I normally don’t spend much time writing on Yom Kippur, but I felt somewhat compelled to do this at this point and time, because in a way, I’m fasting not only for my atonement but also the atonement of this country and the atonement of the world. “Kippur” and “kippurim” means “atonement” and “atonements”, respectively. Atonement isn’t just a payment for a wrong, and a forgiveness for it, it’s a repairing of a relationship — a relationship with Elohim and a relationship with fellow human beings... and this country and the world at large has a LOT of repairing to do.
People who know me know what’s been on my mind lately about the state of the Union. We’re currently in the midst of an epidemic, and the US has obviously failed on this front. Additionally, we’ve clearly failed on numerous other fronts — we’ve become a “police state” in at least one sense, and that sense is in the ability of the average police officer to get away with murder in many cases based on what are nothing more than technicalities and to engage in ridiculous overreactions without consequence due to “policy” and qualified immunity, and it hasn’t helped matters that a once police-skeptical conservative community refuses to recognize the problem suddenly, for reasons that seem more than nefarious and have more to do with a rise in a very nasty form of nationalism than any sense of actual justice.
There is no greater expression of this than the fact that a few years ago, conservatives were screaming over the widespread police policies to kill all loose pets when doing things as simple as delivering warrants, all justified by the supposed policy existing for the sake of their safety, and yet now those same conservatives show deference to the murder of actual human beings on the same hair trigger for the same spurious justifications.
And because racism in this country always translates into the best parts of this country being experienced in diminished capacity for those marginalized minorities, and always translates into those same marginalized minorities getting the largest portion of the negative aspects (such as police brutality, the drug war, or an over punitive penal system), the evils are experienced the most by those who are not in the majority — African Americans in particular experience some of the worst parts of these American negatives, while, in general the majority white populations don’t understand their plight because their experience of the negatives is, though present and acknowledged, clearly diminished by comparison.
This is not to single out the United States. The world as a whole has went into a bit of a jingoistic reversal of the open market pursuit of the last few decades. When the Iron Curtain fell, the world was suddenly free to explore a more open highway for exchange of ideas, exchange of goods, and a more free movement of peoples than in the previous Cold War era. The same world that once cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall is now trying to build walls, figuratively and as we know in the US, also quite literally. We’ve somehow gone back to an attitude that burned as the primary fuel firing up the conditions that led to both of our World Wars. We’re back in that weird Fog of War that we had before, or should I say “Fog of Cold War”, because we’re definitely heading into a new “Cold War” of sorts if we don’t do something to stop that trend now. In fact, expecting only a new Cold War is me trying to be as positive as possible — a new World War is certainly also a possibility.
To add to this, Americans have went back to playing their politics as if it were some kind of weird sports team scenario. The biggest evidence of this is the fact that this treatment of foreigners in our midst did not start with Trump. Before Trump, Obama was the biggest and cruelest deporter of “foreigners” in American History — deporting even children who had been adopted but never nationalized by their adoptive parents back to countries many of them never knew. Even people brought here as infants were treated like this — many of these people committed suicide when they could not adapt to these counties that were essentially foreign to them. But it didn’t start with Obama either. What we’ve seen is a progression of damning behavior — Trump is the latest and greatest perpetrator of it (by far the worst by a real longshot), but our weird politics playing has led to each side being outraged when the opposing team does it and defensive when it’s their star quarterback. We’ve become a stupid football game, played with skins made of avarice, greed, hubris, and hate. And that too has become the way of the world at large.
And this horrible state of things is what is on my mind on this day of Kippurim or “atonements” — the literal absence of atonement — the literal presence of the opposite of “atonement”. We’re no longer repairing relationships, we’re purposefully hacking wounds into them. The hard-heartedness of the population at large to recognize this is striking, but even more striking is that many who claim to believe in the Bible or similar are some of the worst perpetrators and/or supporters of this direction. And I believe it grieves Elohim that they misuse scripture to support that behavior and direction. Unfortunately, this is true even of many who call themselves Messianics.
When you fast on this Yom Kippur, I ask that you pray for Kippurim for the US and the World at large, and the people we’ve already scarred. They may be scarred beyond human repair, but no scar is beyond Elohim’s ability to heal. No relationship is beyond His ability to bring Kippurim. But we have to want that — He won’t force it on us. I ask that you review your own hearts and the scriptures and think about this.
Someday He will intervene, not to bring Kippurim to everyone, but filter out those who have never sought it. And those who have something against their brother, even their foreign brothers whom so many insist are not their brothers at all — their prayers and “sacrifices” won’t be worth His review. When He does intervene, you don’t want to find yourselves on the wrong side of the Torah’s instructions to “love your neighbor as yourself” and to “love the foreigner as yourself”. If we want to repair our relationship with Him, we have to repair it with each other.
Don’t think that calling yourself a “Jew” or a “Christian” or a “Messianic” or a “Nezari” or a “Moslem” or what-have-you is going to save you. Don’t think that because you call upon His name or wait upon him, but don’t love your fellow man as yourself, or support mistreating him, that you have some kind of security blanket. As Elohim Himself said:
“Do not mistreat or oppress the foreigner, for you were foreigners in Mitsrayim (Egypt). (And) do not take advantage of the widow or the orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword — and your wives will become widows, and your children (will become) orphans.” (Shemot/Exodus 22:21-24).
We’ve not only made prisoners of foreigners coming into our land — we’ve intentionally made them into widows and orphans, too. We’ve aroused the anger of Elohim in ways that cannot be ignored. We’re so sure that what we’re doing is right, because we ignore and twist scripture, and we arrogantly think they have no champion. It may not seem like these people who are at our mercy have a champion, but the biggest Champion of all has vouched for them, and He won’t fail to hear their cries... and He won’t fail to act on their behalf. That should make all of us tremble!
And let me be clear here too — Calling upon the name of Yeshua or “Jesus” won’t save you from this fate either if your heart is so hard as to fail in this very basic but definitely certain set of Torah precepts. Calling upon the name of Elohim’s Mashiach won’t save you when He hears the cries of the destitute at your expense. As Yeshua himself said:
“Many will say to me on that day, ‘Master, Master, did we not speak prophecy in your name? And did we not drive out shadim (demons) in your name? And did we not perform many miracles in your name?’ And I will answer them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you lawless ones!’” (Mattityahu/Matthew 7:22).
These are people who show all of the credentials for thinking that Elohim and Yeshua must be with them — even performing miracles in his name, preaching in his name, telling people to come to him for salvation — and yet, he doesn’t know these people because they were “lawless”. I think it’s pretty clear what “law” he’s referring to here.
We’ve destroyed the lives and livelihoods of many Americans, but we’ve been even worse to foreigners in our midst — putting them into impossible situations, jailing them in concentration camps, sterilizing them, permanently separating them from their children, and even murdering them. We have no excuse — the only thing we can do is make “teshuva” — repent and turn from our egregious behavior and correct it. The only thing we can do is attempt to repair the relationship by repairing the damage we’ve done —- the only thing we can do is make Kippurim. If we cannot do that, then there will be no escape for us.
I believe that this is what all of us should be considering on this Yom Kippur.