Ways of Awe: Al-Cheyt

[Reflective opening string music with slowly-building energy]

Xava: I like to think of it as one of the hinges of the Jewish year, right, where things sort of turn into a new direction.

Binya: Like actually our goal is something much bigger and more beautiful.

Noam: So we’re taking part in creation by speaking these words.

Laynie: In the body.

Jessica: And a slowness.

Noa: And…heartbroken rage-full blessing-full connection, for whatever that’s possibly worth in this moment.

[String music gets stronger and faster]

Xava: By reinterpreting a text, we have the power to heal a wound that’s actually in the past, and our ancestors are already in the future, healing the wounds of the foolishness that we’re saying now.

[Horns enter the music with a feeling of both grief and hopefulness]

Maia: I’m Maia.

Shelby: I’m Shelby. Welcome to Ways of Awe.

Maia: An audio companion to the prayers and rituals of the Jewish High Holidays.

Mónica: Um, we want to honor and remember and face death, loss, destruction. And also we want to agitate the living, give the living practices that will allow us to embody grief and move towards courage.

Shelby: We’ve been studying together for years and Ways of Awe shares some of our translation experiments.

Maia: Woven together with research and soundscapes from where we live and pray, all with the help of mentors, friends and ancestors, known and unknown.

Shelby: Sound is touch, sound is touch!

Xava: Sound is touch, yeah.

Shelby: And our ancestors knew it!

Binya: All these things are trying to access you in every possible way to break you open.

Shelby: It’s crowded inside these prayers. But there’s room. Come on in.

[Reflective music slows, resolves and stops]

[Ocean sounds of water lapping, seals barking and birds calling]

[Ocean sounds continue and blend with sounds of fists hitting chests begin with chanting of the Al-Cheyt prayer in the traditional Ashkenazi tune]

Maia: Shana tova. Anyada dulse i allegre. Gut yontif. Let’s go inside Al-cheyt, a prayer we say on Yom Kippur. 

Shelby: Maybe you don’t remember the words, but you remember the fists knocking on chests…[Sound of fists banging on chests steadily] Maybe you have no idea what Al-Cheyt is. However you’re arriving to it, welcome.

Maia: Al-cheyt literally means “for the sins”—a list of 44 ways to err, or maybe 44 origins for our mistakes? 

Shelby: We’ll study the origins of Al-cheyt, we’ll ask the text many questions, we’ll share our translation. And we’ll be joined along the way by Binya Kóatz and Maimonides.

Maia: Let’s step deeper a little deeper into this prayer together. 

Binya: It pulls my heart because it’s theologically brave…it’s not an easy prayer to say, it’s not an easy prayer to write…and it takes a profound amount of love and courage.

[Singing of Al-Cheyt in the traditional Ashkenazi tune begins]

Singers: V’al kulam Eloha selikhot. S’lakh lanu, m’khal lanu, kaper lanu…V’al kulam Eloha selikhot. S’lakh lanu, m’khal lanu, kaper lanu…

Binya: …So we are trying to access through the small things that almost everybody has done, through the things that are not good, but they’re a norm in our community, things that we specifically name as things outside the norms of our community, but can and maybe have happened over the last year, and huge breaks, [sound of walking] small breaks, all these things…and for the things that would have…led to this and would have led to that…it feels similar to the many different shofar calls…it’s trying to take you out of time, of space, and of self, and hopefully, ultimately open you through that. 

…the nature of the shofar blasts are all different: maybe you will listen to a boom, maybe you’ll listen to a boom, boom, boom, heeey! …it’s like a little lock picker…with an ear to the…how do I unlock this little divine-sparks-heart to let them break open?

[Sound of walking continues with muffled fists on chests]

Shelby:  Each year when we say the Al-Cheyt, the congregation transforms into a flock of fists flapping into our chests, like a murmuration of birds all hitting a glass door at once, all of us desperately seeking an entrance into a new year, begging to be invited into the book of life. 

This year and every year, we arrive at the gates of forgiveness as a we, as a squirming organism of humanness–fragile, flawed, alive, longing to change. Who is that we we may wonder now? It’s a we so wide all of our smaller we’s cannot even see its shifting edges…

Maia: We chant this litany of harms together, even if we did not commit each of the transgressions ourselves. We are declaring that we are in community with people who could possibly say these things in the “I.”  You don’t know who you’re saying it with, but you are saying it with them.

