There was a huge crowd of people at Congregation Ansche Chesed for Yom Kippur in the deep well of the synagogue and its liturgical sound. Each person was an ocean, full with their own thought, singular and together. So I can only speak for myself. The terrible violence in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank came in and out of mind, also the synagogue shooting that morning at the Sons of Jacob in Ontario, Canada, which I read about that morning before the mile walk to shul down Amsterdam Avenue.

What struck me this year from the Mahzor was not the Ashamnu we’ve been guilty, we betrayed. For all that the confessional is phrased in the collective voice of the first person plural, the Viddui remains deeply personal, even intimate, not a public spectacle conferring a single and imposed moral meaning or communal rebuke. In synch with the overriding sense of death and human frailty that marks a core of the High Holiday liturgy, I was attuned this year less to guilt than to something more akin to grief.

Liberal and progressive Judaism, of course,  has always loved the Yom Kippur reading from Isaiah 58. What draws attention to itself is that very spectacle, the searing critique of empty religious ritual and clarion call to social justice. Is this the fast, I desire,?! No, this this is the fast, I desire, etc. etc. In the context of Israel and Palestine, a cynic regarding the politics of Isaiah 58 might add that the prophet reminds us also, “not to ignore your own kin” (58:7).

At this political moment, a moment of terrible trauma and social violence, what does Yom Kippur want for people if not a measure of quiet? What caught my eye instead were these few lines, also from the haftarah and also from Isaiah, which I have never actually noticed.  About the wicked and mercy for those who mourn, God says, “I struck them and turned away in My wrath. Though stubborn (they follow the way of their hearts), I saw their paths and will heal them.  I will guide them and grant solace to comfort them, and to the mourners among them.” God says, “Peace, peace to the far and to the near.” Human evil, however, remains like “the troubled sea which cannot be quiet, whose waters toss up mire and mud.” “‘There is no peace,’ said my God, ‘for the wicked’” (57: 17-21, Robert Alter trans., altered).

With a constant eye on moral muck and mire, Yom Kippur is a “thing” that thinks about death and suffering through the prism of mercy more than it is one that thinks about justice and judgment or even the Kingdom of God. Most of the English translations, like the ones in the Mahzor, miss how this turbulence is juxtaposed with the words “peace” and “comfort.” These are unlike the words or dissonant notes of  moral repentance wrapped in pollical rebuke, which might ring false just as often as not –because the ritual is, to one degree, private, not just social.