And I'm sure that each of you does, as well. This holiday, and this time of year, mean something special to each one of us. And I feel confident that the themes of this Humanistic Kol Nidre service, which has been in use in this congregation as long as I've been a member, speak of each of us.

While each of us knows why we are here, it has occurred to me that it is not quite so clear that we - as a collective body - know why we are here. What's the difference, and why do I bring it up? I'll have to start at the beginning.

The Yom Kippur ritual is defined for us in the center of the book of Leviticus, the central book of the Torah - fittingly, because it has a central role in the religion of ancient Israel. Leviticus is a work of the so-called Priestly writer P who was most likely a member of the theocracy that ruled Israel until the Romans destroyed the Temple. It describes the ritual in minute detail.

We know that the day would begin with the selection of two goats, to fill two special roles. The goats were assigned their roles by lot. One, the scapegoat, was said to "bear on its head all the transgressions of the Israelites, and all their rebellious acts, whatever their sins may be." Loaded with these sins, the scapegoat was shoved out the door with a red thread tied to its horns. In Second Temple times it was probably eventually pushed over a cliff, to keep it from returning the sins it was supposed to carry away. This seems to be a very ancient ritual, possibly predating even the worship of Yahweh.

The other poor little goat was much more central to the ritual. This Israelite religion - this Jewish religion - was a sacrificial one; the temple was, in effect, a great slaughterhouse. All meat had to be slaughtered at the temple. However the religious purpose of the daily sacrifices was not to provide meat, but rather to expiate the sins of Israel.

On Yom Kippur there was a very special ritual - it was the only time that the High Priest entered into the holy of holies, where the ark was stored and where, as a result, god was supposed to reside. No one but the High Priest ever entered the Holy of Holies, and he did it only once each year. He took with him two handfuls of aromatic incense, a bowl of bull's blood, and a panful of burning coals. He placed the pan on the ark, sprinkled the blood on the coals, and God would then appear in the smoke. It was after this that the Priest emerged and the second goat was sacrificed; its blood, mixed with that of the bull, was sprinkled over the main alter - and probably on the people below. This not only atoned for the sins of the community, something that happened in every daily sacrifice, but also by its special nature cleansed the shrine of whatever traces of this sinfulness had stuck to it during the year, and returned the shrine - and by implication the people of Israel - to their original purity and closeness to God.

Once the Temple - god's home - was destroyed, sacrifice was no longer possible. The religion came under control of the Rabbis and the actual practice changed quite a bit, although the ritual in the service that will be performed in synagogues and shuls all over the world retains many elements taken directly from the temple service. The tradition of sacrifice is no longer a part of the liturgy, but it survived in lesser ways, such as the tradition of Kaporos, which involved swinging a chicken around one's head - a remnant of an ancient rite to scare away the devil; the chicken was later sacrificed and eaten.

Yom Kippur, as we - or our grandparents - know it is of course very different. We no longer pay much attention to the collective sins of the people of Israel; Yom Kippur is a time when individuals must face up to their own "sins."

It isn't clear how the sins - transgressions, bad behavior - against one's neighbors were cleansed in the days of the Temple. But in the centuries since, that has become a - if not the - central part of the holiday, at least in Jewish culture if not in the synagogue liturgy.

The only thing I knew as a kid about Yom Kippur was that one is supposed to go to all those one has wronged during the year and apologize. Indeed, for many of us this one dictum is all that survives of the Temple Service and the 2000 subsequent years of Jewish history. Even tonight's Kol Nidre, whose origins are unknown is much younger; it is first mentioned in the eight century.

Of course, I understood the concept and importance of apologizing to those whom one had wronged, and of mitigating any damage one had done. But as a kid, I didn't really have a huge list of sins to atone for. My neighbor's wife played canasta and mah jong with my mother, so I wasn't going to covet her - or her apartment, which looked pretty much like ours.

