There are no guilty men in prison. So it is said. No person considers himself to be a bad person. He thinks, ‘Even if I did something wrong once, I am still basically a good person.  And when you look at all the circumstances, you will see that I had no choice, so I am not to blame.’  This feeling is, fundamentally, essential for self-preservation. No one can last long thinking he is a downright evil guy. But a person’s healthy positive self-image should not blind him to his own wrong doings. But it does tend to, so it is necessary to investigate deeply and find one’s wrong doings.

But this investigation is only useful if it helps you to change. If you won’t change anyway, then better not to bother.  And so, in Maimonides’ description of repentance along with recounting one’s sins goes the resolve to change, tshuva. In fact, there are 4 elements, remorse for the past errors, restitution where needed, commitment not to repeat them in the future, and the verbalization of all them. In other words, you must list, out loud, all your past wrong doings and you must state your commitment not to do the anymore. Verbalizing your commitment makes it more real and more binding. And by repeating this often, you reinforce your commitment.  So like an AA member, a Jew should recommit himself to his new path, yearly, monthly, even daily. He should go over his past sins, remind himself of the harm he caused, remorse and resolve again never to repeat them.  This is called Cheshbon HaNefesh, literally, the mathematics of the soul, or to give a more useful translation, an accounting of the soul.

People often think of big sins and small sins.  I may do some things wrong, but the big stuff, the Ten Commandments, that stuff I do keep.  This is another way of feeling good about yourself.  You turn all your sins into trivial matters but the elusive, illusionary big stuff you keep.  What that big stuff really is, your are not sure.  But you keep it, or at least you think you keep it.  Maimonides provides a method for determining what the Torah considers to be something big or something little (or in between), and he describes how each is forgiven.  And so we reach some more soul math:

1. If a person violates a positive command which is not punishable by premature death, he is forgiven at the moment he repents.
2. If a person violates a prohibition which is not punishable by death, he is forgiven on the Yom Kippur following his repentance.
3. If a person violates a law which is punishable by death, he must repent, live through a Yom Kippur, and endure suffering in this world to be forgiven.
4. If a person sinned and desecrated Gods name in so doing, he must do the above, but he is not forgiven until he dies.

Always in this list, there must be repentance, whether big sin or little.  And so nothing can be left out of the Cheshbon HaNefesh, nothing can be trivialized.  But why exactly is Yom Kippur pushed into the equation? What does Yom Kippur do for us?  Is it just an arbitrary time frame to see if the person does not go back to his wrong ways? Perhaps.  Or maybe it just an appendix left over from a time when it was really used.

Let’s ask, ‘Can a person ever be forgiven without repenting?’  Yes …kind of.  The scapegoat, sent to the desert on Yom Kippur would atone for case 2 above without the person having to repent.  But that is because the High Priest in the Temple repented the sins of all the Jews before he took the goat out to the desert.  So the individual didn’t need to repent, but there did need to be a kind of surrogate repentance. Today without a Temple, the Jew must verbally repent his sins to be forgiven, and by doing this on Yom Kippur he gains atonement for case 2 and possible case 3 sins (what Jew hasn’t suffered a little?)  Let’s not think about case 4. In the past, Yom Kippur served an essential role for atonement.  Today, without a high priest, we must take a more active role in our own gaining forgiveness. As the mussaf prayer recounts the procedures the High Priest followed, we should put ourselves in his shoes, or rather, his bare feet.

It is worth noting that the High Priest could not possible have listed every particular sin each Jew committed.  He must have only listed general categories of sins, and this too worked.  This is the source for the current practice in the Yom Kippur prayer of confessing the acrostic list of categories of sin, Al Chet.  Like the High Priest, we can minimally fulfill our obligation to recount our particular sins by stating all their categories.

Math has its beginnings in counting. What role does counting, enumerating, recounting our sins have?  I once showed my resume to a friend.  He pointed out that I need to give numbers to things.  How many people did I mange, how many servers did I administer. Giving numbers gives a clearer idea of what is going on.  People might think they did nothing wrong, or worse they might think they did innumerable things wrong.  By counting our deeds, and putting a number on them, it brings us down to Earth. We see that the wrong things are not innumerable.  And suddenly we can fix them.  When we have a vague feeling of some things out there that we did, we can’t assess them and they start to seem larger than they are.  Counting makes our mission doable.