When the Thread Stays Red

During the Yom Kippur temple service, we find three curious details that invite reflection.

The Crimson Thread

In the Temple, they tied a crimson thread to the scapegoat before driving it into the wilderness. The Mishnah teaches (Yoma 6:8) that the thread would turn white—a sign that the people's sins had been forgiven. The Gemara (Rosh Hashanah 31b) records that after the passing of Shimon HaTzadik in the latter half of the 2nd temple, the cloth stopped turning white. The thread stayed red, so the priests stopped displaying the cloth to avoid public distress.

Why hide it? If the sign of forgiveness fails and causes distress, how does concealing it remove the problem?

The Identical Goats

The Torah commands that the two goats must be identical. Same height, same coloring, same value. You couldn't tell them apart. The Mishnah (Yoma 6:1) and Gemara (Yoma 62a) insist on this: they must be equal in appearance and worth. Then lots are cast: one becomes holy, sacrificed on the altar. The other is driven out to Azazel, sent away bearing the sins of Israel.

Why must they be identical? What does it mean that these two fates, sanctification and expulsion, require being exact parallels?

The Courtyard Miracle

On Yom Kippur, the courtyard of the Temple was packed. The Mishnah (Avot 5:5) records the miracle: the people stood pressed together—omedim tzefufim—body against body, no room to move. But when they bowed—mishtachavim revachim—when everyone prostrated themselves—suddenly there was space. Room enough for each person to touch their forehead to the ground without touching another soul.

How does bowing, which requires more room, create space where there was none?

These aren't puzzles to solve, they are descriptions of something true about how we change.

The Hallway of the Ego

We live most of our lives convinced that certain things are fixed. This is who I am. This is what I cannot change. This fear, this pattern, this limitation—it feels as permanent as a wall. We build entire inner worlds around what we believe is immutable, and those beliefs shape everything we see.

The ego creates these structures. Not out of malice, but out of its desperate need for stability. It tells us: these boundaries are real, this narrowness is necessary, change is impossible. And because we live inside that framework, we can't see past it. The walls feel like walls because we've never tested whether they'll yield.

What if they're not walls at all? What if they're just perspectives held so rigidly that they've calcified into seeming facts?

The Bow That Opens Space

Think about standing in that courtyard. Bodies pressed on every side. You can't move. You can barely breathe. Everyone is trying to hold their ground, to not be pushed out, to maintain some boundary between self and other.

Then the moment comes to bow. A choice: stay upright, stay defended—or yield.

When we bow, when we surrender the grip, when we let go of holding our outline rigid—space appears, and new horizons suddenly open up. The path we couldn't see, the movement that felt impossible, the version of ourselves we couldn't imagine—all of it was there, we just did not allow ourselves to see it.

Fear, conditioning, habit, shame—these are the ego. They feel like immutable facts about who we are, but they're constructs we defend. And the defense is what keeps us locked in place. When we finally yield, when we stop insisting that limitation is reality, the room we needed appears. The crowdedness was never about the physical space. It was about how tightly we held ourselves.

What Must Be Released

The idea that surrendering the constructed identity is the step to finding new space for growth is illustrated in the ritual of the two goats. They must be identical, you couldn't tell which was which until the lots were cast. One is elevated, brought to the altar, made holy. The other is sent away into the wilderness, carrying what we need to release.

They must be identical because these aren't separate endeavors. The path to spiritual elevation and growth must come through the awareness of and surrender of the constructed self. One without the other is void. You can't elevate what you haven't been willing to release. You can't transform by holding onto the ego and expecting holiness to arrive anyway.

The goats are counterparts—bound together in the work of change.

What the Ego Won't See

The crimson thread that turned white. Perhaps this isn't so much about the physical properties of the thread changing color. Perhaps red is a symbol for danger, for stopping, for self-judgment. When we surrender and create new inner space, our perspective changes, and with it we perceive what was previously 'red' as a clean slate, not enslaved to a past but filled with the bright white light of possibility.

The shift from red to white happens in us, not in the thread.

The Thread Stays Red

But then the thread stops turning white. The Gemara records this happened after Shimon HaTzadik's death, in the latter part of the Second Temple period. Why?

Perhaps the people had become too rigid. Their egos too defended, too unwilling to yield. The inner work of surrender, of creating space, of allowing perspective to shift—it wasn't happening. They were going through the motions of the ritual but holding themselves tight, locked in the same patterns, unable to see differently. And so the thread stayed red. Not because forgiveness was withheld, but because they wouldn't allow the shift in vision that turns red to white.

And the priests conceal it.

Here's what makes that choice so brilliant: concealing the thread is a diagnosis.

One of the strangest tricks the ego plays is pretending things don't exist when we're not forced to look at them. The ego is a master of selective blindness. It will ignore, dismiss, rationalize away anything that threatens its structure, as long as it has the option to look away.

So when the priests conceal the thread, they're revealing something that's already true. They're saying: Look, we can ignore what we know is there. We can live with a hidden thread, pretend the question doesn't exist, go on as if nothing has changed.

And that's exactly how our ego keeps us from transformation. It keeps us from seeing the opening, the path, the possibility by letting us look away. By letting us treat what's hidden as if it's not there at all. The thread staying red and the thread being hidden are the same problem. Both are about vision locked by ego, a perspective that won't yield.

The Only Miracle That Matters

So the miracle of Yom Kippur isn't in the external sign, it's in us. It is our innate capacity to change, which awakens the moment we stop defending our limitations. It is the possibility that opens when we allow ourselves to see differently, to be differently; to fail and yet still grow, rather than remain forever locked in place.

The thread may stay red.

The goat may be driven out.

The courtyard may be packed.

But we have this capacity, to bow, to release, to see what we couldn't see before.

We have the capacity, to fail, to grow, to discover that we were never as fixed as we believed.

That's the only miracle that matters. The one that happens when you let go.