If you are a Jew and it is the night before Yom Kippur you cleanse your conscience, you let go of all the stupidities you have committed during the year. You atone. Put crudely this means that you find a scapegoat, like “The Devil made me do it”, or “Hillary Clinton”. If you are a frum Jew you do it by swinging a live chicken three times over your head. This transfers the swinger’s sins to the chicken. The practice is called Kapparot. The chickens come to the market stuffed into narrow crates. That is cruel, but we must remember that until recently all chickens spent their lives stuffed into narrow crates. Only lately are we invited to buy free range eggs, for example, eggs laid by hens who are raised on meadows where they can run and scratch for worms. I support that idea, a laudable step toward improving our collective attitude concerning the treatment of animals. But back to the business at hand.
People who are not Jews are called Goyim. The Goyim are sinful, too, but they don’t have an efficient mechanism to deal with that. They mistreat their chickens just as cruelly, and not just on Yom Kippur but all year long, before they chop them up and package them for the supermarket. It is a disgusting business either way and all my vegetarian friends agree. And the Goyim’s sins do not go anywhere, to boot.
The more merciful Jews practice Kapparot by swinging a bag of money around. Same result: the sins are transferred to the money. I do not know what happens to the swung money. It gets spent, I suppose. As for the sin-contaminated chickens, some are eaten, I learned. Those are the lucky ones. Many end up on the garbage pile.
I have an idea. What if we were to convince all the Chicken-Kapparot people to switch and become Money-Kapparot people? Picture this huge banner I have designed: JOIN US FOR YOM KIPPUR – COME AND HELP US SWING MONEY – SUPPORT CAGE FREE KAPPORES. This should go over well and would be good news, at least for Jewish chickens. And it might be an incentive for the rest of us to become more humane.
And then again it might not work because the practice is such an age old tradition and age old traditions are difficult to replace. Unless, of course, people see an advantage in doing things differently. We have witnessed such dramatic changes in our lifetime. We used to go to the store to buy something and then took it home to keep. We do not do this anymore. We now do it the other way around: first we buy something at home and then we take it to the store for a refund. We also used to use a special kind of very dirty green paper called money to pay for things. We don’t do this anymore, either. We may still go to the store occasionally but we pay by sticking plastic in a little box that is full of electronics. It reads our credit card, debits our account, and says “brrr!” when it is done
Now if a few overhead swings of a bag of coins can make a year’s supply of sin particles disappear I see no reason why a few electronic nano vibrations administered to a credit card by a scanner should not have the same effect. We would no longer have to swing anything over our heads. Instead there could be a scanner in every synagogue. Sinners would be encouraged to insert their card and just wait for the “brrr!”. It would be so simple, so easy. Not just Jewish temples, but churches would probably find this attractive as well. Malls, banks and other places of worship would, I trust, be delighted to offer such an extra service for a small fee. Before long the entire nation, in happy coexistence, will be seen chipping away at their sins.
The only problem remaining, some will say, are the jobs lost. Thanks for bringing this up, but this is the beauty of my plan: there are four thousand temples in the U.S.; each temple will install at least two scanners; it is common knowledge that one of them will always be out of order; former once-a-year pushcart operators will be retrained and turned into full time scanner fixers. I tell you, all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. I did not say that, however. Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss said it first.
©2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman. Picture credits: aqwwiki.wikidot.com
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