In Yom Kippur, “atonement shall be made for you to purify you of all of your sins”. Here two concepts come to the fore: atonement and purification. But what is the difference between the two. Why do we need both?

The English word “atonement” suggests that we have to repair a breach in our relationship with God. We want to become reunited with Him. We want to be “at one” with Him. At-one-ment becomes “atonement”. But even once we’ve been forgiven, and the breach has been repaired, there’s more to do.

It’s one thing to make right with others, and to receive forgiveness from God and from those we’ve hurt. It’s another thing to fix the character flaws that allowed us to sin in the first place and to repair the damage that our actions have done to ourselves. We’re looking to make right with others (ie to atone), but also, we’re looking to fix (ie to purify) ourselves.

The sage, Resh Lakish, said that repentance is so powerful that it can transform our past sins into accidents, or even into merits (Tractate Yoma 86b). Atonement is forward-looking. It’s about receiving a clean slate so that we can do better next time. Purification, by contrast, affects our past. It can transform it for the better.

The artist, Marcel Duchamp, pioneered the notion of ready-made artwork. He would take sundry items that had been made by others and — by placing them in an art gallery, or exhibition— he would transform them into sculptures. Famously, he took a urinal, turned it upside down, signed it and voilà, he had made a sculpture. Another of his ready-mades was originally a rack for drying wine bottles. He purchased it and placed it in an exhibition. It became a sculpture.

His work, at that time, was obsessed with his bachelorhood and his childlessness. This led art critics to view the wine-rack in a very specific light. 

I doubt that people in the furniture shop, looking for a wine-rack, would have commented on how it was “waiting for wet bottles to be hung on its prongs … obviously, laughably Freudian” (J. Siegel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp). The wine-rack only took on that significance once it had been appropriated by an artist preoccupied with bachelorhood and childlessness.

Objects that seem to have been completed years ago can take on a new meaning, once they’re placed in a new context. So too, Resh Lakish would urge, can the actions of our past. This is what purification, at its best, can mean.

I once met a drugs prevention educator. He told a powerful story about the devastation that addiction had wrought in his life. He had stolen from his parents, burgled homes, broken into cars, lived in crack-houses, woken up, dazed and confused, in a pool of his own urine, and had multiple spells in prison. If his life had ended during that period, his biography would have been a tale of unremitting darkness. But that’s not what happened.

By the time I met him, he was a happily married family man whose years of drug abuse and crime, thanks to a prison rehabilitation programme, were long behind him. Moreover, had he not done the things he had done, he could not have become the powerful drugs prevention educator that he came to be. The darkness of his past was an essential part of the good person he had become. Surely that casts his past in an entirely new light.

It’s easy to fall into the illusion that we are already all that we will ever be. We define ourselves in terms of our (seemingly fixed) levels of religiosity, our profession, our family life, our strengths, and especially, our weaknesses. But in actual fact, nothing is set in stone.

A good novelist can craft a story such that the end of the book casts everything that came before it in a new light. You think you know a character, but until the book is over, you can’t really be sure that you’re right. The same is true with our lives.
 
Every moment that we’re still drawing breath, we have an opportunity to remake ourselves. To remake ourselves isn’t merely to move forward in a new way, it’s also to reshape everything that came before.

If Marcel Duchamp could take an item of furniture and, by placing it in a different context, give it meaning that it didn’t have before, then we can take the events of our lives and refuse to be defined by them.

Instead, we can place them into a new context and thereby give these seemingly already finished episodes of our past a completely new meaning and significance. This is hard work. Often we cannot do it alone. We need help from teachers, mentors, counsellors, family, and friends. But it has to start with us. And it can start on Yom Kippur: a day on which we strive for more than atonement; a day on which we strive to purify everything that came before, by starting a new chapter in the story of our lives.

Rabbi Dr Lebens is a philosopher at Haifa University