JERUSALEM -- The schochet, the Hebrew term for a Kosher slaughterer, reaches into a yellow plastic crate full of white chickens and pulls one out. The chicken looks small, especially its sleek head, but it has wide, sprawled feet, like a puppy with massive paws that foreshadow the big dog to come. Beneath his thick, square, frameless lenses and wispy white beard, the schochet wears a black coat mottled with chicken dander and droplets of blood. A leather sheath for a sharp, thin blade rests in the corner of his coat pocket. A black yarmulke covers most of his head. From a distance, he is a blur -- only his forehead, his beard and the chicken he holds in front of his torso stand out against the black.
With his palm over the chicken's back, he positions his thumb under its right wing and his index finger under its left. He squeezes, and the animal's wings rise over its back and come together. His other three fingers support the chicken's breast. The customer, a middle-aged man with close-cropped gray hair, is wearing a light blue oxford shirt and black cotton slacks. He bows slightly at the schochet, who rotates his wrist, moving the chicken in tiny circles and mumbling. Before the man in the blue shirt has even opened his eyes or straightened his back, the schochet flips his wrist -- so that the chicken is facing skyward -- unsheathes his blade and slits the chicken's throat. He unceremoniously tosses the bird into one of 10 narrow, stainless-steel funnels to his right.
I am not touring a slaughterhouse; I am in the middle of a small West Jerusalem plaza that is covered by a large, low-hanging tarp. On this partly cloudy day, the tarp filters what sunlight exists, and the space underneath is hazy; the air is thick and heavy and putrid enough to make me nauseated even as I purposely breathe through my mouth. To get here, I passed a security guard and climbed a few steps into the plaza, entering an open space inside a ring of vendors. Each vendor has a stack of plastic crates filled with white chickens, as well as a long table holding two rows of deep, narrow, metal funnels, draining into large plastic bins on the ground. Set well behind each vendor is a machine for removing feathers from dead chickens. The machines sound like lawnmowers tackling thick weeds.
Another customer steps forward toward the schochet, who reaches into his crate and lifts out another chicken. He shows the customer how to hold the chicken so that it will not squawk or writhe. The customer raises it in the air, closes his eyes and then hands the chicken back to the schochet, who draws his blade across its neck. He throws the chicken into an empty funnel. Another customer, another chicken. And so it goes, at all five of the vendor tables in the plaza.
In the eight-day period between Rosh Hashanah (which took place last Saturday) and Yom Kippur (which is this coming Monday) Jews consider their sins over the past year and prepare to ask forgiveness from God. The practice of kapparot -- the transferring of an individual's sins to a chicken -- is a traditional part of that preparation. The ritual has no roots in the Torah or in the commentaries that spell out the laws of Jewish living, yet it has survived since the 9th century. In this tradition, individuals swing a chicken (a white one, to symbolize purity) over their heads three times while pronouncing that their sins are to be assigned to the animal. Then the schochet slaughters the chicken, reminding everyone present of the potential severity of God's judgment upon sinners. Customers donate the chicken -- or its equivalent value -- to feed the destitute a full meal before the daylong Yom Kippur fast. Some rabbis and other leaders have long condemned the practice; today, many Jews continue the tradition but omit the chicken, instead swinging charitable donations overhead, reciting the prayer and then donating their items to the needy. In the United States, traditional kapparot is practiced by only a small number of Jews, but here, in Israel, it is out in the open.
In some ways, witnessing kapparot met my expectations: It was both horrifying and compelling. Yet there was far less drama than I had envisioned. I had imagined a chicken swung with effort and conviction -- at least enough to trigger centrifugal force and flying feathers. Instead, I saw chickens raised overhead and rotated a bit, in lazy, pro forma movements. And many of the people who come to practice kapparot never touched their bird, allowing the schochet to hold the chicken over their heads before slaughter. Some customers chose to read the appropriate prayer themselves from laminated cards; others delegated this task, too, to the slaughterers. Some stayed while their chicken was drained, plucked and packaged. Others left quickly.
The biggest shock for me, though, was which Israelis I saw at the plaza. I had envisioned a ritual far more clandestine and far more limited to the ultra-observant fringes of the Jewish community. Those fringes are constantly visible in Jerusalem -- the men dressed in black hats and long matching coats, seemingly immune to the summer heat; the women in floor-length skirts and long sleeves, their hair covered by a wig or scarf. But these were not the customers I saw. At least half of the men did not wear kippot (skullcaps), and many of the women wore pants rather than skirts. These were average Israelis. Some had sought out kapparot; others, perhaps, were lured into an impulse ritual by the large banner outside the plaza. By participating in a practice that is medieval in its origins and overtones, many of these customers were stepping away from the modernity that dominates their lives the vast majority of the year. It's entirely possible that some of those I saw swing chickens will not even attend synagogue on Yom Kippur. (By contrast, the vast majority of observant American Jews would regard skipping temple on Yom Kippur -- the holiest day of the year -- as only slightly less shocking than swinging a chicken over their heads before slaughtering it.)
Kapparot customers are like Israeli society as a whole -- a discordant mix of tradition and modernity. In Jerusalem, it is common to see a man dressed as if he stepped out of a time machine from 18th-century Europe yammering into a tiny, state-of-the-art cell phone. Downtown, new buildings are designed with sleek lines and sweeping windows, but portions of the facades are constructed exclusively with the same rough-hewn white Jerusalem stone that was used to build the walls around the city almost 3,000 years ago.
Monday will mark the 30th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War here. From that war's aftermath -- the rise of a viable right-wing political opposition, the expansion of settlements, the arrival (and political organization) of more Jews from non-European backgrounds -- sprouted many of the tensions that divide Israelis today. Prior to 1973, external threats loomed so large as to overshadow many internal differences, but in the years since 1973, those external threats -- while never disappearing -- have sometimes receded just enough to allow Israel's internal contradictions a fuller airing. When the American media write about these tensions (which is rare, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tends to dominate headlines), they almost always portray them as the cause of conflicts between people -- peace activists and vigilante settlers, secular soldiers and yeshiva students, Ashkenazi elite and Sephardic workers.
Those divisions exist, of course, but they make for too facile a story line. The truth is that individual Israelis often embody conflicting political and philosophical impulses themselves. Which is why, in the days leading up to Yom Kippur, one can find ostensibly secular Jews paying to have chickens swung over their heads in the name of religious atonement. It all adds up to an odd -- perhaps unique -- balance that pervades Israeli culture and politics. Every thought, every decision, must satisfy modern realities, but also historical understandings. Even if many Israelis regard the past and the traditions it spawned with skepticism, they find in them a comforting familiarity. Most Israelis insist they are not religious, but when they turn to religion -- for a wedding, a funeral, a Bar or Bat Mitzvah -- they still turn directly to orthodoxy. At this time of year, that's bad news for the chickens.
Jeff Mandell is on a year-long leave of absence from the University of Chicago Law School. He is living in Jerusalem, where he is a Dorot Fellow and a Leifer Social Justice Fellow.
CORRECTION: Because of an editing error, the original version of this article incorrectly stated the location of the plaza where the author observed the practice of kapparot. It is in West Jerusalem, not the Old City.