Binya: …Al-Cheyts are not supposed to be an easy unifying call…

Shelby: Every year, we must be in relationship to even approach forgiveness, to even imagine transformation, we have to practice solidarity, in all of its sacred discomfort. 

There is no more ignoring that we are inextricably linked to one another. During rising fascism, ongoing pandemic, genocide in Gaza: the choices we make for ourselves are also choices made for our communities, even if we can’t see the droplet travel or the message carry. 

Maia: This prayer is not a comprehensive list of every single sin we sinned, every error we erred, every mark we missed. The original Al-Cheyt is intended to show us the roots of all failures, to dig beneath how we harm, to see where that hurt came from. It lends itself to close reading–to painstaking word-by-word interpretive translation. We chose to translate Al-cheyt to deepen this excavation for ourselves.

Shelby: We follow these trails together, not absolved from our own repairs, but never alone in struggles to uproot, to propagate new ways of being ourselves, of being together.

[Sound of fists hitting chests]

Binya: That “we” is only possible when we have agreed that we are responsible…and accountable not just for each other’s successes, but for each other’s failings…And that’s the gift we can give each other.

Shelby: We can even examine the roots of the words themselves: the name of G-d invoked in this prayer means at its root “to join, to be connected.” When we petition G-d here, perhaps we are just praying to the divinity of we, towards our coursing luminous interconnectedness. To attempt the name of G-d–we are also pronouncing the painful and unfathomable truth that some of the we’s that we belong to are ones of domination, supremacy, harm. It’s always both. 

[Sound of fists continue]

Binya: The al-chet is obviously one of the prayers that comes really naturally with its own sound-scape and that’s how y’all start your intro to your translation…My whole thing with the al-chet and chest beating and any of these things–like the kissing of the tsit tsit–is, I’ve always loved things that add to the panoply of sound within any Jewish space–anything beyond just the davening, I’ve always loved. 

…I’m big into beating my chest not because I’m a slut, not because I’m a saint–which aren’t opposite things and usually actually very combined–but because I just want to play drums and this is my time to play drums. I just want to add sound and rhythm to my Jewish space and this is my time when I’m allowed to…

[Sound of fists continue]

[Tzali begins chanting Al-Cheyt]

Tzali: Al Chet shechatanu lefanecha be-ones uveratzon…v’al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’imutz halev…Al Chet shechatanu lefanecha bi-vli da-at…

Maia & Shelby: For the failure that we failed in front of your faces because we were forced to & on purpose–because we wanted to; because we were bent by violence and bent willingly to do violence.

Tzali: v’al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’imutz halev. 

Maia & Shelby: And for the failure that we failed in front of your faces by a hard-heart & without even knowing it–because pressed & compressed it became impervious.

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha bivli daat

For the failure that we failed in front of your faces because we destroyed our knowing, we let our thinking rot & decay our temperament, our very minds.

Shelby: Prayer is about the body, it’s a map towards embodiment, a manual left by ancestors to inhabit a posture together, inexplicably across time and space. Al-Chet especially so–fists banging on chests to reckon with how we have hurt, where we need to take responsibility. And our curiosity always sparks where our present-day bodies meet ancient grammar.

Maia: How is each word really in relationship? The Al-Chet, in so many ways, is about relationship–broken relationships, our varied relationships to perpetuating pain and injustice in the world, about how we repair.  How we ‘take responsibility’ is in the grammar–the difference between perpetrator and survivor is conjugated. Every Hebrew & Aramaic word has a root–the shoresh–a core unconjugated meaning that can be dressed up with vowels, prefixes/suffixes, and other patterns to build a word. It is how we vocalize a word, how we embellish the root letters, that allows us to decipher the who/the how/the when/and the how many of it all. Our translation process includes dusting off vowels and letters to find these roots, to find some of the oldest valences for each word.

Binya: Just by changing the vowels in the verb-form of cheyt means either to sin or to cleanse from sin…that density of meaning again really points to…this combination of our sin and our cleansing from sin and our liberation and our failing, all of these things being combined into one word really points to the core of the tradition really wants us to be in a room with sinners, trying our best even as we’re failing, to get free.

[Fists on chests return]

Shelby The Al-Cheyt is recited during Yom Kippur as part of the Vidui (confession) along with the Ashamnu, or “short confession.” The oldest form of the root of Vidui (yud, daled, hey) just means to point or move or (even more literally) “to raise hands”—as the word for hand (yad) is embedded in it. It can mean to thank or give praise, to admit, to consent, or to confess. 

