What if the greatest Yom Kippur begins one minute after Yom Kippur ends?
The shofar sounds. The fast ends. People embrace, eat and return home. There is a rare feeling of cleanliness.
Then the next morning arrives.
The phone returns. The pressure returns. The same annoying person, the same work, the same house, the same temptations.
That is where the real test begins.
Maimonides defines complete repentance as meeting the same situation again, having the ability to repeat the wrongdoing, and choosing differently because of teshuvah.
Not at Kol Nidrei. Not in the tears of Ne’ilah. When the same situation returns.
A person can pass through twenty-six sacred hours and then return to the same mechanisms that created the year for which he asked forgiveness.
So the great question is not only what we accept upon ourselves on Yom Kippur. We need to choose one ordinary moment in which repentance will meet reality.
Perhaps the holiest moment is the first moment after Yom Kippur when life gives us the chance to become the person we promised yesterday that we wanted to be - and this time we choose differently.