Yom Kippur and Nonduality

Forgiveness, in a nondual perspective, is about seeing clearly. Everyone is doing the best they can — if they could do better, they would.

For this month’s Inflection Points — a paid-subscriber-only feature in which I reflect on an article I wrote many years ago — I chose something timely: a nondualistic interpretation of Yom Kippur, which falls this week. This essay was published in October, 2006, in Zeek, the magazine I co-founded in 2002. (For a time, Zeek’s content appeared on Jewcy, another Jewish online magazine, which is where this piece now resides.)

What is the meaning of repentance, if everything is God?

On the purely cognitive level, the answer is not complicated. All of us live within the delusions of the ego, the yetzer hara, which sees the world not as it is — as manifestations of a single Being, according to the Hasidic nondual reading of the Shema — but as divided into many different, separate objects. Most importantly, the ego sees itself as separate from the rest of the world, and evaluates the world according to how well what’s outside is pleasing what’s inside. It’s as simple as “have a nice day” — “nice” being a term that means “pleasing to the self.” This is our ordinary existence, conditioned by eons of evolution and natural selection, and without this ordinary frame of reference, we’d all be dead. Pure nonduality doesn’t do well at crosswalks.