Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which is described in Leviticus 16. The Jerusalem Post has an article on a curious practice that some Jews follow in the days before Yom Kippur. In the absence of a temple and the blood sacrifices that provide atonement for sins, some Jews today observe a sacrificial ceremony with a chicken.

Clasping the necks of the three fowl with both hands, the man swung them counterclockwise around his wife’s head. His faint incantation reflected the hope of devotees who practice kapparot, which is to transfer their sins onto the swinging fowl: “This is my exchange, my substitute, my atonement. This rooster shall go to its death, but I shall go to a good, long life, and to peace.”

I observed this ceremony in Mahane Yehuda a few days ago. Sometimes the rabbi working behind the table would swing the chicken around the individual’s head. Sometimes the participant would wave the chicken around his own head.

The haredi shohet, his smock slathered in feathers and blood, grabbed the birds in the same manner each time. He first clasped their wings behind their backs, then pulled them supine and yanked their heads further back. He plucked a tuft of hair from their necks, slit the newly bare patches, pinched their beaks shut, and dropped them headfirst into one of the table’s 21 open receptacles. Most of the birds continued to jerk and struggle, sometimes for well over a minute, before being placed on a mechanized defeathering rack, declawed, and gutted.

Not all Jews follow this custom.

Quoting the Encyclopedia Judaica, Hakol Chai’s Web site states, “Several Jewish sages strongly opposed kapparot. Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham Aderet, one of the foremost Jewish scholars during the 13th century, considered it a heathen superstition. This opinion was shared by the Ramban (Nachmanides) and Rabbi Joseph Caro, who called it ‘a foolish custom’ that Jews should avoid.”

But no one can deny that a blood sacrifice was what was required in biblical times.

“Look, the idea of sacrificing an animal in place of yourself – the scapegoat – exists in the Torah,” said Rabbi Professor Daniel Sperber of the Department of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University. “The original scapegoat was a national scapegoat. Kapparot is a personal scapegoat – scapegoat or scapechicken, whatever you wish to call it. But the practice of kapparot as we now know it dates from the Gaonic period, roughly the 7th or 8th century CE.”

No one should be surprised that animal rights activists are up in arms.

Hakol Chai spokesman Tali Lavie agreed with that statement. “We don’t think you need to kill innocent animals to redeem yourself,” he said. “The public can do other things that do not harm animals and still have their religious necessities fulfilled. You can give money, not chickens, to children.”

Horn said few of the protesters were secular. “The objection to kapparot is coming from the religious people themselves,” he noted. “At Yom Kippur we ask for mercy for ourselves. It’s absurd that we behave so unmercifully to these creatures.”

They make a good observation – surely these chickens do not deserve to die. And surely God is not going to accept the blood of an innocent chicken to cover over the sins of a wicked man. Isaiah said that one man would bear the sin of many and that by his undeserved punishment, Israel would be healed. This is the atonement that God accepts – not by the death of a chicken, nor through the works of prayer and fasting.