When I was a 16-year-old yeshiva boy studying in Jerusalem, my friends invited me to go with them to â??shlug kaparosâ? on the day before Yom Kippur. Though I grew up Orthodox, in Houston, I was not familiar with the term (which translates loosely as â??beat the atonementsâ?), but I was quickly off to the Mahane Yehuda market, where we muttered a quick prayer as a shochet waived a chicken over our heads. He slaughtered the animal and threw it into an overflowing bin destined for the poor. Later that day, fearing that I ruined the ritual by cheaply â??sharingâ? a chicken with others, I did it again, this time in the parking lot outside the Har Menuchot cemetery. (That shochet had run out of live chickens so we used a dead one instead.) As I recited Kol Nidre that evening, murmurs of angst crept into my head: Was that really a holy act? As it turns out, many commentators, both medieval and modern, have called it a grave mistake.
Like many rituals, kapparot emerged in the early medieval period as a folk custom that scholars later struggled to understand. They questioned the origins of the practice, which, like tashlikh, might appear as an attempt to magically manipulate oneâ??s fate.
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