Erev Yom Kippur Davar

Every year as we enter the month of Elul and begin our approach to Yom Kippur, I wrestle with these questions:

• Who might I have offended or hurt in this past year – or even further back in time? Am I ready to apologize, and make amends? Will they be ready to accept an apology if I offer it?

• Is there someone who has hurt or offended me in the past year – or further back in time? Would I forgive them if they apologized? Can I forgive them without receiving an apology?

• Am I obligated to forgive people who have done me serious harm?

• Will I be happier and saner if I forgive them, anyway, even if not obligated? Or does the pain of what they did still linger too much for me to let it go? Am I a bad Jew if I don’t forgive them? A bad person?

This process of self-reflection is sometimes referred to as cheshbon hanefesh – an accounting of the soul. Cheshbon in Hebrew also means a check – for those who still write them – and also a bill. A bank account is also cheshbon. Our liturgical calendar provides us with this annual opportunity to balance our ethical accounts. Most of us don’t really love to apologize, or to try to work things out with people we have had struggles with, and forgiveness also can be quite difficult for many of us. We need a yearly season when we are encouraged – indeed, expected -- to deal with these hard things. But of course, the rabbis actually say that it is better to balance these relationship accounts every day. In Pirkei Avot 2:10 we read: “Rabbi Eliezer said, “Let the honor of your friend be as dear to you as your own; And be not easily provoked to anger; And repent one day before your death.”” How are we to know what day is the one before we die? We have to assume that any day could be that day and we must therefor get our affairs in order, sort out our messed-up relationships, apologize and forgive, today -- in case we don’t wake up tomorrow.

Maimonades says there are four steps to teshuvah – repentance, or, more literally, return.

Rabbi Leora Kaye boils them down as follows:

• Verbally confess your mistake and ask for forgiveness (Mishneh Torah 1:1).

• Express sincere remorse, resolving not to make the same mistake again (Mishneh Torah 2:2).

• Do everything in your power to “right the wrong,” to appease the person who has been hurt (Mishneh Torah 2:9).

• Act differently if the same situation happens again (Mishneh Torah 2:1)

Rabbi David Blumenthal, in a thought-provoking article on Repentance and Forgiveness, writes, “The tradition is not of one mind on the steps one must take to repent of one's sins. However, almost all agree that repentance requires five elements: recognition of one's sins as sins (hakarát ha-chét'), remorse (charatá), desisting from sin (azivát ha-chét'), restitution where possible (peira'ón), and confession (vidúi).” He stresses that the process of teshuva is not complete without actually desisting from the sin. It may be good for us to come back year after year and say our Al Cheyts, but the process is only complete if we actually stop doing harm.

“Rabbinic tradition,” writes Blumenthal, “teaches that all the steps to teshuva are necessary. Their interrelationship is best described as a spiral which touches each of the five points, yet advances with each turn. Thus, one may begin at any point -- with action, analysis, remorse, restitution, or confession. However, as one repeats the steps of teshuva again and again, one's analysis and remorse deepen, one's restitution and commitment-to-desist become firmer, and one's confession becomes more profound. As one cycles through the five phases of teshuva again and again, one's teshuva becomes more earnest, more serious. At its height, one achieves "full teshuva" (teshuvá gemurá) which would require full consciousness and action such that, given the same situation, one would refrain from the sin for which one had repented. Sinfulness is a very deep dimension of human existence and dealing with it calls upon all our spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and moral resources -- even when we recognize that ceasing to sin is the base line of repentance.”

There are, of course, certain instances in which we are not expected to forgive. Primarily, this applies to occasions where we are being asked to forgive someone for sins they committed against someone else – often, someone who is now dead. Many of you will be familiar with the book, The Sunflower, in which Simon Wiesenthal recounted an experience he had while in a Nazi camp. He was pulled from a work detail to go to the bedside of a Nazi Soldier, Karl Seidl, who was dying. Seidl recounted his past with the Hitler Youth and in the SS, concluding with an account of having participated in the murder of three hundred Jews. He wanted Wiesenthal’s absolution, but Wiesenthal left the room in silence. The next day, the Nazi had died. Wiesenthal was haunted by the question: should he have granted forgiveness? Rabbinic tradition is entirely clear on this: he was in no position to grant the absolution the Nazi sought. “In rabbinic thought,” as Blumenthal notes, “Only the offending party can set the wrong aright and only the offended party can forgo the debt of the sin.” The offended parties in this case were dead. At that point, it becomes a matter only God can forgive.

Equally, there are instances where one is no longer obliged to seek forgiveness from a person one has injured. According to Maimonades, if a person gives a sincere apology three times, and the person she is apologizing to does not accept her apology, then she has done all she needs to. At this point, also, the person who refuses the apology takes on some of the blame for the situation. The obligation, in Judaism, is on both the person who does the harm and the person who was harmed. We must do teshuvah, make amends, ask for forgiveness, and stop doing harm. But we must also accept a sincere apology when it comes to us.

