Why Yom Kippur is not the day of the locust

In the second chapter of his prophecy, the prophet Joel, whom Rashi identifies as the son of the prophet Samuel, warns the Jewish people of an impending cataclysm of unimaginable ferocity.

Understood simply, this awe-inspiring passage refers to a plague of locust which God predicted for the Jewish people as punishment for their sins.

Locust swarms are one of nature’s most destructive phenomena. They can be miles across, numbering in the billions and inexorable in their voracious attack as they lay waste to vast tracts of land.

When they take flight all at once, they block out the light of the sun. No wall can defend against them and in biblical times no home could keep them out. Joel was warning the Jewish people to repent or face total disaster.

But in a startling comment, the Midrash Tanchuma on Parashat Vayishlach says that the “great day of the Lord” refers to Yom Kippur. Thus what we read here is not a historical account, but a description of Yom Kippur every year. Yet we see no locust in our shuls. How are we to understand this prophecy as applying to our time?

There is a little hint to Yom Kippur in Joel’s epilogue (verses 12-13) to this horrific scene. Just after the account of the onslaught, God encourages the people to repent and fast:

“Return to Me with all your hearts, with fasting, weeping, and lamenting. Tear your hearts, not your garments! Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate.”

If repentance is the solution to the locust problem, we can perhaps understand the portrayal of the locust in a deeper way — as a depiction of sin itself.

Perhaps the Midrash encourages us to use the terrors of a locust plague as a lens through which to view our own sin. Perhaps each locust represents a sin. Rav Nachman of Breslav said that the real problem with sin is not the sin itself, but the feeling of despair and distance from God that sin creates in our hearts.

Each sin that we commit alights on our soul to gnaw away at hope, to negate our attempts at self-improvement or a fresh start, to persuade us that God could not possibly love us when we have violated His trust so comprehensively.

How many sins do we commit in a day, a year, a lifetime? If even a jealous thought, a moment of doubt about divine guidance, a prayer said without full concentration or proper utterance is an offence against God, how many billions of sins have besmirched our souls during the past year? Over our whole lives?

On Yom Kippur, God unleashes His army against us; His foot soldiers are simply the sins on our own conscience, alighting upon us on Yom Kippur like swarms of locust. Our souls are ravaged and despoiled as the memories of our wrongdoings and inadequacies come back to haunt us. We quail before the sheer number of our missed opportunities, our botched attempts to do good and our gleeful spiritual self-harm, our moments of greed, weakness and insouciance. Our sins exclude light from our hearts, obscuring our vision of what is right and wrong. Our homes are redolent of selfishness and self-indulgence. Our defences against sin, our attempts at self-restraint, our calls on our own human dignity, have been overwhelmed.

But however defeated we are by sin, however hopeless our situation, God wants us back. This is the flip side of Yom Kippur: even as the massed phalanxes of our sins are ranged against us, God calls to us in mercy, imploring us to return. Precisely because our position is so desperate, we are forced to turn to God as our last hope.

Thus, Joel taught us that even if the reflective mood of Yom Kippur should lead us to horror at how far short we have fallen, we must never ever despair. Now more than ever, we must hold our nerve, because Yom Kippur is prime time for us to extricate ourselves from the mire of our own failure and reach for a state of purity, innocence and spiritual supremacy. As long as our repentance plucks at our hearts and is not perfunctory and ceremonial, God is there for us. Now is the time for us to regain our closeness with God and to proclaim a resounding victory over ourselves and our own past.

Joel takes us a step further. By advancing towards this goal, we not only cleanse ourselves of the mistakes and weakness of the past; we can achieve a spectacular turnaround.

Through repentance we refashion our legacy entirely, transforming it from a bewildering, heaving mass of sin into a source of abundance and inspiration for those who come after us (verse 14): “Those who have knowledge will return and think again. They will leave a legacy of blessing, of offerings for the Lord their God.”

David Lister is rabbi of Edgware United Synagogue