Thanks to Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster for this guest post. Rabbi Kahn-Troster is Director of Education and Outreach for Rabbis for Human Rights North America.

In Judaism, confession is a group experience. On Yom Kippur, we stand together as a community and in one voice confess our collective sins before God. Amidst the various lists of transgressions, the Al Chet prayer contains a line that deals with sustenance: Al chet she chatanu liphanecha b’ma’achal u’mishteh, literally: “For the sin we have sinned before You through food and drink.” “Food and drink” is often translated as “gluttony,” which narrows the sin to the idea that we are confessing to having eaten more than our share, wantonly, without thinking. I think the original translation is helpful—we have committed sins through all kinds of acts of eating and drinking, but also through the way our food is produced, distributed, and wasted.

In an earlier post, I discussed the idea of doing food teshuvah or repentance: a gradual changing of mindset to try to do better to eat more consciously and sustainably. The comments to the post rightly pointed out the dangers of associating food with sin. There are so many issues to deal with when we make food choices. In the end, over-active guilt about each bite might end up back firing, leaving people to their old habits rather than dealing responsibly with questions like “Is it better to eat local but non-organic, or organic but from 3,000 miles away?” and “What if the only fruit my child will eat are strawberries and it’s the dead of winter?” Indeed, one of the problems with the American diet is that we’ve become so obsessed with the minutia of what goes into our mouths that we have forgotten to take pleasure in eating. We can see the corn stalks but not the field.

I want to suggest that this line of the Al Chet is on to something slightly different. First, its about responsibility. The formulation “We have sinned” requires us to admit that it’s not the chocolate mousse cake that is sinful. We’re the ones who take food for granted in a time when so many people are food insecure.

Perhaps more important is the reminder that this sin is before God—it’s not just about eating sustainably but about eating sacredly. We have to remember the Jewish version of Michael Pollan’s basic rule about eating: “Eat kosher food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Say a bracha.” When we forget to acknowledge that our sustenance depends on God and that we are blessed each day to be able to enjoy it, then we have missed the mark. Judaism provides us with ways to reinforce the sacred nature of our food—as my teacher David Kraemer taught me, we say a bracha not to make the food holy but because it is holy to begin with—saying a bracha thanks God for giving us permission to eat it, and only then does it becomes mundane. On Yom Kippur, we acknowledge as a community that we have been blind to God’s blessings.

There is a beautiful paragraph in the prayer U’netaneh Tokef that describes humankind’s fleeting presence on earth as compared to God’s eternity. One line reads: B’nafsho yavi lachmo, with a person’s very life he or she earns bread. We spend our lives focused on the basics of sustaining ourselves one more day. Learning to eat sacredly means to try to see past those blinders.

Looking deeper, we can see more in the Al Chet to inform our sacred eating. Another line asks forgiveness for sins done knowingly and unknowingly. As sacred eaters, we learn not to eat unknowingly, even if changing our behavior takes a bit longer. In light of recent scandals in the kosher food industry, we should also take to heart the line about sins in our business dealings (Masah u’matan). When standing before God, we cannot compartmentalize our religious obligations from our ethical obligations, and our sacred eating must reflect that synthesis.

It’s especially poignant that we recite this line of the Al Chet on a day when we are fasting. I, like I am sure many of you, end up dreaming about bagels and water as the last hours of Yom Kippur tick down. Most days of the year we can commit this sin. On Yom Kippur, we can’t. This offers us a fantastic opportunity to live our lives differently as soon as the holiday is over—we can begin to eat sacredly as we break our fast.

G’mar chatimah tovah—may each of us be inscribed this year for good in the Book of Life.