“One for the L-rd, and one for Azazel.” With the deepest service of the holiest day — the incense of the Holy of Holies and the two identical goats chosen by lot — Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, shlit’a, opened the inner meaning of Yom Kippur before a congregation who had gathered to prepare their hearts for the great and awesome day.
Thank G-d, it is a very great joy to complete the holy Torah. And as the congregation stood on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Rabbi asked them to pause and grasp what the day actually is — because only one who knows what Rosh Hashanah is can know what Yom Kippur is meant to accomplish within us.
His answer lay entirely in the Seder HaAvodah — the Order of the Service of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest — and above all in two of its most essential acts: the burning of the incense in the Holy of Holies, and the two goats, one for the L-rd and one for Azazel. To understand these is to understand the journey of the soul.
Two Corruptions: the Tree of Knowledge and the Calf
The Rabbi began at the beginning. The children of Israel left Egypt in the month of Nisan and walked seven weeks until the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, on the sixth of Sivan. Moses our Teacher ascended to heaven for forty days and forty nights, and descended on the seventeenth of Tammuz — and on that very day the people sinned with the calf. Moses broke the tablets, and then ascended again on the first of Elul to ask for pardon, atonement and forgiveness.
The Holy One, blessed be He, had wanted to blot out Israel for the sin of the calf. But Moses stood in prayer for forty days more, and every day of those days the people blew the shofar, repented, and took resolutions upon themselves. On the fortieth day — the tenth of Tishrei, Yom Kippur — Moses descended with the second tablets, and the verse was fulfilled: “For on this day He shall atone for you, to purify you from all your sins; before the L-rd you shall be pure.”
The Rabbi then traced the world’s two great corruptions. The first was the sin of the first man, who on the first of Tishrei ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and brought the curse upon the world — by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, in pain you shall bear children, thirty-nine curses in all. The second corruption, specific to the people of Israel, was the sin of the calf.
What was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Where good and evil are woven together, and it becomes hard to tell them apart. You see good — perhaps it is evil? You see evil — perhaps it is good? That is what Adam brought into the world: confusion, and the mixing of good and evil.
The first of Tishrei is therefore the day of creation, the day of man, the day of judgment, and the day of corruption — all at once. On Rosh Hashanah, the entire world passes before Him like a flock of sheep: Jews and gentiles alike are judged. On Rosh Hashanah, who is not remembered — for the sword, for famine, for captivity, for plunder?
A Gift for Israel Alone
But Yom Kippur, taught the Rabbi, is not the day of judgment for the nations of the world. It is a gift that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave to the people of Israel alone — the very day Moses came down with the Tablets of the Covenant. “For on this day He shall atone for you” — this is for Israel, and not for the nations.
And because it is a gift, it carries a power that no other day carries. Even if, G-d forbid, a harsh decree was written for a person on Rosh Hashanah — illness, poverty, Heaven forbid death, or some other difficult thing — Yom Kippur is the day given to Israel on which all of it can be annulled, repaired, and set right once again.
Everything is written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. How many people last year were alive, and suddenly were run over; suddenly found they had a disease; suddenly lost their money; suddenly passed away. A person does not know what is written on their back. Yom Kippur is the day where a person has the power to turn and change everything.
The Rabbi described the day in the words of awe it deserves: a holy and awesome day, when all the angels and the whole world are in fear and trembling, a day so sacred that there is a dispute in the Gemara whether the day itself atones. It is a Yom Tov — a festival — with a service unlike any other, in which five things are forbidden, and in which a person who is ill and must eat makes Kiddush.
The Incense: Atonement for the Soul
Then the Rabbi entered the Holy of Holies. The first of the two great services was the burning of the incense — and he stressed how severe it was: if the Kohen Gadol omitted even one of its ingredients, he was liable to death. He had to prepare the incense fine, fine, very fine, ground and crushed.