Maia: Al-cheyt is often understood as the later expansion of the acrostic Ashamnu (appearing in our liturgy in the 9th century), listing wrong-doing in alphabetical order. In the time of Rav Saadia Gaon and Moshe Maimonides and in many Sephardi & Mizrakhi communities today, al-chet appears as an additional listing of cheyt, in no particular order. Ashkenazi communities chant a longer double acrostic form that has shifted and expanded over time, ten times during Yom Kippur 

To bring in Maimonides aka the Rambam, well-known Sephardic medieval Jewish philosopher, legal codifier, and physician–he wrote a kind of recipe for Jewish confession in the medieval period: naming the transgression, naming its harm, stating regret, and ending by saying: “I will never return to such a deed.” We think of this time in the Jewish calendar in terms of teshuva, t’shuva, turning and returning… and in Maimonides’s formula we seal our confession (the first step towards repair) by saying what we will NOT return to.

Shelby: It’s so physical. Where we will position our bodies, what we will move towards, and what we will move away from. Facing up to something also then requires turning to face something else.

[Fists on chests return]

Tzali (chanting): v’al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’tzarut-ayin…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha bagalui uvasater…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha bagalui arayot…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha beh’dee’bor’peh…

And for the failure that we failed  in front of your faces by our hollow lips–because our talk swelled, but yielded nothing; because our borders have only expanded.

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha bagalui uvasater

For the failure that we failed  in front of your faces that was revealed for all to see, and those that were hidden out of sight–because we were in exile & because we thought we were protecting ourselves.

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha bagalui arayot

And for the failure that we failed  in front of your faces by revealing what wasn’t ours to reveal, uncovering skin that was not ours to uncover, for not honoring consent.

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha beh’dee’bor’peh…

For the ways we hurt  with the words of our mouth–because words matter; because the world is created with words.

[Fists on chests continue steadily]

Shelby: For a prayer with such physical body-based metaphors it is also so much about words…”speech violations”…as opposed to actions…

Binya: That …comes from… the primordial essence of Judaism… That we are a people who understand the world …as having been created through a word written on a lightning bolt, so obviously, we are going to be focused on our words as little reflections of the gd that created the world through word. We know we can also do that…we connect through words, we build through words, we destroy through words, and it’s our obligation to use them so much better…

We don’t take our words seriously in this world. We’re so quick to…hyperbolize, to say the most caustic thing, to risk pain and rupture and shame at the smallest offense. And that is a punitive culture that does that…it’s not sticks and stones…. whatever…that’s not in the torah for a reason…that’s just not true. That’s truly not true. 

[Tzali chanting Al-Cheyt returns]

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha bir’dot’of’mir’ma…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’hirhur halev…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’hirhur halev…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’ho’not’rayah…Al cheit shechatanu v’dui-peh…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’vi’daat’sa’noot…Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha v’yosh’doni’vish’gaga…

Shelby & Maia: And for being misled,    for deceiving ourselves, believing what was not true –because we misled, we knew we were being dishonest.  For fraud.  

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’hirhur halev

Shelby & Maia: For our heart’s plans.   

And for when we have wronged our friends & dispossessed our neighbors & oppressed our lovers.

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu v’dui-peh…

Shelby & Maia: For how we raised our hands to speak –for taking up space & letting our voice be heard over others.  Did we take the blame or the credit for something we didn’t do? If we confessed, did it repair what we broke?  Did we petition? Did we praise? Did we acknowledge? Pray? If we did, did we mean it?

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’vi’daat’sa’noot

Shelby & Maia: And for making an appointment  with mindlessness,   using pleasure to numb out & to run from our truths.

Tzali: Al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha v’yosh’doni’vish’gaga…

Shelby & Maia: For how we intended violence    & for how we erred inadvertently because we were careless–because we assumed instead of asking; because we got excited and weren’t paying attention. 

[Ocean fades in and out]

Binya: What’s our main goal here? Is it to punish or is it to fix? …if you’re going from that abolitionist framework around decreasing and reparating harm as their main goal, then unwitting and witting sins both need to be addressed. Because the thing isn’t about: are you bad? Did you do a bad thing, you bad person? You knew you were bad, You’re so bad! The thing is like: hey, whether wittingly or unwittingly, we are hurting each other and actually our goal here is for our community to come out stronger and more repaired with everything that has broken it over the last year……and so we’re gonna address it all.

