Entering Rosh HaShanah – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Steps Toward Rosh HaShanah

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (coinciding with Parshat Ki Tavo 2024) (adapted from previous versions)

©Rabbi Mordecai Finley

Back when I was in high school, I used to frequent one of those cavernous bookstores, down in Long Beach, California. Piles of books, floor to ceiling, mostly paperbacks. I had developed a love for poetry and found treasures in this roughly organized warehouse. I bought anthologies for 15 cents. I discovered this poem, written by Stephen Crane. He was 24 when he published it in 1895. He died when he was 28. I remember reading it, shuddering. I quote it often, badly. So here it is, as written:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

From “The Black Riders and other Lines” #3, 1895

Now that I know some Bible, I cannot help but think that Stephen Crane had Proverbs 14:10 in the back of his mind, “Lev yode’a marat nafsho”  “The heart knows the bitterness of its soul. . .”

I have spoken about two kinds of Teshuvah (return, penitence), one of our core drives during the Days of Awe. One kind of Teshuvah, the moral type, means working out harm done to other people by taking responsibility and apologizing. The other kind of Teshuvah is harder to describe. The second Teshuvah, the more spiritual version, means returning to a path of well-being, goodness and righteousness. Sometimes it means returning to that which we have not yet been.

Many of us, when we look over our lives, see mistakes, confusion, wrong paths taken, and even, now and then, real harm done to others. We feel guilt, remorse, regret and sometimes shame. Others of us focus on the harm that others have done to us. We feel anger, resentment, and see ourselves as a victim. The deeper we go into reflecting on living our complex lives, the more we see that we never had enough wisdom when we needed it the most. We lacked the wisdom needed not to cause avoidable harm. We lacked the wisdom to work our way through confusion.

We lacked the wisdom to work through guilt and regret. We often lacked the wisdom needed to withstand the harm that others inflicted upon us. We often lacked the wisdom of not allowing our resentment of others to ensnare us. We sometimes look back on life and don’t understand why we did what we did. Back then it was obvious. Now it isn’t. In those moments of painful insight, we can feel that queasy sense of the soul that Proverbs teaches – “The heart knows the bitterness of its soul.”

I think for some of us, we cannot do full Teshuvah (return, repair, penitence) in either realm, the moral or the spiritual, without encountering the bitterness of our souls. We must feel the depths of our pain, our own brokenness, the tragedy of our story. I also think for real Teshuvah in either realm, we must be able, when appropriate, to have empathy for others. Anger, resentment and blaming can be as damaging for our inner growth as depression, guilt and shame.

Setting things as straight as possible in the moral, interpersonal realm is crucial. We must be accountable and, as much as possible, make amends. In the process of making amends, we must do the work of straightening out ourselves within. Know the truth of ourselves, hidden away in our depths.

We must admit the bad and the ugly – things that we have done, that others have done to us. We did bad things to others – we scarred them. We’ve been scarred. We’ve done ugly things and have had ugly things done to us. Sometimes through negligence and sometimes on purpose – we all sin. Staying in resentment and anger is a sin – they can be a poison to the soul.

We must admit all this and experience our own brokenness.

Psalm 51:19 tells us that the true sacrifice to God is a broken spirit, a broken and crushed heart. Truth can be bitter. We bring our bitter, broken hearts to the Divine altar.

We can break apart the husks of guilt and regret, resentment and victimhood. Within the husk, we discover sadness, a holy sadness, an unbearable sadness – that can transform into light. The spark of a purified heart, a new and steadfast spirit, flows through us. We find the good – the light of love, gratitude, reverence, grace and kindness. The Good, the Bad and Ugly.

And then we make a prayer for ourselves: May that redemptive spark of light, redeemed through knowing our bitter and broken hearts, transform into a will, diamond-like, and will ourselves to be a channel of the light and the good.

That diamond-like will, crystal and clear, comes from encountering the bitterness of the soul that the heart knows. The good outshines the darkness of the bad and the ugly, the dreadful and the unbearable. The path is bitter, but it is good, because it is your heart, your soul, your life.

We have a choice to make every year. Shall we journey through these Days of Awe like sleepwalkers, oblivious to the pain in the soul and the truth about the disruptions between us and others?  Or do we use the teaching of these days to do Teshuvah – to return to an inner path of the good and the true that awakens us to life’s purpose?