Yom Kippur 2022 at Congregation Agudas Achim
Teshuvah: what to do when there is a lack of resolution
Rabbi Talya Weisbard Shalem
Last night I spoke about how we each need to hear a different message from Yom Kippur, and gave an example about how during the confessional prayers, while some of us may indeed need to feel the physical action of beating our chests, others of us need to take that moment to massage our hearts and practice self-compassion, and a third group needs just to tap on our heart and invite it to open up and pay attention. (Forgive me for quickly repeating myself – One of the challenges of planning sermons for the high holidays is wanting to layer my message across the journey of the holiday, but knowing some people will be hearing each talk without having been here for the previous one. Then again, those who are hearing me twice will perhaps get a chance to internalize my message more by hearing it twice)
In any event, today I’d like to go deeper into the idea of us each needing to receive a different message from Yom Kippur in any given year, by looking at one specific teaching about Teshuvah from multiple perspectives, that of the injurer and the injured, and what to do in situations where resolution seems impossible.
Teshuvah is the fundamental Jewish practice we do during the high holiday season, and specifically around Yom Kippur. Teshuvah means return. Return can mean a lot of things. Returning to God. Returning to our own selves. Returning to being present for our spouses, our kids, our parents. Returning to tradition. Returning to an old friend we’ve lost touch with. Returning to someone dear we got in a fight with so long ago that we can no longer remember the sides or the reasons. Returning to being a mensch, a good person.
There are many teachings about how to do teshuvah. Maimonides, also known as Rambam, which is an acronym for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, lived in Spain, Morocco, and Egypt in the 12th century, and composed many important Jewish texts, including an entire shelf wide series called the Mishneh Torah, which is a comprehensive Jewish legal code. One whole volume of this work is called Hilchot Teshuvah, the laws of Teshuvah.
All the teachings I will be mentioning today from Maimonides talk about a scenario where one man wrongs another man, and it can be tricky to follow (“he said to him…”), as well as not being gender inclusive. I’ve chosen to adapt each teaching to refer to the person whose actions I want to focus on in that moment as “you” and the other unknown party as “them” for ease of understanding and so we can each have the opportunity to identify with Teshuvah from a variety of perspectives.
Maimonides teaches in Hilchot Teshuvah chapter 2, section 9:
Teshuvah and Yom Kippur only atone for sins beyn Adam laMakom (between a person and God); for example, one who ate a forbidden food or engaged in a forbidden relationship, et cetera. However, sins beyn Adam laChavero (between one person and another); for example, if you injure your fellow, or curse them, or steal from them, et cetera, you will never be forgiven until you give them what you owe and appease them.
Even if you restore the money that you owe to the one you wronged, you must also appease them and ask them to be forgiven. Even if you only upset a colleague verbally, you must appease them and approach them until they forgive you.”
This is the simple scenario, what we might call case 1. Both people are alive and in touch, and we are supposed to see ourselves as the perpetrator and be inspired to take actions to make amends.
Sometimes it is easy to forget the human element that is required for Yom Kippur to be complete. We forget that we need to make amends with other people before our slate can be wiped clear. Maimonides reminds us that fasting and praying on Yom Kippur are nice, but not sufficient, in a somewhat similar vein to the Haftarah Howard chanted earlier, which also focuses on the import of human to human interactions in addition to ritual observance.
In an ideal world, we’d each have made amends with everyone we needed to, before coming here today, but in my experience, going through the prayers of Yom Kippur tends to remind us of various misdeeds we had forgotten about, and leaves us with a human plane to-do-list for after Yom Kippur.
The holiday itself can work to help us shift emotionally out of defensiveness into vulnerability and openness, the starting grounds for being able to reach out. Luckily our tradition gives us an out, although we will say at the end of the day that “the gates are closing” we technically have until Hoshana Raba, which falls on Sunday October 16th this year, for apologies to make it into this past year’s books, as it were. And fundamentally, there’s no end time for reaching out and making amends.
Case 2: But what if you are the wronged party, and you do not want to forgive? (Lack of resolution from the side if the injured person)
Maimonides continues his teaching saying:
“If you do not desire to forgive them, they should bring a group of three of their friends and approach you with them and request forgiveness. If you are not appeased, they should repeat the process a second and third time. If you still do not want to forgive them, they may let you alone and need not pursue the matter further. On the contrary, the person who refuses to grant forgiveness shall now bear the burden.”
When I was younger, I used to think about this very glibly, from the perspective of the person causing the harm. Go apologize three times, and once you’ve done that, you are done, it’s the other person’s problem if they want to hold on to a grudge, you can move on with your life with a lighter heart.
