“He said the quiet part out loud.” That’s the in-vogue phrase to describe politicians who say something outrageous that everyone assumed they felt but was too extreme to admit.

The confessional, Ashamnu, is our liturgical opportunity to say the quiet part out loud. Maimonides makes the point that repentance is not possible without verbal confession. We have to actually verbalize our wrongdoing. Finding words for it is hard, but doing so allows us to make our confession specific and concrete. We repent for a particular sin, rather than suffer endlessly in an amorphous fog of undefined guilt.

To admit what we did wrong, in its many possible variations, (“We are guilty, we have been treacherous, we have stolen…)  is hard, emotionally and psychologically. Our tradition tries to make it easy for us in a number of ways.

First, we are all saying it together. None of us are being singled out as “the sinner in a group of saints.”

Second, there is a collective aspect to it—all the confessions are in the plural. We are guilty, we have been treacherous…Although we each bear our own personal responsibility, ultimately we stand before G-d as a community.

Third, the list is an alphabetic acrostic. We don’t dwell on every word, but repeat a chant. At different times, after different experiences, a particular word reverberates, striking a moral nerve. Then we know which sin is crying out for repentance and repair.

Fourth, we repeat the list many times over the course of the day. This way, we don’t have to hammer ourselves into submission or cut to the bone in a single spasm of contrition. Instead, we can explore, examine, probe, and gently admit our wrongdoing, not with the intention of hurting, but of healing, not punishment, but penitence.

The process of repentance on Yom Kippur has two separate elements. The first is atonement, “making up” for our failings. But the second is equally important—purification. We can atone for our sins, but still feel tainted by them. It is the purification that really frees us from the past, and the confessional is a major element in that process.

“Confession is,” indeed, “good for the soul”. (Ps 119:26)