What does the incense do? It stops the plague. When Korah and his assembly rebelled against Moses and a plague broke out, Moses told Aaron to take the incense — and the plague stopped. In the Holy Zohar it is told that when a plague struck the city of Lod, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai sent word to offer incense in the four corners of the city, and the plague ceased. Even the Angel of Death gave Moses the incense as a gift when Moses ascended on high.
And why does the incense stop the plague? Because the plague comes from divine wrath. The Rabbi taught that a person sins on two levels: with the body, and with the soul. When a person eats what is forbidden, desecrates Shabbat, or commits a physical transgression, the body has sinned — and for that, the sacrifices offered outside the Holy of Holies atone. But when a person sins, he also damages the holy soul, the most sacred and elevated inner part of a human being.
The burning of the incense, ground very, very fine, is to atone for and purify what the person’s soul corrupted. This is why the incense has the power to stop the plague — because the plague strikes the person’s spirit, the person’s soul. My G-d, the soul You gave me is pure; You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me, You preserve it within me.
So when we stand on Yom Kippur and recite the Order of the Service — “and let our lips substitute for bulls” — we must intend in our soul, in our mind, in our thought, that what we say with our lips is as though we had performed the act itself. The incense in the Holy of Holies purifies the spirit; the outer sacrifices purify the body.
The Two Goats and the Secret of the Lot
The second great service of the Holy of Holies was the two goats. The Mishnah in Yoma teaches that on Yom Kippur they would bring two goats — both the same height, both the same weight, born on the same day, identical in every way — and they would cast lots: one for the L-rd, and one for Azazel.
One was sacrificed to the L-rd in the holiest place, ascending to the highest level; the other was taken by a designated man out to the desert and cast down to Azazel. On the goat for Azazel they would tie a red thread to its horns — and the moment it was thrown from the mountain, the red would turn white: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” It was the sign that the Holy One, blessed be He, had forgiven the people of Israel for their iniquities.
But the Rabbi pressed deeper. Why must it be by lot? Where else in the Torah do we find a lot? On Purim — for Haman cast a pur, a lot, seeking to destroy all the Jews. And the Sages teach that Purim is like Kippur, indeed greater than Yom Kippur, and in both there was a lot: here, the lot for the two goats; there, the lot of the wicked Haman. The task is to understand the depth of the lot — how a single moment, a single choice, holds within it the power to fall to Azazel or to ascend to the L-rd.
Building the Torah Before the Holy Day
From the depths of the Temple, the Rabbi turned to the community before him, because the eve of Yom Kippur is also a time of building. He spoke of the fund for the Torah scholars of Shuva Israel — a new, organized system so that every scholar would be known by name, so that every donor would know exactly which scholar they support, “Yissachar and Zevulun,” straight from the source to the recipient without middlemen.
He spoke with a broken heart of the students and the widows, and of a responsibility that had been resting on his soul: “We would cry only for the students and for the widows — this is the most important thing to us.” The goal was set: to reach two hundred and sixty Torah students by the end of Yom Kippur, so that the community would enter the holy day with merits and not need to “sell” the honors.
Know that at this time, Torah and charity — and charity saves from death — is no less than Selichot, no less than the annulment of curses. Charity purifies a person before Yom Kippur.
As the count came down through the final hours — a hundred, then ninety-one, then seventy-five, seventy-four remaining — the Rabbi blessed each and every soul who came forward by name: the righteous families, the self-sacrificing teachers, the young students who would one day be great lights, the widows and orphans supported quietly through the year, and the great givers of kindness without whose quiet work so much would not be built.
The takeaway for every one of us this Yom Kippur: The service of the Kohen Gadol is not distant history — it is the map of our own avodah. The outer sacrifices purify the body; the incense purifies the soul. The two goats and the lot teach that at every moment we choose: toward the L-rd, or toward Azazel. And Yom Kippur is not merely a fast — it is a gift given to Israel alone, a day on which a person has the power to turn and change everything.
As Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, shlit’a, taught: “Yom Kippur is a holy and awesome day. Everything is written on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur. We have been given an opportunity to set everything right once again.”
May we all be sealed in the Book of Life. Amen.
