And thus each Jew can begin again on this day, by resolving to do another act of hesed in the coming year, to study a traditional text in translation, to learn Hebrew, and to repair interpersonal relations that have soured. That is the thesis about Yom Kippur. Viewed in this traditional way, this holy day has all of the wonderful charms of baseball. This is what we expect to hear on Yom Kippur. And the romantic thesis of teshuvah as a rebirth, and as an amnesty, must be joined by the searching light of a somewhat harsher, but equally real, antithesis.
Nothing can be so simple as a neat clearing of the slate.
And it isn't. There should be an urgency , and not just a romanticism, about Yom Kippur. Because it is a terrible mistake to imagine that all things can be made new again. So here is a second text. That hymn attempted to affirm the significance of choices that may come our way once, or only briefly, but not linger forever.