Blumenthal says that “sinfulness is a deep dimension of human existence.” In other words, we are built to be good at doing harm – to others, and to ourselves. We have been created, as the rabbis observed, with a yetzer hatov and a yetzer hara: and urge to do good, and an urge to do evil. We have been given free will – or at least, depending on your theological and scientific views, a perception that we have free will. Had we been created only with an urge to do good, free will would have been obviated – we would have simply always done the right thing. The rabbis also generally believed that without a yetzer hara we would lack some of life’s essential drives. Chickens would not lay eggs, they say – and possibly humans would no longer desire to eat or have sex. So we are stuck with this ability to do wrong, and have to keep going around the spiral of erring, recognizing that we have erred, feeling sorry for having erred, confessing our error, and doing our best to make amends to the person against whom we have erred.

Going back to some of the questions that I struggle with every Elul:

• It is understood that it may take time for us to be ready to make amends to someone we believe we have wronged. If I am ready to apologize, I must be prepared that they may not accept my apology. However, if I apologize sincerely – without caveats, from my heart – I am only expected to this three times before letting the matter rest.

• If a person who wronged me has died without apology, it may sometimes be better for my mental well-being to forgive them, but I am not obligated to do so. If they are still alive, and I have reason to believe that they are never going to apologize to me, perhaps even do not understand that I might expect an apology, again, it may be for the best that I not dwell unduly on the wrongs that were done me – but I am not required to grant them forgiveness.

• There are no bad Jews. Certainly no one is a bad Jew for not forgiving a person who has not sincerely apologized, or apologized at all.

Blumenthal sums it up this way: “The principle that mechila – forgoing the other’s indebtedness -- ought to be granted only if deserved is the great Jewish "No" to easy forgiveness. It is core to the Jewish view of forgiveness, just as desisting from sin is core to the Jewish view of repentance. Without good grounds, the offended person should not forgo the indebtedness of the sinner; otherwise, the sinner may never truly repent and evil will be perpetuated. And, conversely, if there are good grounds to waive the debt or relinquish the claim, the offended person is morally bound to do so. This is the great Jewish "Yes" to the possibility of repentance for every sinner.”

An apology may be difficult to make – or not. I can never know the extent to which someone has struggled in order to say they are sorry. But the power of apology is such that, even if a person is able to offer a sincere apology easily, the one who forgives may be changed forever.

Let me close with a story: about twenty years ago, I applied to the Hebrew College cantorial program. I had previously taken some classes toward a Certificate of Jewish Music, but I felt strongly that I wanted to pursue the deeper studies and the ordination that came with them. I had, at the time, only been an “official” Jew for two or three years, and what I knew about the role of a cantor was necessarily limited. At my interview and audition, there were members of the committee who felt that I was not suited to the role. I’ve never been sure what it was that they were worried about: the fact that I was a recent convert, that I my spiritual background included a dalliance with Neopaganism, or perhaps that I just wasn’t able to fully describe what I envisioned myself doing if I was ordained. The committee did not want to accept me into the program, instead suggesting that I could take some of the classes without being a matriculated cantorial student.

I was distraught. I had given many years of thought to the idea of becoming a cantor, and it had become clear to me that this was the role that I was built for. My skill set was right for the job, I felt, and more – I was electrified in some way by singing cantorial repertoire. I felt connected to the Divine Power I had been looking for most my life. Fortunately, through the intervention of a couple of allies, the committee agreed to reconsider and admit me on a provisional basis. So, with some trepidation, some exhilaration, and honestly, some resentment as well, I began my studies.

It was probably the following year that I began to study nusach – the traditional chanting of our liturgy – from the person who had most strenuously objected to my entering the cantorial ordination program, Cantor Doctor Brian Mayer. Canter Mayer is small but intimidating, and word in the halls was that he was “difficult”. Yet, as he unfolded the mysteries of the Ashkenazi nusach system, I was confirmed in my expectation that this was really what I needed to learn, as rewarding and fulfilling a subject as I had hoped. Still, when I went into his teaching room at the end of the semester to demonstrate that I had actually learned what he had been teaching, I was, frankly, terrified. I opened my siddur to the weekday service – afternoon, I think, was what he asked me to start with. Then he said something like this: “Kate, I just want you to know that I have realized that I made a mistake about you at your audition. I have seen and heard that you have a deep spiritual feeling for the liturgy and the nusach. I’m sorry I misjudged you.”

I’m afraid I didn’t end up chanting much of the weekday service for him – I started to cry, and I had some difficulty pulling myself together. Not by nature a very demonstrative fellow, Brian looked embarrassed, and eventually shooed me out of the room. But when I think about what an apology can mean to someone, this is always the scene I remember. I don’t know that it cost him much to say he was sorry. He knew I respected him and enjoyed his class. Still, he didn’t have to say it. He showed me more about how Judaism should be practiced, in that moment, than he ever did in all the years I studied nusach with him.

Needless to say, I accepted his apology. That was incredibly easy. In some cases, forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world.