The traditional emphasis on atonement is found frequently in Jewish history, in many forms. One thread, from the late prophets, is the notion that there are certain righteous ones in every generation whose suffering and death replaces the temple sacrifice. However, while the theme of atonement remained, through the years, the Jewish idea of sin changed; rather than a wrong committed against god, sin became thought of as a departure from a state of sinlessness, a state to which one could return. And, of course, the tradition got subsumed into Christian theology: John's Lamb of God is the very lamb offered at sacrifice every day according to the instructions in the book of Numbers - although there were actually two lambs, one to wash away the sins of the day, the other to handle the sins of the night.

The other side of atonement is found in the famous story of how Hillel converted a gentile by saying "That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it." At some point, I recall that my friends and I were exposed to the apparently profound statement of the contrast between Judaism and Christianity - where Hillel said, "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you," Jesus told his followers to "Do unto others what you would have them do unto you."

I call it an apparently profound contrast for two reasons. First is that, whatever came afterward, Jesus was speaking within the established Jewish tradition of the time - albeit on the fringe - to other Jews. The dichotomy may be nothing more than a question of style. But more significantly, as I learned later, the dichotomy is false. There has never been a lack of positive action among the Jewish people - whether the Prophet Amos with his "But let justice roll down like waters And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," or R. Simeon b. Gamaliel's famous dictum "The world rests on three things: justice, truth, and peace", or the rabbi of legend who was never at morning service because he would sneak out of the village every night to cut wood for an elderly widow in the forest, or modern social activists from Lennie Zakim to people right in this room. There are echoes of this commitment (as there are, of course, of the similar commitments of other peoples and cultures) in the Humanist Manifesto, whose concluding point, reminding us of Amos, is "We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few. By this positive morale and intention humanism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of humanism will flow."

Without denying our historical and modern commitments to positive social justice, we are here tonight for a service that focuses largely on Kippur - atonement. Yes, we do say "On Rosh Hashanah we are called to remember how we were in the year past; on Yom Kippur we are called to consider how we wish to be in the year to come," but the service is primarily about kippur - about the past. In reference to the confessional prayer of the traditional synagogue, with its "we have transgressed ... we have wrought wickedness ... we have provoked," we say in this service "Today the words are different. The meaning remains."

Do we truly want to keep that same meaning for this time, which we look forward to for its ability to help us recall and be at one with our better natures? Or should we rather seek to make more explicit the positive and concrete actions that we will do, or might hope to do, in the year to come? Yom Kippur, we say, "is a day of confession. The shame of our wrongs stings our pride and makes us wince with each accusation." As individuals, we each have our own regrets about the year past, and our own goals to improve ourselves. And of course these individual reflections are a vital part of our service. We could never ignore them, we will always have need of them. But might our communal service at this most meaningful time be more than just a space for individual reflection? Each of us surely does what we can to make the world a better place, according to individual abilities, talents and resources. How do we act as a community - as a Kahal? That is to say, why are we here?

Just as the Temple service was about the past, later Rabbinic and cultural traditions were too. By cleansing ourselves, and our community, of the sins of the past we each hoped to be granted the gift of life for one more year. Implicit in this hope was our sense that we could do better in the next year than in the one past. Perhaps this is all the foresight one needs in a world where each year is just like the one before, except for the natural processes of birth, growth and death - punctuated by the occasional eviction or pogrom.

But in our complex and fragile world is it enough to walk out of this service trying to remember next time not to yell at the kids, that it's not helpful to growl at the neighbors, or how important it is to not package up worthless mortgages and call them high-grade securities? Perhaps it is, for the individual. But might we, in addition to reviewing our personal goals, find value in using this time of year as a community, perhaps not just for gaining admission to the future, but rather for shaping it? What shape we might give to our future, choosing from among all the ways that we as a community might think about it and choose to act? Whether our focus for the future would be on this community, our wider communities, the world at large, or some abstract value, is not for any one person to say. But I suggest that it is also not something to leave unsaid.

The roots of this time of reflection are a very communal event, likely the most significant of the year for the community. Is it sufficient for us to carry this tradition forward as solely a time for individual reflection. Rabbi Tarfon, who lived during and after the Second Temple period, said "You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to evade it." I leave you, finally, with this question: before we can begin the work, need we not first determine what it is?