Yom Kippur begins Sunday night -- the most serious 25 hours on the Jewish calendar. We fast, pray, confess, remember those who have passed, and hope to be inscribed in the Book of Life. It is a time of introspection and self-questioning. What did I do this past year? Who did I hurt? What did I refuse to see? And hardest of all, can I actually change going forward?

That question is what teshuvah (often translated as "repentance," though the word literally means return) is all about. As one rabbi shared, "Guilt is cheap. You feel badly for a minute, apologize, and then go right back to doing what you were doing before. That is not teshuvah."

Rabbi Jay Strear recently wrote, "Maimonides described teshuvah as requiring three things: recognition, seeing clearly what happened without minimizing it; oral confession, naming it aloud, which changes your relationship to it in a way that thinking it privately does not; and commitment to change, identifying specifically what will be different." Teshuvah is about returning to the person you want to be.

Think about the Vidui prayer during the Yom Kippur service. It is the central confession of the day (read the full text here). We recite it in the plural. We have sinned. We have transgressed. We have acted wrongly. You are confessing to sins you probably never committed. And doing together with others who are also confessing to the same sins they may not have committed.

Yom Kippur is not about standing alone before God saying, "I messed up." It is about recognizing that we belong to something larger than ourselves. We stand together, admit the whole community is capable of failure, and take responsibility together.

Last week would have been my mother's 84th birthday. Her two favorite television shows were Perry Mason and Hogan's Heroes. My fun fact for the week -- Hogan’s Heroes premiered on September 17, 1965 -- barely 20 years after Allied troops liberated the death camps.

For those who know the show, it was a sitcom about POWs running circles around their bumbling German captors. For viewers in 1965, the Holocaust was not ancient history. It happened in their lifetime. Parents lived through it, relatives died because of it, and for some, survivors lived down the street.

Do you realize who was actually wearing those German uniforms on the show?

Werner Klemperer, who played the endlessly outwitted Colonel Klink, was a German Jew whose family fled the Nazis in 1933. John Banner, the oblivious ("I see nothing.") Sergeant Schultz, was an Austrian Jewish refugee. Leon Askin, who played General Burkhalter, and Howard Caine, who played Major Hochstetter of the Gestapo, both came from Jewish families forced out of Europe. And Robert Clary, the cheerful Corporal LeBeau, was a Holocaust survivor imprisoned at Buchenwald who lost most of his family.

These actors, all whose real lives were impacted by the Nazis, would decide how those characters would be portrayed. Klemperer reportedly insisted, as a condition of taking the role, that Colonel Klink could never win.

There is something in all of this that connects to Yom Kippur (perhaps only in my mind). Kol Nidre, recited before the fast begins, is technically a legal formula about vows. However, over centuries it took on added emotional weight for Jews who, under persecution, would live a dual reality of who they were and who they had to pretend to be.

That is what those actors were doing on Hogan's Heroes. They were literally putting on the uniform of the people who tried to destroy them. They controlled the joke, and the joke was on the Nazis.

On Yom Kippur, we also change our uniform. Many wear a kittel, a plain white robe with no pockets, no status, no rank -- the opposite of a military uniform -- and, according to tradition, the same simple garment we are to be buried in. Where the Nazi uniform on Hogan's Heroes was a costume of false power, the kittel is clothing of true humility that removes power away entirely. 

Yom Kippur also asks us to confront the gap between appearance and reality. Most of the year, without acknowledging it, we "perform" in our professional, family, and public worlds. Do we truly let our guard down and just be who we are while honestly and openly sharing how we feel? Just look at the seemingly perfect lives everyone is living on social media. Yom Kippur strips that away. We fast, pray, confess, and admit that we are imperfect people trying to do better.

Hogan's Heroes was a silly sitcom. It also drew real criticism, then and since, for making comedy out of a Nazi POW camp. However, the show was not funny because Nazism was funny. It worked because the power relationship had flipped. Several Jewish actors refused to let the people who caused the suffering to have the last word. They took a story once written about them and rewrote its ending.

That matters, because Yom Kippur, in its own way, is about taking the script back. The Vidui provides the words, but after reciting them we decide the actual change inside of us. And teshuvah means we each refuse to allow the worst thing we have done to become the final word on who we truly are.

Each Yom Kippur we admit our failures, remember those we have lost, and ask for another chance. We say "we," not "them." Because each individual is not only responsible for what they did, but for the entire community of which they are a part.

Wishing you and your loved ones a meaningful fast and a positive year ahead.

G'mar Chatimah Tovah.