LEV175 Expiation demands a ritual, some dramatic representation of the removal of sin and the wiping cleaning of the past. That is clear. Yet Rambam [Maimonides] does not explain why Yom Kippur demanded a rite not used on other days of the year when sin or guilt offerings were brought. Why was the first goat, the one on which the lot "To the Lord" fell and which was offered as a sin offering [this verse] not sufficient? The answer lies in the dual character of the day. The Torah states: (Leviticus 16:29-30). Two quite distinct processes were involved on Yom Kippur. First there was kappara, atonement. This is the normal function of a sin offering. Second, there was tahara, purification, something normally done in a different context altogether, namely the removal of tum'a, ritual defilement, which could arise from a number of different causes, among them contact with a dead body, skin disease, or nocturnal discharge. Atonement has to do with guilt. Purification has to do with contamination or pollution. These are usually two separate worlds. On Yom Kippur they were brought together. Why? As we have already noted, we owe to anthropologists like Ruth Benedict the distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures. [Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 1946] Shame is a social phenomenon. It is what we feel when our wrongdoing is exposed to others. It may even be something we feel when we merely imagine other people knowing or seeing what we have done. Shame is the feeling of being found out, and our first instinct is to hide. That is what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden after they had eaten the forbidden fruit. They were ashamed of their nakedness and they hid. Guilt is a personal phenomenon. It has nothing to do with what others might say if they knew what we had done, and everything to do with what we say to ourselves. Guilt is the voice of conscience, and it is inescapable. You may be able to avoid shame by hiding or not being found out, but you cannot avoid guilt. Guilt is self-knowledge. There is another difference, which explains why Judaism is overwhelmingly a guilt rather than a shame culture. Shame attaches to the person. Guilt attaches to the act. It is almost impossible to remove shame once you have been publicly disgraced. It is like an indelible stain on your skin. Shakespeare has Macbeth say, after his crime, "Will these hands ne'er be clean?" In shame cultures, wrongdoers tend either to go into exile, where no one knows their past, or to commit suicide. Playwrights have them die. Guilt makes a clear distinction between the act of wrongdoing and the person of the wrongdoer. The act was wrong, but the agent remains, in principle, intact. That is why guilt can be removed, "atoned for," by confession, remorse, and restitution. "Hate not the sinner, but the sin" is the basic axiom of a guilt culture. Normally, sin and guilt offerings, as their name imply, are about guilt. They atone. But Yom Kippur deals not only with our sins as individuals. It also confronts our sins as a community bound by mutual responsibility. It deals, another words, with the social as well as the personal dimension of wrongdoing. Yom Kippur is about shame as well as guilt. Hence their has to be purification (the removal of the stain) as well as atonement. (continued at [[LEV153]] Leviticus 14:7 open SACKS 187).