Contributor(s): Daniel Yoel Cohen
Shared on ז׳ בתשרי ה׳תשע״ז (2016-10-09) — under the following terms: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license
Categories:  Rosh Hashanah, Repenting, Resetting, and Forgiveness, Yom Kippur, Days of Judgement, Self-Reflection
Tags:  וידוי vidui, repentance, integrity, 21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., acknowledgment, paraliturgical vidui 
Vidui means acknowledgment. It is not about self-flagellation or blame, but about honesty, coming into contact with our lives, our patterns and experiences, and ultimately about teshuva and learning. In contacting the pain and suffering which our modes of being have given rise to, our regret can help us to willfully divest ourselves of them and awaken the yearning for those modes of being which are life-affirming, supportive of wholeness, connection, integrity, and flourishing. With each one we tap on our heart, touching the pain and closed-heartedness we have caused, and simultaneously knocking on the door that it may open again. . . .
The Al Cheyt (literally meaning “For the sin…”) is a confessional litany recited on Yom Kippur. It is an alphabetical acrostic; each one of its verses starting with a successive letter of the aleph-beit, to represent not only the moral failings that are specifically enumerated there, but the fullness of every way in which we missed the mark in the previous year. . . .
This prayer is not a comprehensive list of every single sin we sinned, every error we erred, every mark we missed. The original Al Ḥeyt is intended to show us the roots of all failures, to dig beneath how we harm, to see where that hurt came from. We follow these trails together, not absolved from our own repairs, but never alone in struggles to uproot, to propagate new ways of being ourselves, new ways of being ourselves, of being together. . . .
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