atonement will atone for the sins between man and God, but as for sins between man and his neighbor, the Day of Atonement will not atone for them, unless he makes peace with his neighbor. Said Rabbi Akiba: Happy are ye, O Israel, that it is your Father in heaven who purifies you. (Mishnah Yoma 8.9)
	Ah, verily, not one of us is just! Thy myriad mercies save us from the dust; Lo, unto Thee we stretch our guilty hands, And in Thy holy Name we put our trust. We put our trust, for ’tis our soul’s delight To seek in humbleness our shield of might; Thy strength is all the refuge of the poor, And lowly souls Thou placest on the height. On Thee alone must rest the hope of man, Iniquities Thou wilt not strictly scan; Lo! God, the righteous, loves not punishment, His ways transcend the little human plan. From soul affliction did I comfort win, Confessing every public, private sin; Lo! This is the appointed Judgment Day, A covenant eternal set within. (from “Otekha Edrosh” by Shimon ben Yitsḥaq of Mainz, as translated by Israel Zangwill)
	Many are the pathways to God. Some come near unto Him in the meditations of solitude, some mount upon the wings of thankfulness; others find Him through the discipline of sorrow. Many men have found the way into His presence by walking in the path of righteousness. Surely upon this road, His law is a light unto our feet, and His eternal example, an inspiration. When we seek to be merciful as He is merciful, and to be holy as He is holy, we come near unto Him. We feel His blessed Presence, and, in humble peace, walk with God.
	Sin estranges man from God. It is not that the eternal Father abandons His erring child, but rather that man, conscious of his wrongdoing, flees from the divine presence. The radiance of His countenance which once illumined the path of life, now becomes a blinding light, and man, in terror, covers himself with darkness. Yet whither can he flee from the divine Presence? Where can he hide from God’s light? He cannot hide from himself, and in his own heart there remains a ray of divinity, accompanying him in all his wanderings, shaming the darkness of iniquity. Whenever man struggles against God’s law, he is at war with his own spirit. His heart is divided against itself. Conscience and sin, virtue and iniquity, light and darkness battle within him. He finds no peace.
	The heart cannot live divided; yet it cannot be united except in God. Let man pray that the Lord purify him from evil and unite his heart to worship Him. No partial allegiance will ever bring peace. Let man seek the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul. Only thus may he become a fit instrument for God’s will, a whole offering which will be acceptable unto the Lord.
	O Eternal One, the contemplation of Thy unity awakens within our being the longing to unify our hearts. Each of us in his finiteness is a discord of conflicting impulses. In the serenity of Thy presence we seek to surmount the discords and conflicts within us and around us, becoming one even as Thou art one. For this atonement, this at-one-ment, our soul crieth out.
	Our thoughts are not at one; behold the darkness of our ignorance. Our desires are not at one; alas, the tortuous mazes of sin! Yet our very agony assures us of Thy mercy; for this we can see through the mists and the tears: that, since sin brings such anguish, righteousness must be our destiny; and since endless unrest masters us when our thoughts and longings fail to have unity, fail to harmonize, to be at one, Thy one-ness must be the image in which our souls are made.
	We implore Thee, “seal us in the book of life.” Behold, the book is within us, the book of the spirit’s life. Zeal and power have been given us to grapple with the forces of death. Though strength should fail, courage need not fail. Steadfastness need not fail. Sealed unto life, may we never yield our battle with all that destroyeth.
	We implore Thee, “pardon and blot out our sins.” Thy gracious instrument of pardon is our own throbbing discontent with sin. We pray for the blotting out of our inclination to sin, for that is the evidence of Thy pardon. O better the fast day of hungering after the unattained high and good than the feast day of contentment with the unworthy and low. May our entire life, from the eventide when we were not, to the eventide of Death’s Shofar call, be consecrated to this atoning quest.
	Truly the work must have its aim and the journey its goal. In the academy on high— ‘garments are always white.’ We who, in earthly life, are discordantly manifold shall yet array ourselves, transcending life, in the gleaming robes of perfected love and peace, having found consummate atonement, having merged and lost ourselves in Thine unfathomable unity. Amen.

“Yom Kippur—The Day of Atonement” is the sixteenth prayer found in ברכה ותהלה Blessing and Praise: A Book of Meditations and Prayers for Individual and Home Devotion (CCAR 1923), pp. 57-60. Unfortunately, we do not yet know of a resource providing clear attribution of authorship for any of the prayers in this volume. One important clue may be the use of the word-play “at-one-ment” for “atonement” — a turn of phrase that dates at least to April 1765 (in The Monthly Review, in a footnote for a book review found on page 260), and made extant in Augustin Calamet’s entry on “Atonement” in his Dictionary of the Holy Bible (1800).

Source(s)

Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Unknown

Sometimes the best we can do in attributing a historical work is to indicate the period and place it was written, the first prayer book it may have been printed in, or the archival collection in which the manuscript was found. We invite the public to help to attribute all works to their original composers. If you know something not mentioned in the commentary offered, please leave a comment or contact us.

Central Conference of American Rabbis [CCAR]

The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), founded in 1889 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, is the principal organization of Reform rabbis in the United States and Canada.

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו׃ (תהלים צ:יז) · "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." (Psalms 90:17)

Yom Kippur—The Day of Atonement, a prayer for at-One-ment (CCAR 1923)

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