The vidui recited throught the long day of Yom Kippur is a confession composed of t5wo parts. The “ashamnu” is a short confession, an alphabetical acrostic, a list that starts with the first letter alef scrolling down to the last letter tav. The al chet is a longer confession), each wrong introduced by the statement “Al chet she-chatanu lefanecha” (“For the sin which we have committed before You…”).

The traditional list of personal faults is confessed in the first-person plural. Indeed, modern Jews pride themselves regarding a tradition where fault is communal. The truth, though, is that the litany of faults listed in the machzor channels the expression individual failure and wrongdoing, to the failure of the individual situated in community, not to the failure of the community as such.

Like any ritual form, meaning or content is secondary to the form itself. In this light, the Yom Kippur vidui is a structure or an envelope. The predetermined form is a placeholder prior to personal meaning, the undetermined individual content placed into the structure. The ashamnu is an acrostic chain of floating signifier in rhyme and rhythmic sequence. The repetitions of the al-chet constitute a similar structural form. The form itself is eternal and matters more than the content we bring to it.

“The circle,” claimed Vassily Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.” As a ritual of “self-affliction,” the structure of the vidui is a container for personal meaning, a deep interior place undetermined by the external stimuli or predetermined political exigencies. In the face of death, one stands alone with others, situating one’s own misery in the collective space of the congregation, reliant and confident in the mercy and forgiveness of God.