The Holy Goat

I've actually been writing a lot lately but just not posting it. This may look like it's from Yom Kippur but it's not quite that old. It was inspired by one of the postings I read online but like four weeks later. So about half way between YK and now?

I think I had an undiagnosed inner ear problem as a child. Once, I witnessed the Beard (my father) chastising my brother for saying “Jesus”. This was penalized under taking the lord’s name in vain. However, I had heard my brother say something like “cheese”. I proceeded to never refer to cheese for several years.

In Catholicism, at least, the concept of G-d is represented by the “Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” For anyone who doesn’t know, liturgical legend says that Jesus was born in a manger. Mangers are in barns and barns in the Holy Land have goats. The problem my family had with always being late to church—if we ever went—was that we had to sit in the back. As a child I prayed “the Father, the Son and the Holy Goat.” It made perfect sense at the time.

The ancient Israelites had a different concept of the Holy Goat. For starters, it actually was a goat. On Yom Kippur, the Priest would give one goat to G-d (he’d kill it) and one goat would receive the sins of Israel and be sent out into the wilderness.

Now the practice in many places, Jerusalem and beyond, became to ensure the demise of goat #2, usually via chasing the thing off of a cliff. The idea was that the sins couldn’t return.

I can’t uphold this viewpoint and not just because it’s contra-biblical and needlessly kills a goat (I think the first goat was needlessly killed as well but that’s a different matter). It’s the idea that we can just drop our sins off of a cliff and they won’t come back. That’s not how teshuvah works. It’s not how sin works; nor is it how tikkun works and—in my eyes at least—teshuvah is part of tikkun.

As an archery term as well as for our sin, chet is a missing of the mark and teshuvah is returning to it. Maybe for those sins and misses that are just one-time issues, like maybe someone’s sin-goat bumped you as you were about to shoot, it’s logical to go directly from messing up to a bull’s-eye. However, most things aren’t that easy, especially not the type of personal teshuvah that really matters.

And maybe that’s why the second goat was sent into the wilderness—the ambiguity of Schrödinger’s cat: both alive and dead. We have to be prepared that the goat MIGHT come back. We need to look out for that goat, for those misses and sins that slip back into our lives and our behaviors. If G-d had wanted us to kill that scape-goat, the Torah would tell us how the Priest slaughtered two goat-offerings. Instead the Torah releases it, sets it free with the option of returning. The same way that we let go of our sins, be they one time oopsies or lasting habits; we need to let them go, aware that they may return so that that we may return to better hit the mark.