It’s felt different to me recently. This text is acknowledging a fundamental truth. Sometimes there is a never a resolution. The wronged party DOES NOT HAVE TO FORGIVE. They are not required to keep engaging with the person that harmed them. They are however left carrying a burden, which in our own terms today we might call trauma. Healing from trauma may include forgiveness for your own sake even if not the sake of the perpetrator, but it is not required. If anyone here is in this situation and would like to discuss further in private, my door is always open for appointments. If you have suffered from abuse from a relative or others, or from being in relationship with someone who is mentally unwell and damaging to you, do what you need to do to protect yourself from further harm, first, even if that means cutting off a relationship. Later on your own you can work on healing, and assess whether you ever want to forgive, or not. Our religion does not demand forgiving and blame those who cannot forgive. But, can going through the rituals of Yom Kippur help you to acknowledge to yourself what has happened and start moving forward with your life anew?
Case 3: What about when you are the person who has hurt someone else and you cannot reach out to the other person, for whatever reason, and there is no chance for you to resolve the situation? (Lack of resolution from the side of the injurer, and where I want to focus today)
Perhaps the other person is no longer alive, or is no longer mentally available. Perhaps they have blocked your number or cut off contact in another manner. There are many reasons one might experience a situation where there will never be straightforward resolution.
Our tradition suggests options for actions one can take, even in this case. Maimonides suggests the following:
“If you wronged another person and they died before you could ask them for forgiveness, you should take ten people and say the following while standing before their grave: “I sinned against God and against this person by doing the following to them…
If you owed them money, you should return it to their heirs. If you are unaware of the identity of their heirs, you should give the money owed to the court and confess.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (The RaDR on Twitter) recently published an essay and a book in which she describes effectively doing this ritual today, over zoom, where she shared a choice she regrets from the time she was caring for her dying mother, something she’d been feeling guilty about for 25 years, with a group of 10 friends, and began to heal, finally.
As I told it, I was able to find a little more compassion for myself in the doing. I did harm that night, I believe. And I have to own that and live with it. But also, as I told this story, as I named the true thing, the true thing about leaving a terrified, dying woman alone in her hospital room, the faces of my friends—my witnesses—held me, as I lifted my darkness up to the light and said, here, yes, look at this thing that I did. And their faces held me as I cried my way through it and named my bitter regret and the fact that I can never ask my mother for forgiveness for not showing up and sticking through it on a night that was so scary and hard.
And then, after I was done telling my story, something else happened. My friends offered me some other ways to think about what had happened.
She concludes:
All the emphasis in my tradition around public confession, around bringing witnesses to the amends process, is not to put people in the stocks, to shame them for their choices, but to help to shine a light. To help give the darkness air and space. To clean out the wound so that healing might be possible. To say: yes, this is a choice that I made, this is the harm that I caused. This happened, it’s true. I want desperately not to be the kind of person who does that harmful thing, so in part I am asking for your help to accompany me on this journey, so that I can begin to become different. See me now: Witness not only my regret, but my commitment to becoming a different kind of person. Help me to become an agent of healing in the world. I can’t do that on my own. I need your compassionate help. Your loving eye. Your accountability on my journey of amends and transformation.
I think she (and Maimonides are offering us a very powerful model of how to do teshuvah in the absence of the other party.
Another possible model comes from the Twelve Step World. As you may know, twelve step is a program for healing for people struggling with a variety of addictions, and there are twelve step programs for family members as well. The 9th step of the 12 steps is to “make direct amends to people harmed wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” 12 Step literature then elaborates on a few possible ways to make amends:
Direct Amends – taking personal responsibility for your actions and confronting the person who you would like to reconcile with.
This lines up with our case one from Maimonides above.
Indirect Amends – finding ways to repair damage that cannot be reversed or undone by doing things like volunteering and helping others.
This is an interesting addition to our model – instead of working with the person directly, you take action out in the world in a related vein. This lines up somewhat with the refrain in the prayer Unetaneh Tokef, that Janet will be chanting shortly, which encourages us all to follow a path of Teshuvah (what I’ve been talking about), Tefillah (prayer, what we’ve been doing all day today), and Tzedakah (charity and justice work out in the world.
For anyone who has a situation they are feeling guilty about, but cannot work out directly with the other party, or even for anyone here who us unable to forgive someone else for something they did to you, I think it is worth considering whether there are any actions you can take out in the world to help bring about your own healing – volunteering or giving tzedaka or working for justice or something else that feels related, to you. If you need ideas, come see me after class. ☺
Thank you all for listening to this lengthier sermon, and I hope it has given you all some food for thought that you will continue to think about for the rest of today and in an ongoing way hereafter.
