Your Kingdom Come, Your Will Be Done: Yom Kippur 2026

by Miykael Qorbanyahu

All week, I’ve been quietly contemplating the words of Messiah Yahoshua ben Yoseph recorded in Matthew 6.10,

Your Kingdom come, Your Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

I keep sitting with these two words at the center of the prayer, Kingdom and Will, because comprehensive Israelite cultural consciousness gives me a whole language for both, and that language lines up perfectly with what Yom Kippur asks of me.

The English word Kingdom in the Hebrew is Malchut (מלכות), and I think of malchut as the world exactly as it shows up; the visible, tangible reality where Heaven’s order either takes root or stays absent. Malchut, in Israelite consciousness, represents the vessel that receives everything above it and brings it down into form that can be touched. So when we pray for the Kingdom to come, in essence what we’re asking for is HaShem’s heavenly order to show up in actual conditions; in our souls, homes, and systems, not just in some far-off spiritual plane.

Will is captured in two words that I hold together, ratzon (רצון) and ruach (רוח). Ratzon, in the Hebrew language, points to deep desire, the will underneath the will, the pure intention that exists before any action takes shape. Ruach carries more weight for me, and Rambam’s Guide for the Perplexed opens that weight up in ways I keep returning to. His fourth definition names ruach as the divine influence that descends upon a prophet, a higher spirit entering a person and lifting perception past ordinary human limits. His fifth definition names ruach as purpose or resolve itself, the directing force behind a decision, the “spirit” that moves someone toward wherever their will decides to go. I hold both meanings together for this year’s upcoming observance of Yom Kippur (יום כיפור).

During this season, it is essential that we pray for our ratzon to align with something bigger than our own appetites, asking for our ruach to carry that aligned will into the world; part resolve, part consciousness descending from above us, breath and direction moving as one force.

Now that we’re currently well into the Days of Awe, or in Hebrew Yamim Noraim (ימים נוראים), ten days marked by the shofar’s first sounding on Rosh Hashanah and closing this year with Yom Kippur on September 21, I feel the gates of repentance, and the challenges that accompanies this lifelong task, open wider with each day that passes. I’ve taken this window as sacred time set aside each day specifically for the work of alignment, the labor of bringing ratzon and ruach into agreement before the gates close again. And I must admit that this year the challenges for me have been somewhat pressing; finding myself reconciling both my desires and spirit with that of HaShem’s call for Its children to be tamim, or blameless and mature.

Over the years, I’ve found that Yom Kippur exists as the day to bring these two concepts together through atonement. Kapparah (כפרה), the Hebrew word for atonement, means covering, and I understand the covering as removing the layer between my ratzon and the higher will it’s meant to serve. Given the thralls of human nature, it’s easy to see that selfishness creates that layer, while selflessness dissolves it. So, throughout my travels in consciousness I’ve learned that when I set my own interest down and act from care for something outside myself, I open a channel where personal ratzon and collective repair, or tikkun (תיקון), starts moving in the same direction. My experiences have also shown me how tikkun gently but directly asks to mend what’s broken, both within and without, and I believe for that to take place, every act of selfless will, however small, drops a piece back into place.

Bitul (ביטול) in Hebrew denotes self-nullification, or selflessness, and speaks to the deliberate quieting of ego so something larger has room to move through. I think of bitul as the practical mechanism behind everything for which the Machzor, or the liturgy, for HaYom (היום), the Day (of Atonement), asks. Kingdom Come and Will Be Done stay abstract concepts until we begin to actually contract our own sense of self enough to cause the principles behind the Kingdom to manifest on Earth as it is in Heaven, and bitul is the discipline that does the shrinking.

As HaShem would have it, Yom Kippur builds bitul directly into its structure. We fast, we strip away food and drink and physical comfort, and we stand in prayer dressed simply, if at all possible in all white, resembling the burial shroud more than any garment of status. Israel’s literary tradition reads this stripping as a rehearsal of bitul, a day where the body’s usual appetites go quiet so the soul can speak without competition. On this day, it’s as if we show up before the highest court of the year with nothing to negotiate with, no comfort to bargain for, only the honest accounting of who we’ve been.

In this I find the deepest teaching in how bitul reframes confession itself. The Yom Kippur liturgy has us as individuals to confess sins in plural, i.e., “we have sinned,” even the ones that we personally never committed. There was a time when I used to find that strange, now I read it as bitul in action. I now realize that through the prayers of HaYom, my individual identity dissolves into the collective for just long enough to feel that another person’s failure touches me too, that another person’s repair is my repair as well. Selflessness stops being a good idea here and becomes the actual instrument of tikkun. The reality is that I can’t mend what stays walled off inside “my” problems and “your” problems, but with bitul, we are able to remove the wall.

I think this is why the day ends the way it does, with the gates closing and one final blast of the shofar rather than any triumphant statement of personal achievement. Bitul doesn’t ask me to announce what I’ve fixed, it asks me to disappear into the fixing long enough that the Kingdom, not my own name, or desire, or goal gets to come.

Tikkun names the repair itself, the actual mending that bitul and kapparah make possible. I have come to hold tikkun as the point of the whole day, not just a pleasant closing thought but the goal every other piece serves.

Fasting quiets the appetite.
Confession dissolves the wall between my sins and everyone else’s.
Bitul empties out the ego.
All of it exists to clear space for tikkun to actually happen.

