We would beat our breasts and wail: “We have done this, we have done that”—all possible sins were mentioned (including many I had never thought of), sins of commission and omission, sins deliberate and inadvertent. The terrifying thing was that one did not know whether one’s breast-beating was convincing to God, or whether one’s sins were even, in fact, forgivable. One did not know whether He would reinscribe one in the Book of Life, as the liturgy had it, or whether one would die and be cast into outer darkness.
