I once spent the entire evening of Kol Nidrei on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. While on my way to the congregation I was then serving as rabbi, an accident closed the road. What at first appeared to be an annoyance soon became a cloud of panic.

The worst part was not missing the service; the congregation was capable without me. It was being cut off from the sacred time and space of Yom Kippur.

Fortunately, I remembered that one of the Philadelphia-area congregations broadcast its High Holiday services, so I turned on the radio. As the cantor began the chant of Kol Nidrei, I was transported, spiritually at least, and what in my earlier isolation had seemed destined to become a lost Yom Kippur evening was now transformed into sacred time.

One of my colleagues, Rabbi Joy Levitt, once began a Kol Nidrei sermon with the line, "Yom Kippur is the day when we all come together in order to be alone." As I sat on the turnpike that night, I understood the unique power of this most unusual day.

So much of Jewish religious life is communal. From the seder to the sukkah, to the plural construction of the High Holiday confessions Al Het and Ashamnu ("we have sinned…"), it often seems as if we are unable to be alone when it comes to matters of the spirit and soul.

There was a time when Yom Kippur was a personal experience. Leviticus tells us that "when Aaron goes in to make expiation in the Shrine, no one else shall be in the Tent of Meeting until he comes out." The Avodah liturgy indicates that the people stood outside the Holy of Holies in a state of anxious anticipation until the High Priest re-emerged from his isolation.

Today, Yom Kippur services are so often bereft of the space, quiet, and calm needed for personal introspection. I have increasingly come to question whether the work we are charged to do on Yom Kippur—introspection, atonement, purgation, and restoration—can be accomplished through the collective experience of communal prayer. Somewhere, we have lost sight of the question of whether the abundance of words on a printed page can serve the purpose of Yom Kippur.

One of my favorite experiments with adult Jewish learners is to ask them to imagine there are no traditions associated with a specific religious idea.What would you create? How would you engage people?

When I do this with the categories of sin and atonement, it is rare for someone to claim that they prefer a four-hour service. This leads me to wonder if we have made the work of Yom Kippur "the sitting through of the service" rather than the work of introspection and atonement. How can we reverse this?

That night on the turnpike, it crossed my mind that there were probably some Jews stuck where I was—but they might be experiencing the road closure as a reprieve rather than a restriction. Freed from the burden of the "service endurance test," they had an excused absence.

Yom Kippur is our annual encounter with the enormous questions of life that mortality implies. Our challenge is to find new ways for Yom Kippur to be the day when we can come together in order to be alone.

Rabbi Richard Hirsh,a Sh’ma Advisory Board member ,is Executive Director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and for the past ten years, editor of the journal The Reconstructionist.