Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the people, putting them on the head of the goat, which shall be sent away into the wilderness. The community's sins are literally placed on an animal who bears them away.
My therapist pointed out that we still do this - we place our sins on people (parents, spouses, whoever we blame), and we send them away. We don't integrate our own responsibility. The scapegoat mechanism continues.
But the ritual itself teaches something: sin needs to be named, confessed, literally handed over. And then... it goes away. Not denied, not minimized, but actually released. We need that both psychologically and spiritually - someone to name our failures to, then to be free of them.
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