[Fists on chests continue]

[Tzali chanting continues]

Tzali: v’al cheit shechatanu l’fanecha b’zilzul horim umorim.

[Tzali chanting continues underneath]

Shelby & Maia: 

And for having contempt   for those who have pointed the way for us–for disregarding our guardians, for neglecting the ones who parent us and despising the ones who teach us.

For misusing our strong hands   –the ways we use our power to take, to possess–the ways we tighten our authority.

And for desecrating the name   –the way we divert, dilute, violate & pollute our attention to the sacred.

For the mistakes we make with our stubborn mouth & the foolish things we say.

And for the way we clog our lips with it.  

For bending ourselves  into instruments of harm.

And for harming those we love & those we don’t. 

[Ocean waves sound returns]

Shelby & Maia singing: V’al kulam Eloha selikhot. S’lakh lanu, m’khal lanu, kaper lanu. V’al kulam Eloha selikhot. S’lakh lanu, m’khal lanu, kaper lanu. 

Shelby & Maia: For all of it, the forger of forgiveness forgives us: Forgive us, Absorb us, Obliterate us towards healing.

Binya: Kaper means to both cover and uncover and this is the beauty of hebrew…

Kapar means to erase…could also mean obliterate… you looked at the itpael version of the aramaic…to be obliterated…

[Sound of ocean return]

Maia: When we talk about harm, sometimes we feel the word “sin” arising in our mouths. Is that what we mean? No but also yes. How do we translate into a language that is sometimes choked with meanings dominated by Christianity? 

Binya: So, yes..don’t say the word sin…but say aveyra. Aveyra means something. Aveyra means something. These are meaningful things. And Cheyt means something… Just off my head: aveyra has the more beautiful poetry of crossing-over…[pages turning]…there is a boundary and you crossed it, and cheyt is just like, you messed up.

Shelby: Aveyra shares a root with the Hebrew word for Hebrew–the language and the people. IVRI makes us the border-crossers, the people of crossing over borders? A diaspora people? The transgressors? 

Binya: Uh oh. Did we just create a people whose very essence includes the possibility of sin? …Because ultimately to cross over and to get free we have to accept the possibility that our ability to cross-over would also cause harm, but it’s the only way we got free? Uh oh. Uh oh!

[Tzali chanting Al-Cheyt returns and is chanted underneath the English translation]

Shelby & Maia:

For the mark we missed  by being knotted up in a bribe.

And for the mark we missed  by being reduced, shrinking our truth.

For the mark we missed  by sharpening our tongues.

And for the mark we missed  by our scoffing. 

For the mark we missed   by willingly carrying the burden of capitalism.

And for the mark we missed   by our food & drink–what we do to make our meals & how we attempt to satisfy ourselves. 

For exploitation  –when we take a bite out of others for profit.

And for arrogance  –when we stretch our throats.

For the way we look at others   –when our eyes don’t tell the truth, when they surveil.

And for planting idle talk   in the mounds of the lips, without limits & without purpose.

For fronting with proud eyes  –looking high above others’ heads, condescendingly. 

And for our harsh forehead  –unrestrained & unashamed of the harm we cause.

[Tzali chants with ocean]

Tzali: V’al kulam Eloha selikhot. S’lakh lanu, m’khal lanu, kaper lanu.

Shelby & Maia: For all of it, the forger of forgiveness forgives us: Forgive us, Absorb us, Obliterate us towards healing

Maia: Kabbalistic midrash teaches that gd had to contract to make space for creation. Sometimes a negation, a going against, an abolitionist stance is what is needed for something new to be created. The act of opposition is what can make space for what we desire, for envisioning what we want to make.

Binya: If al-chet was the only prayer we ever had …we would be a bad tradition…but you can’t have judaism without al-chet, you can’t have meaningful judaism without anti-zionism at this point and we should be looking for ways to balance that with our own positive visions…

We’re still in the proverbial big room saying we with people we really don’t want to be saying we with. And if we care about Judaism, that is a necessary thing we have to do at this moment…I’m part of a people, I’m a steward of a torah that people are carrying with them, literally in backpacks as they carry m-16s to murder children.

[Sound of fists on chests]

Shelby: One disastrous kinship that we are a part of….

[Sound of fists on chests]

[Tzali chanting Al-Cheyt returns and is chanted underneath the English translation]

Maia & Shelby:

For how we harmed by untying ourselves    from the obligations of community–thinking we are throwing off a yoke.  For believing we are broken and no longer belong & that what we do doesn’t matter; for not believing in our interdependence.

