Let it never be said that Christians hold a monopoly on religious silliness.

My childhood home town was heavily populated by those media-controlling, Hollywood-running, Gentile-eating boogymen: the Jews. As a result, I am now one of the tiny handful of Americans who actually notices when non-Christian religious holidays roll around. For instance, sundown tonight marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement.

Now, the modern observation of Yom Kippur (as directed by the Reform and Conservative Rabbis that I was exposed to) is a day of fasting and contemplation, and is a relatively quiet affair. However, a related ritual called Kapparot* takes a somewhat more dramatic approach to atonement.

Kapparot was first introduced around the ninth century, when some Jewish scholars pointed out that the Hebrew word "gever" means both "man" and "rooster." The scholars concluded that punishment of the bird could be used as a substitution for punishment of the man, and thus a chicken could be used as a moral whipping boy on the day before Yom Kippur. It wouldn't completely cover all the atonement (because if it did, what would be the point of Yom Kippur?) but it would "take some atonement off the top," as it were. Here's how it works:

Buy a gender-appropriate white chicken (roosters for boys, hens for girls). Recite some passages from Isaiah 11:9, Psalms 107:10, 14, and 17-21, and Job 33:23-24. Swing the chicken around your head by its neck, while saying "This is my atonement, this is in exchange for me, this is my substitute." Then sacrifice the chicken and give its flesh to the poor. For bonus generosity points, feed its entrails to the birds.

This got me to thinking. In addition to the hilarity-related benefits of chicken swinging, we could draw upon the ritual of Kapparot to enrich other aspects of our lives. For instance, one of our English words for a young human ("kid") can also refer to a young goat. Instead of using time-outs to dicipline a misbehaving youth, require that your child swing a goat kid around his head while asking to be forgiven. Then have the child sacrifice the goat and feed its entrails to the family dog. If your child isn't terrified into obedience by this experience, I can assure you that the tot is possessed by Satan.


*Let me stress that the ritual of Kapparot is not described in the Torah or the Talmud, and many Rabbis oppose it. Some Rabbis worry that people will not understand the significance of the ritual, and in recent times there have been concerns about the obvious distress inflicted upon the hapless fowl, while still other Rabbis have decried the ritual as a pagan superstition. Few have been willing to directly question the sanity of swinging birds around your head to atone for your sins. Of course, that isn't as surprising when you remember that the Jews spent 40 years wandering the desert at the direction of a conflagrant hedge.