A Crowd of Sorrows

Martha Hodges - 2006-10-01

“Forgiving is giving up all hopes for a different yesterday,” wrote some unknown sage. I love that. It’s funny, but it is also completely true and is worth remembering. Anguishing over the past will not change it. We can and should learn from the past, but the only thing we can change is the present.

Other religions offer ways to deal with regrets in a constructive way. The Catholic practice of confession may seem shallow and facile to some of us. Ritualized confession can be this. It can also be coercive. And the penance that follows confession may seem empty and rote, or even bullying – a way for the religious establishment to maintain its power over believers. The Protestant reformation which gave birth to Unitarianism and Universalism was in part a reaction against this ritualized practice and the abuse of church power that it enabled. Confession and atonement became personal matters between the believer and God.

But I think we lost something in the process. Outside of psychotherapy and the penal system, we liberal religionists – and our society as a whole – don’t really know what to do with guilt. We tend to get stuck in our regrets, unsure how to move beyond it, or at the other extreme, to let ourselves off too easily. We may apologize less out of a desire to make amends than out of a wish to gain relief by passing the burden of acceptance on to the other person. We may use apology to make ourselves feel better, rather than to help heal the other.

The Jews, on the other hand, take the question of confession and atonement seriously and, better yet, they have a way to practice it that is at once demanding and hopeful. For atonement is basically an act of hope. The following reading is taken from Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation, by Michael Lerner.

“Built into the [Jewish] High Holy Days is a deep psychological wisdom that can and should be reclaimed. In the ten days of repentance that extend from the first day of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, through the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, we may engage in a mass psychological process, as we participate in an individual and collective reassessment of our lives.

Remembering is step one—looking at what we have done and what we have become during the past year. Rosh Hashanah is called the Day of Remembrance.

The second step is to measure what we have done and what we have become against our own highest visions of who we should and could be. This step is facilitated when we collectively, through prayer, reaffirm the vision of our possibilities (what we could be individually and together).

The third step is called teshuvah or repentance. This does not mean merely a recommitment to “good values” that are so abstract that they function only to make us feel good when we espouse them. Real teshuvah means determining in considerable detail exactly what we are going to do differently in our lives, taking into account the things that will likely throw us off or undermine our resolve. This requires more than making just an inner resolve about our intentions—it requires figuring out concretely how the things that tend to undermine our resolve or deflect us from carrying out the changes we want to make can be handled. Teshuvah is not a series of New Year’s resolutions, but is instead a serious plan of action based on the deepest and most searching self-scrutiny.

Obviously we cannot accomplish all of this in one morning at a synagogue; the services are meant only to provide the collective affirmation of the commitment to the task, but the ten days of repentance are intended to provide the setting for a much deeper and more concentrated attention to change. To avoid using these ten days seriously, people fill up all their time with services, meals, socializing, and endless chatter. But this time period is really about something else: a fundamental transformation of self and community. This is also the time to straighten up unfinished emotional business with other people, to seek to rectify whatever misunderstandings or pain that you may have caused others.

Self-scrutiny is not meant for individuals only. The religious community as a whole needs to meet during the ten days of repentance and to discuss its own functioning and direction. Has the community really embodied its highest values? Has it really been sensitive to the pains of its members, and to the pain and suffering that continue in the larger world? Has the community used [religion] merely as a way to “feel good,” …or are the nice sentiments matched with serious action?”

Today we will draw on the wisdom of the Jewish tradition in a ritual of atonement and hope. For despite the connotations of the word, atonement is a positive and hopeful enterprise. It is founded on the faith that we can change, that we can heal and assist in the healing of others. On the faith that moral missteps are not fatal to the spirit, but that we can become the people we want to be.