By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in ABC
18 September 2026

Yom Kippur is the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — a day so solemn that Jews spend more than twenty-five hours fasting, praying, reflecting and asking for forgiveness. On Yom Kippur, ordinary life stops. We do not eat or drink, work or attend to the usual demands of life. Most of the day is spent in synagogue.

At the heart of Yom Kippur is the notion that the year ahead is being decided and a person’s fate is being sealed. Jewish liturgy describes G-d as remembering the deeds of every person, weighing what has happened over the past year against the petition for another year of life. The prayers return again and again to the idea of a G-d who remembers everything, who sees what human beings have done and does not lose the details with the passing of time.

Human memory is very different. We remember selectively and often inaccurately. A person might recall an insult delivered ten years ago, the precise feeling of a friendship ending or the humiliation of being embarrassed in front of other people. Some mistakes are remembered for years, replayed so often that they begin to feel like permanent parts of a person’s identity.

At the same time, enormous aspects of ordinary life disappear from memory. Whole years become hazy around the edges. In human memory, conversations are forgotten, meals eaten with family, afternoons with friends, jokes that once seemed hilarious and thousands of small moments all vanish from our minds. Memory does not preserve a life evenly.

There are people with amazing memories who can recall large parts of their lives in precise detail, but perfect recall is not necessarily the gift it sounds like. Remembering every painful moment with complete clarity can make it difficult to ever leave those moments behind. Some things need to be remembered because they teach, warn or honour. Other things eventually need to be allowed to recede.

Jewish tradition has always held these two ideas together. Memory is central to Jewish life. The Torah repeatedly commands Jews to remember, zachor. Jews are instructed to remember the Exodus from Egypt, the Sabbath and the destruction brought upon the Jewish people by Amalek. Jewish holidays themselves are structured around remembering events that took place thousands of years ago.

But Judaism also recognises that human beings cannot carry every part of their past with them forever. Jewish mourning makes this very clear. There is a beginning when grief is raw and overwhelming, followed by seven days of shiva, when mourners sit together while family, friends and members of the community come to comfort them.

There are further stages of mourning, including a year for close relatives, but eventually the formal period of mourning ends and the mourner returns to ordinary life. This does not mean the person who died is forgotten; rather, it means that grief is not expected to consume an entire life.

That tension between remembering and moving forward sits at the heart of Yom Kippur. A central part of the day is teshuvah, usually translated as “repentance” or “return”. People are asked to look honestly at the year that has passed, recognise where they have gone wrong, apologise, seek forgiveness and make amends where they can.

The Vidui, the confession recited repeatedly throughout Yom Kippur, contains a long catalogue of failures: sins committed through words and actions, anger and dishonesty, arrogance and indifference. Jews stand together and name the ways human beings hurt one another and fail to live up to the people they could be.

However, the purpose of this remembering is not to spend another year ruminating over the same mistakes. The past is brought into the present so that it can be dealt with. A mistake that is acknowledged can become a lesson. An apology can repair a relationship that has broken down. The aim of Yom Kippur is not to construct a permanent record of everything a person has done wrong, but to make it possible to live differently in the year that follows.

Yom Kippur asks people to remember enough to take responsibility, but not so much that the past becomes the only story they can tell about themselves. It asks for an honest reckoning without demanding permanent self-punishment.

At the end of Yom Kippur, after a day of fasting, prayer and confession, the shofar is sounded. The long day comes to an end. Perhaps that is why the final sound of the shofar feels less like an ending than a release. The past has been remembered, now, finally, it can be left behind, into the year ahead.