Kaparah, the Hebrew word for atonement, means a covering over. The idea is not that atonement effaces our sins. It cannot. They will always be there, along with everything else we and everyone else has ever done—an endless and indissoluble concatenation of cause and effect, stretching back to the beginning of time and reaching forward to its end as well. When we make atonement, kaparah, we are covering over our wrongdoing with the will to behave differently.
