DANGEROUS CONFESSION

“RABBI’S MUSINGS (& AMUSINGS)”

Erev Yom Kippur 5786

           9 Tishrei 5786/October 1, 2025

DANGEROUS CONFESSION

When our children became old enough to take a bath by themselves it was definitely a relief. Being able to send them to the bath without having to be there saved time and energy.

The first few times however, when they came out of the bathroom, one of two things happened. Either their hair was completely dry which means that they didn’t bother to wash their hair at all, or there was soap running down the side of their face because they didn’t bother to get all the shampoo out of their hair before they came out of the bathtub. They may have been clean but, ironically, they were messy from the shampoo.

We like it when professionals have experience. We want our doctor to be experienced, our mechanic to be experienced, our realtor to be experienced, and our rabbi to be experienced. Companies hang signs outside their building boasting that they have been in business since whatever year they began. Their message to the potential consumer is that the customer can be confident that using their product or expertise will ensure they are getting the best product/service. 

No one has more experience than our evil inclination. It’s been messing people up and luring them to sin for over 5786 years now, with a very high success rate. In this world it has home court advantage and knows the terrain better than anyone. In addition, it also knows how to use psychological tactics to manipulate our thinking.

Knowing his tactics can be incredibly helpful in our perennial struggle to not fall prey to his machinations.  

One of the yetzer hara’s effective tactics involves reciting vidui (confession) on Yom Kippur. Being that we recite the long vidui 8 times over Yom Kippur, saying vidui is a significant part of the day’s service.

Our evil inclination convinces us that for confession to be meaningful we must ruminate and agonize over the sins we are confessing. But doing so is actually quite counterproductive. The first danger is that hyper focusing on sins committed can cause a person to despair and feel like a complete failure. He may start to think he can never stop committing habitual sins. The evil inclination craves deflation more than anything.  

But there’s another danger in ruminating over our sins. If we think too much about a sin and start to focus on the circumstances when we committed the sin, we can mentally transport ourselves there and get lost in sinful fantasy. If our evil inclination can get our minds to wander inappropriately in middle of reciting vidui on Yom Kippur, he can really get us to feel deflated.

The Chassidic masters note that even if one is trying to clean mud, wallowing in mud causes you to become filthy.

Reciting vidui is a delicate balance. We must recall the sins we committed to the best of our ability. We must acknowledge our culpability, our feelings of regret and sincerely commit to try to be better. After doing so, one must move on to the next sin and not allow himself to get bogged down in the details of the previous sin.

There is a great symbolic lesson to be gleaned from our young children’s shampoo experiences (aside from the fact that they still needed some parental assistance when they took a bath). If a person stays in shul the entire Yom Kippur but doesn’t say any of the prayers and doesn’t invest any emotional/mental effort into doing teshuva, he isn’t going to emerge purified from the day. He will undoubtedly be somewhat spiritually uplifted, but he will have wasted the crux of the opportunity the day affords us. He’s analogous to the child who went into the bath but didn’t bother to use soap/shampoo. He’s definitely better off having gone into the bathtub, but he isn’t emerging with the freshness and cleanliness he should have.

On the other hand, one can also emerge from the bath messy and unkempt because he didn’t sufficiently wash the shampoo out of his hair. The person who recites vidui and allows his thoughts to drift and focus too much on the sins he committed will lose more than he is gaining.

In fact, the analogy isn’t so accurate. Such drifting thoughts are more in the realm of dirty from mud than messy from shampoo. What was intended to be a tool of repentance can quickly morph into a catalyst for sinful thinking.

How effective and sinister is our evil inclination? He even uses tools of repentance to lure us down the rabbit hole. It seems logical that when we try to repent and recoup our spiritual losses that our evil inclination caused us to forfeit, that it would try its darndest to prevent us from doing so.

With this knowledge we can be better prepared to contend with its mind games on Yom Kippur. We recite vidui sincerely and ‘trust the process’. But there is nothing to be gained – in fact there is much to lose – by overly focusing on our individual sins.

Shampoo is great but it must be used properly.  

Good Yom Tov & G’mar Chasima Tova

R’ Dani and Chani Staum

STRIVINGHIGHER.COM

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Share the Post:

Related Posts

31 Jul 2025

ROTTING ROYALLY

24 Jul 2025

NO DISTRACTIONS

16 Jul 2025

HEAR ME NOW