Our parasha, which deals with a variety of sacrifices, devotes an extended section to the

kathos, the sin offering, as brought by different individuals, first by the high priest,

then the community as a whole, then a leader, and finally an ordinary individual.

The whole passage sounds strange to modern ears,

not only because sacrifices haven't been offered for almost two millennia since the destruction

of the Second Temple, but also because it's hard for us to understand the very concepts of sin

and atonement as they're dealt with in the Torah. You see, the puzzle is that the

sins for which an offering had to be brought were those committed inadvertently, Boshugig. Either the

sinner had forgotten the law or some relevant fact. So to give a contemporary example, supposing the

phone rings on Shabbas, and you answer it,

you'd only be liable for a sin offering if either you forgot the law that you can't answer a phone

on Shabbas, or you forgot the fact that today is Shabbas. For a moment, you thought it was

Friday or Sunday. Now, it's just that kind of act that we

don't see as a sin at all was a mistake. You forgot. You didn't mean to do anything wrong. And when you

realize that inadvertently you've broken shabbas, you're more likely to feel regret than remorse.

You feel sorry, but not guilty. We think of sin as something

you do intentionally, yielding to temptation, perhaps, or in a moment of rebellion. That's what Jewish

law calls Bezadon in biblical Hebrew or Bamezid in rabbinic Hebrew. That's the kind of act we'd have

thought calls for a sin offering. But actually such an act can't be atoned for by an offering at

all. So how are we to make sense of the sin offering? The answer is that there are three

dimensions of wrongdoing between us and God.

The first is guilt and shame. When we sin deliberately and intentionally, we know inwardly

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