No other religion has it. I’ve never heard nor even heard or nor read any Jewish sermon against sin. In Reform and Conservative Judaism, there’s virtually no talk of sin and everything Jewish you want to do is applauded. In Orthodox Judaism, there are Torah standards and failures to live up to them but no pre-occupation with “sin” itself and thus no burden of guilt (over failures to live up to ritual laws) and no need for redemption from sin.
On the night of Yom Kippur, Jews recite communal sins in the liturgy, but there’s no gloom. Rather, it is joyous occasion. A religion is not just its texts in a vacuum. What’s more interesting to me is how those texts play out in real life. Reading the Jewish high holiday prayer book, you might think there’s a Jewish obsession with sin, but if you’ve lived the high holidays in synagogue, you’ll see there’s no such obsession. Rather, in most of Jewish life, this is a time for women to wear their best clothes. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are as much fashions shows as anything else for most of Jewry.
I don’t know of any Jew who feels guilt about the sins mentioned in the Yom Kippur prayer book if he did not personally commit them, and if he did commit them and made amends to those he hurt, there’s no quilt either. Yom Kippur is a great time, however, to meet a girl or to start a business deal or to find a job.
