Mishnah Yoma Chapter 3 Mishnah 8 Pt. 8

Our Mishnah today continued with the language of the High Priest’s confession on Yom Kippur. One of the things I love most about this Mishnah writ-large is that it is this precise language of the confession that is at the center of the Avodah / עבודה service of Yom Kippur today. (And biasedly, as a High Holy Day cantor, it’s one of my favorite pieces to sing—it’s simultaneously personal and communal in a very visceral way). But what makes today’s Mishnah particularly unique? A kra קרא proof! Yup, you heard me right—in the middle of this very vulnerable, tender confession of wrongdoing, of missing the mark, we get a very technical “as it says in the Torah of Your servant Moses” moment. Trust me, if it weren’t for the beautiful music, this moment would fall very flat in real time. Which might beg us to ask, why would our rabbinic ancestors break up the emotionality of the High Priest’s confession with what is, essentially, a footnote?

Probably not surprising to most of you, a footnote is rarely just a footnote when it comes to Mishnah. (Some folks like to call it a hyperlink.) Torah proofs often complicate the very matter they are trying to prove, or at the very least add a little spice to the conversation. In our case here, it’s less about the Torah proof itself than its intro: “As it says in the Torah of Moses Your servant / עבדך. Note that the word for “servant” shares the same root as the Avodah עבודה service of Yom Kippur. If you’re not familiar, the whole point of the Avodah service is to reenact the confessions of the High Priest, i.e. these Mishnayot we’ve been learning. Talk about high ritual theater! So here’s the funny thing—for all of these rituals, it seems our ancestors weren’t totally confident that they were going to be efficacious—in other words, in a world in such dire need of repair and accountability, do ritual sacrifices actually change anything? Doing confessional words even change anything? Does the day of Yom Kippur itself even move anything forward?

By linking Moses the servant עבד with the rituals of the High Priest (עבודה), I think our queer-rabbinic-ancestors are trying to be in a kind of cosmic-communal dialogue across the generations—the whole point of Torah is to be able to make repair when it is needed, to be able to course-correct when we lose our way and create more harm than good. Effectively, the our Mishnah is saying that the act of confession, of taking responsibility both individually and communally is an expression of Torah, and is about as Divine a thing as can be. Maybe this is why our ancestors also have given these passages soaring melodies to remind us of the super-power that comes in making repair in this world.