THE ESCAPE OF THE SCAPEGOAT

Finding a scapegoat, attaching all of one's sins onto a goat and letting it loose in the wilderness to become lost and never find its way home, polluting someone with your filth.

A scapegoat to blame it all on, a reason to not take the blame, a reason to not admit fault, a reason to say it is all because of another and that you are not the guilty party, having supposed but unfounded innocence, absolving oneself of all regret, not asking for forgiveness, saying it is all because of another and that you have nothing to do with the problem, saying you are an angel but actually wearing the horns.

Taking all your wrongdoings and thrusting them upon another, to paint them in a color black, painting the goat a black color but being the one who is really black, to say the goat is at fault and you are not. To take a white goat, a goat of true innocence and paint him black.  But the truth being that the blackness is of your transgressions and yours alone, not the goat's at all.

A goat who then cannot find his way home, a goat wandering around like the Wandering Jew, hoping for a Promised Land, wandering this way and then that, wandering for 40 years.

Finding a goat in your backyard and taking the goat in as one of your household pets, adding him to your farm, absolving him of all sins that never were his to begin with, blessing this goat, cleaning the goat and not feeding him garbage, asking for forgiveness from G-d and the person you wronged to take away the wrongs of the world that were thrust upon this innocent goat.

Then drinking delicious white pure goat's milk and churning the goat's milk into vanilla ice cream, not to blame it anymore on the goat, not to force a goat to bear your faults, instead to eat and drink the delights of the goat's milk and be nurtured and satiated by a goat who is clean and absolved of all darkness, yours and theirs.

This article about a goat, a scapegoat, is from this week's Torah Portion. We read in The Torah about the Israelites casting all their sins upon a goat and then leading the goat out into the wilderness and he gets lost there with the load of sins that never were his in the first place. This was the first "scapegoat," a real goat who was forced to take the blame for the sins of others and then suffered for it because he got lost and never found his way home.

The better way to handle having committed a transgression is to ask forgiveness and be sorry and not to commit the transgressions again, instead of blaming another for your own wrongs and causing him to suffer when he is innocent.

On this day of Yom HaShoah, the commemoration date to remember the 6 million Jews who were brutally murdered in The Holocaust, we can understand that the Jews were picked out by the German Nazis as scapegoats like this original goat whose story is in The Torah. The Nazis said the Jews were to blame for all the wrongdoings that happen in the world, that it is us, the Jews who are the single one cause of all the world's problems. The Nazis picked us out as scapegoats, when we were as innocent as the white pet goat that was then painted black with the sins of others, we were painted black by the Nazis who were the ones who were really to blame, not the Jews.

But, to not let this day of Yom HaShoah get you sick, to not allow these 6 million murders to cause you an inability to function as you normally do, to ask G-d to keep you healthy throughout this day of remembering the murder of our ancestors. To use your state of health to honor these 6 million deceased who deserve to be honored, and to put an end to using people as scapegoats when the fault lies really on those who cause the transgressions and blame others for their own wrongdoing.