A Jewish apology to the world

At this time of year, it is common for many of us to pick up our phones and send e-mails apologizing to others for the ways that we wronged them in the past year. In addition to doing personal repentance (teshuvah), Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, explained that we as a people (klal Yisra’el) must also do teshuvah. How do we, as a nation, ask the nations of the world for forgiveness?

Every nation has a unique debt to the world, and the Jewish people are no exception. Elul is a time for us to focus on where we have fallen short, not only interpersonally but also collectively, as global citizens. While the Jewish people have made many extraordinary and admirable contributions to the world in the past year, we have also done wrongs for which we remain collectively accountable. The communitarian ethos in Jewish thought (areivut) makes every member of our society responsible for one another morally and spiritually.

Where have we collectively fallen short? As founder and president of Uri L’Tzedek, an Orthodox social justice organization guided by Torah values and dedicated to combating suffering and oppression, it has been my role to reflect on such matters throughout the year. This is some of what I’ve learned.

First, we owe an apology to all those who have suffered losses from our most recent scandals involving billions of philanthropic dollars. It has been shown that Jewish nonprofits are far behind non-Jewish nonprofits in public transparency, making it possible for a Ponzi scheme to emerge from within our midst. These crimes of fraud spill over to affect the masses.

Further, it is now clear that Agriprocessors — the former Iowa kosher meatpacking firm raided in 2008 for illegal practices — and countless other Jewish-owned companies have oppressed their workers, creating a problem that is now pervasive throughout our community. We owe an apology to the Guatemalan people and to a spate of other countries whose people have been abused in American Jewish factories while producing kosher products that we blindly consumed. We also owe an apology to some of the poorest tenants in buildings owned by Jewish landlords, who have often suffered exorbitant rent hikes, winters without heat and have been made victims of gentrification.

On a global front, Israel has sometimes treated its minorities or neighbors without the full dignity they deserve. Additionally, only 65 years after the Holocaust, we have not done enough to try to stop the genocides in Darfur, the Congo and other countries around the world. And despite years spent studying the Bible and its imperative to care for the poor, we still have not become world leaders in alleviating poverty.

So how does Jewish tradition suggest we do teshuvah for these significant shortcomings? First, we must come out of our denial and accept the wrongs we have remained bystanders to or perpetrated. As a nation chosen to carry certain responsibilities, we need to recognize how we have fallen short as global leaders of justice. We must now repair our harms and missed opportunities and offer apologies. Then we must ensure that we put sustainable systems in place to improve our community and safeguard it from falling again in the coming year.

From the Jewish perspective, a wrongdoing to an individual is a wrongdoing not only against that individual but also against God and the whole world, since it creates insecurity — what Martin Buber called an offense against “the order of being.” At times, tragically, a wrongdoing cannot be directly repaired, and thus requires substitute reparation. Maimonides explains that compensation should be given to the inheritors of the wronged or to the local authorities to manage (hilkhot teshuvah). Midrash teaches us that if we cannot locate the one who deserves our apology (gezel d’rabim), we must give to strangers and to society at large. 

Similarly, one talmudic passage suggests that if someone has harmed another whom they can no longer locate, they must go to a place where no one knows them and return a valuable lost object to its owner (Sanhedrin 25a). The idea is that they must perform acts of goodness to repair themselves and others from the harm they previously caused.

This year, in addition to apologizing to others for our mistakes, we, as a “light unto the nations,” can embrace the virtue of collective teshuvah by asking all humanity to forgive us for the times that our light burns others rather than inspires and heals. I have little doubt that our great nation can meet the challenge this Rosh Hashanah. We are a holy nation, not when we point fingers at our perpetrators but when we cleanse ourselves, representing the ideals of our tradition and conscience.

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz is senior Jewish educator at UCLA Hillel, founder and president of Uri L’Tzedek, and a fifth-year doctoral candidate in moral psychology and epistemology at Columbia University.