And for how we harmed by avoiding honest judgement    of our actions.

For how we harmed when we entrapped, ensnared   & hunted our friends, partners, neighbors & lovers.   

And for how we harmed with our narrow vision,    our selfish and envious look.  For closing our eyes.

For how we harmed by not thinking things through   fully 

& for our stiff-necks. 

And for how we harmed by rushing towards hurting others   

& peddling mean rumors–telling stories that were not ours to tell.

For not deeply considering our commitments  –we made promises we didn’t intend to keep; because we made an oath that produced nothing.

And for caressing our hatred  –for hatred for no good reason.

For when we carelessly extend our bodies  –for lending & not lending our hands.

And when we do not tune into our hearts,   we hesitate, we confuse, we pull ourselves (apart) in two different directions.

Tzali (spoken): V’al kulam Eloha selikhot. S’lakh lanu, m’khal lanu, kaper lanu.

[Ocean starts again]

Maia & Shelby: For all of it, the forger of forgiveness forgives us: Forgive us, Absorb us, Obliterate us towards healing

[Singing of Al-Cheyt refrain underneath narration]

Maia: We are speaking of the kind of forgiveness that is a reconnection, a returning, a reweaving, an obligation, a way to stop doing things the way we have been doing them.  When we speak about forgiveness, we say, for these, the joiner of forgiveness forgives to us.  Because forgiveness has a direction & it is a going towards; because forgiveness remakes a relationship.  

Binya: Hey, can we just create things together and share them together? …there is a …world with an entire empire with multiple millennia of violence just to try to stop us from doing that with each other. but if that is the core of our political project, we have to get real about what it means to be in community with each other. That means acknowledging real harm, real capacity for harm, [fists sound] and not trying to live among angels…not sinners…but aveyra-doers… that are our community so we have to find a way to repair the harm that happens and this is one of the ways that we do that. 

Maia: Forgiveness is what forgives us because forgiveness also means to blot out [sounds of birds and water start] the systems that keep us hurting each other.  We refuse them, we give them up. We don’t give up on each other. Because if forgiveness means repair, it means reparations.

[Sounds of birds and water]

Shelby: There is a doubling to how we hurt each other:  It is because we waited, it is because we didn’t wait.  Because we didn’t know when it was enough–that we are enough–because it’s never enough until we all get free.  It’s in how we orient ourselves towards power.  When we scoff at kings is not the same as when we scoff at our comrades.  Because our knee is on someone’s neck or because we believe our powerlessness is permanent.  For deciding whose body belongs and whose does not.  Because we ignored the past, because we did not dream up new futures.

Maia: Do we forgive these? Are we forgiven, these? The ashkenazi Al-Chet ends by references to old temple ways that forgiveness was made: through fire, ashes, altars. We’re not saying we are all directly descended from people that burnt offerings on altars, but we are saying that we have ancestors in the text itself–ancestors older than the text itself. And we are saying that what forgiveness and repair has looked like has changed over time–that it takes time too. There are things we don’t forgive in a lifetime or even in the lives of the generation that’s coming. 

[Sounds of water lapping]

Binya: These fights take so much longer than they should. and we might be right close to the end, we might be like those chants that say, from the river to the sea Palestine is almost free, we might be a hundred years away. And we kinda have to hold both possibilities at once.

[Sounds of water lapping]

Shelby: We embody the postures of those who came before us to invoke the ones who are on their way. 

[Sounds of water lapping and children playing]

[Binya chanting Al-Cheyt]

[Water lapping continues]

Maia: Ways of Awe was written by Maya Brown and Shelby Handler, based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, Washington, on unceded Coast Salish, Duwamish land.

Shelby: All episodes edited by Maia Brown. Audio engineering by Daniel Guenther.

Maia: We’re indebted to each of our interviewees for their brilliance and generosity, and we’re grateful to the community who lent their prayer voices to these episodes.

Shelby: Thank you to our friends Ross Kirshenbaum, or Levoneh, Jimmy Austin and Peter Lippman for our show music, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings.

Maia: Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program, the King County Office of Arts & Culture Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop—without which this project would never have made it into your ears, dear listener.

Shelby: Thank you to all of our mentors and teachers. Thank you to our ancestors. We feel you with us. We’re hoping the feeling is mutual.

[Show music continues and fades out slowly]