I’ve now come to know that the repair starts inside me before it reaches anywhere else. Our sages teachings hold that a person carries a spark of the divine, and that spark gets buried under layers of selfishness, distraction, bad decisions and old wounds the same way malchut gets buried under a world that hasn’t caught up to divine order yet. Yet, when I do the inner work of Yom Kippur, when I actually locate where I’ve caused harm and turn my ratzon back toward something higher, I clear one small piece of that inner rubble. Tradition calls this tikkun ha’nefesh (תיקון הנפש), repair of the soul, and I’ve come to see it as the necessary first repair, the one that has to happen before any larger repair holds weight.

Self-repair never stays contained to self; every person who clears their own inner rubble changes the total weight the age carries, and Israelite consciousness names this larger project tikkun olam (תיקון עולם), repair of the world. I don’t reach the world’s repair by skipping my own, instead I reach it by doing my own honestly enough that it ripples outward, one cleared spark joining another until the accumulated weight starts to shift at scale. Several years ago, I described this process as collective consciousness gathering critical mass in order to create a paradigm shift; this was the impetus for the designation of my blog SHFTNG PRODGMZ. And this is where I stop reading Yom Kippur as a private spiritual exercise and start reading it as civic work, the kind of work that shows up in real communities doing real repair right now.

I see malchut expanding right now in a developing Ethiopian aliyah story and their return to the Promised Land of Israel. An urgent window opened for immigration to Israel, with officials committing to bring 7,000 immigrants from India and Ethiopia home faster, urgency growing as instability spread through northern Ethiopia. I read of how several hundred Beta Israel members from the Tigray region gathered at the synagogue in Gondar to hear from Jewish Agency officials, holding their ratzon fixed on reunion through years of separation. Kingdom Come looks like this to me, Heaven’s order taking physical form as a family finally crosses into the land they’ve held in their hearts for generations.

Gabi Gebre Worku’s Likud primary win shows me ruach in motion, a community’s collective breath pushing intention into structure. A vote, a seat, a place at the table, this is will finding form inside malchut, spirit refusing to stay abstract.

I also feel collective tikkun most clearly in the Black-Jewish Alliance’s work this year as more than 100 leaders gathered in Miami for the first National Convening of the Black-Jewish Alliance, building what organizers called a participatory national strategy that lets everyday people join the work of justice, repair, and shared liberation. I read this convening as ratzon shared across two communities, each putting personal history aside long enough to build something neither could build alone.

Selfless will, applied collectively, becomes tikkun at scale.

Like the High Priest of Israel with the shoham stones on his shoulder, I, as all of Israel is intended to, carry the weight malchut places on its people, and I hold this weight as part of the same picture. In the UNITED STATES, Federal job losses hit roughly 271,000 positions in less than a year, landing hardest on Melanated workers who counted on government service as a stable path forward. Melanated unemployment climbed to 7.5% by December 2025, a number many consider recession territory if it described the whole country. A new tax plan adds pressure on top of that, handing wealthy households major gains while low-income Melanated families in major cities lose more in benefit cuts than they gain in relief. AI automation stacks a third weight onto the pile, cutting jobs in service and manufacturing work where Melanated workers are employed in mass. All of this can be read as malchut still unrepaired, the covering of kapparah still needed at a societal level.

The ruach, as if it were again hovering over the chaotic waters, continues to persist anyway, right alongside the weight of systematic inequities. Melanated-owned employer firms pulled in $249 billion in revenue in 2023, supporting 1.8 million jobs and paying out $69.8 billion in salaries, growth spreading across 116 metropolitan areas. Colin Kaepernick’s recognition as the Muhammad Ali Center’s 2026 Humanitarian of the Year and Saul Williams’ Leap Life joins a catalog built on fusing spoken word, hip-hop, and Afrofuturist sound design, and the title itself carries the same forward-motion, transformation-focused energy that runs through his newest work with tracks like Control Is Not Controllable and Conspiracy. Williams has spent over two decades pushing the boundaries between poetry and music, treating albums as extended meditations on liberation, technology, and Melanated consciousness, as Heaven’s breath is still moving through the body even under real pressure.

I intend to hear the shofar sound at least one more time before Yom Kippur’s gate closes, and I’ll take it as a call straight to my own ratzon. I ask myself what selfless-will looks like for me this year, what covering I still need over the gap between my own desire and the higher one I’m meant to serve. I realize that Kingdom Come starts in the choices I make today and every day. Will Be Done initiates the moment I set my own interest down and let ruach carry something bigger through me.

HaYom stands before us as the Atonement itself, the moment kapparah moves from concept into lived reality. I invite you to observe HaYom fully with Beit Mashiyach, to sit inside this day and let it work on you the way fire works on gold, refining what stays and releasing what no longer serves the higher will. This day carries the weight of the whole year, and it asks each of us to show up with our full presence, honesty and willingness to change.

To catalyze this transformation, internalize the atonement this day offers, Let it move from a prayer on the lips into a decision in the heart, then into an action in the world. When enough of us carry that internal shift and let it shape how we treat each other, how we build community, how we show up for the vulnerable among us, the earth itself begins to experience At-One-Ment, the healing of the separation between what is and what ought to be.

This is how HaShem’s Kingdom Comes and Will Gets Done On Earth as it is in Heaven, one internalized atonement, one selfless act, one ruach-carried choice at a time, until the whole earth reflects the unity HaShem intended from the beginning.

Selah…