Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 - Day 16
“Before the judgment and memory of God we stand. How can we prove ourselves? How can we persist? How can we be steadfast? Through repentance.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity)
I am not following yesterday’s quote with the next few paragraphs because tonight is Kol Nidre, the beginning of the Holiest Day of the year in the Jewish Calendar, a day when most Jews show up at Temple for expiation, for remembrance, and out of superstition, fear, memory, and hope. We want to believe we can be and are forgiven, even if we don’t believe in God, we want to remember our deceased relatives with others who understand loss. We go because we don’t want to tempt the fates, we go because we are afraid of judgement of another(s) if we are not seen. We go because we always have and we go in hopes of being moved, of having a spiritual experience. We fast for the day to ensure we don’t hide in food, we don’t hide in work, we don’t hide from our self!
Kol Nidre begins with asking for forgiveness for all of the things we did not get done in the past year and asking forgiveness for everything we will not finish in the year to come! Its an acknowledgment of our imperfect natures, of our exuberance to do more, better and the reality that it just might not happen. In the Mahzor, the Prayer Book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we recite the words of God in Numbers: “I have forgiven as you have spoken”.
This is the challenge, to speak the words of our errors, to go to people whom we have harmed and ask for their forgiveness, to forgive the people who ask for our forgiveness. An even greater challenge is to let go of our resentments towards people who have disappointed us, who have harmed us in ways we may not be able to articulate and we know the harm deep in our being. Tonight begins a 25 hour period of putting our hurts into words, crying out for healing and letting them go, asking for forgiveness from God and forgiving our selves for our imperfections. Rabbi Heschel reminds us in another teaching that when we harm another human being, we harm God, so after we ask for forgiveness from a person, we also have to ask for forgiveness from God, so the Kol Nidre Prayer encompass’ this ‘missing the mark’ as well.
“Through repentance” we prove ourselves worthy of our names, of our position, of our dignity, of our abundance. We are buoyed by our repentance and lifted up to new ways of living well through our previous failures when we learn from them. We are reminded of how much we matter when we are told how we have harmed another and how joyous this person/family/group is that we have returned. We are all ‘prodigal children’ to God and to one another, we all have been lost and Yom Kippur is the day we come out of hiding and allow ourselves to be found. This happens through T’Shuvah, “through repentance!”
I am so remorseful for the harm I have brought to people when I have missed the mark. It makes me ache when I confront myself with the relationships that have been lost because of my errors and another’s decision to not want to reconnect. It makes me sad to know that some people have decided to not forgive my errors and I accept their decision. I understand people’s decision to hold me responsible and not forgive. I understand people’s decision to forgive and not want to reconnect. I understand my own experiences of both of these decisions and it is usually out of a mistrust that the person making the amends is serious about changing. This makes me ache the most, that I cannot be trusted by some people to change, that I can’t trust another to change. The issue is my issue, not anyone else’s. It is an issue of spiritual immaturity that I am praying to grow in 5783.
I am powerless over the decisions another makes, I am powerless to change people’s minds and I am powerful over my choice to respond with acceptance or react with hurt. I choose the former! I also realize that resentments are very crafty, I just became aware of my inability to let go of certain experiences and how they are seen by another(s) as being a “victim”, which I do not feel like. I also have become aware that I have held onto a sense of not understanding peoples actions/reactions and allowing this not understanding to color my interactions with them. While I thought I had let go completely of any resentments, I have come to realize that I did not. For this I am very sorry and I pray people will forgive me.
I am in complete, or as complete as possible for this imperfect human being, forgiveness and compassion towards anyone who has harmed me. I don’t want any resentments standing in the middle of me and God, I don’t want any resentments standing in the way of me meeting my soul today and every day forward. I am truly sorrowful and ache for my errors and I am desperately in search of a resentment free 5783 and beyond. Have an easy fast, if you fast; have a good finish to Yom Kippur by being more connected to yourself than you were when you started; allow the experience to imbue you with the cleaning you need; God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark