September 8, 2010

In the past several months I have had some version of the following exchange several times. I tell a friend that I’ve just finished a book on repentance, and he responds that he finds the subject of forgiveness very interesting. It’s psychologically so much healthier to forgive than to hold on to resentments, he says, signaling that he appreciates the importance of the subject.

The confusion of repentance and forgiveness is widespread, it seems, and also very telling.

Forgiveness, I explain, is what we are called on to do when we have been wronged by others. It is about our willingness to be generous and compassionate with those whose behavior was hurtful and unwarranted.

Repentance, by contrast, is what we are called on to do when we have wronged others. It involves confession of our transgressions, feeling remorseful, making an apology, seeking forgiveness (hence the confusion in the minds of so many), offering restitution, soul-searching and ultimately uprooting old patterns of behavior from our lives.

In these weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it seems that the need to understand what repentance is and why it matters is more urgent than ever.

Forgiveness is difficult and rare, to be sure, but I want to suggest that engaging in real repentance is far more difficult, more easily misunderstood and far less frequently practiced. Despite the many dozens of sermons that our rabbis have given on the subject of repentance, the process of repenting remains something of a mystery to most Jews (and, of course, not only Jews). Many never take seriously the need for repentance. Others start out on the path of repentance but give up when they encounter one of the many obstacles along the way.

Repentance, in our time, has become a lost art. Consider several examples, which I suspect all of us will find familiar.

• The family member who regularly deflects any suggestion that he or she has done something to hurt others by insisting repeatedly that it’s really someone else’s fault;
• The boss who can acknowledge making mistakes but can never quite say the words “I’m sorry,” or worse, can say the words but not express genuine remorse;
• The spouse who cheats on a partner and apologizes profusely, but who is utterly unprepared to do the hard work of restoring the trust that he or she has undermined;
• The friend who has a habit of speaking harshly or acting impulsively, but lacks the self-awareness to explore the real roots of those dysfunctional patterns of behavior;
• The person who has promised repeatedly to reform her ways — to give up smoking, to make more time for her children, to be less judgmental of others — yet continually falls back into old patterns.

In light of these examples — and hardly a day goes by when we don’t encounter others — we do well to ask: What makes genuine repentance so difficult? And why should we even bother trying?

Repentance, what Jewish tradition has called teshuvah — “turning” or “returning” — entails nothing less than a radical transformation of our selves and our relationship to others. It requires profound psychological self-awareness, which includes both recognizing our own moral blind spots and exploring the character traits that cause our moral lapses in the first place.

It demands that we take full responsibility for our behavior, without hesitation or equivocation, and then take action to undo the effects of that behavior on others. And if this were not enough, Judaism teaches that the process of teshuvah is never really finished. Each time we have an opportunity to make the same mistake again, we need to renounce the past and choose a different path.

So doing teshuvah is literally an endless process. Forgiving others for their transgressions against us is a piece of cake by comparison.

There are many obstacles on the path to true repentance: ego, self-deception, dishonesty and stubbornness, to name just a few. Because we all want the approval of those we love, it is tempting to cover up or minimize any actions that might cause us to lose their affection. Because we all know that others expect us to make amends when we hurt them, it is tempting to feign remorse and utter empty words of apology.

But counterfeit repentance, like counterfeit currency, has no value. We can’t restore our integrity or repair our relationships with others by merely pretending to repent; there are no shortcuts to an ethical life.

All of which explains why genuine repentance is so rare. The work of examining ourselves and repairing the relationships we have broken is arduous and always has been.

The culture in which we live only compounds the difficulties. The expectation that we can find a quick fix for every problem that arises makes us less prepared to engage in the long, morally demanding work of teshuvah, and even less inclined to try. When virtual friends take the place of real relationships, we lose the impetus to cultivate the sort of emotional honesty that teshuvah requires of us.

The costs of ignoring the work of repentance are not easily quantifiable, but the evidence is all around us. We see it in the lives of public figures — politicians and corporate executives — who get caught in some deceitful or fraudulent behavior, and then baldly deny it.

We see it on daytime television shows, where people confess their transgressions before a live audience, never displaying a hint of the contrition or soul searching that is the mark of repentance.

Most of all, we know it in those quiet moments in our own lives when we recognize that we are not living up to our own moral standards, yet don’t know how to restore our own sense of wholeness and integrity.

The ultimate benefit of doing teshuvah is that it offers us a way to overcome our past precisely because we have confronted and taken full responsibility for it. It enables us to escape the sense of guilt — in some cases, even despair — with which many of us live.

In its place, we come to live with self-acceptance and hope because we know that moral renewal is always a possibility. We may even discover, as the ancient rabbis taught, that through repentance our transgressions can be transformed into merits. The rewards of doing teshuvah are commensurate with the effort we expend.

This year when we celebrate the 10 days of repentance, the holiest days on the Jewish calendar, we would do well to focus on what repentance is and what it is not. Surely it is easier to think of this as a time to forgive others for their transgressions against us. But it is far more rewarding to remember that this time is really a gift, an opportunity to engage in searching moral introspection about the ways in which we have harmed others and so failed to be our best selves.

Tradition has laid out the path to follow, as well as how we can work with our internal resistance and what we stand to gain in the process. All that we require is an accurate understanding of what is required of us and the will to begin anew.

Louis E. Newman is the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religion and the Humphrey Doermann Professor of Liberal Learning at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. He is the author most recently of “Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah,” published this year by Jewish Lights.

Daniel Rope knew the apology to his sister would be the hardest one to make.

His mother, after all, was his mother — throughout his drug addiction, starting at age 12, Dan’s mother had stood by him, believed he would somehow pull out of it. She was at all his court appearances, she went to Alcoholics Anonymous to figure out the best way to help him, she implicitly forgave him for stealing from her, for keeping her up at night wondering if he was dead or alive, for wrecking a family already devastated by the death of her husband from colon cancer when the children were 6 and 3.

But Katie was different.

Katie had given up on her older brother.

By the time she was 20, she hadn’t spoken to Dan in a few years, and she had reconciled herself to the idea that his addiction would kill him.

Now, she was sitting across the table at the Greek restaurant he had taken her to after Friday night services at Beit T’Shuvah, the recovery facility where he was living. He had been out of prison and sober for more than a year.

Katie remembers Dan’s voice quivering when he told her he was sorry.

Sorry for bringing drugs and shady people into their home; sorry for stealing the money she had earned at Domino’s Pizza and was saving for her trip to Europe after high school; sorry for preoccupying their mother, for making her keep his secrets, for missing her childhood.

Sorry for not being her big brother.

Katie sat in the restaurant sobbing.

Katie and Dan both know it wasn’t that 10-minute apology that made them the best friends they are today. But that acknowledgement more than a year ago opened up a conversation and process that couldn’t have happened without the words “I’m sorry.”

“My resentment for him was so intense and passionate that, if it wasn’t for the way that an apology neutralizes a situation, I think I would still hold all those things in my heart,” said Katie, now 22 and a philosophy major at UCLA. “I think I would still hold some grudge toward him for never recognizing the truth and the severity of the situation that his addiction caused in our family.”

Apologies hold the power to transform individuals, to restore relationships, to move people forward rather than leaving them stuck in the past.

Perhaps that is why apologies and forgiveness are so central to the High Holy Days, the most intense time of introspection on the Jewish calendar.

Over and over in the High Holy Days liturgy, Jews ask God for forgiveness and praise God as forgiving and merciful. The liturgy is meant to inspire repentance, and to bring worshippers to emulate God by actively participating in a culture of forgiveness. The 30 days before Rosh Hashanah and then the 10 days following, culminating in Yom Kippur, are designated for preparing for divine forgiveness by asking for human forgiveness.

The holiday’s earthly application can be compelling even for those who can’t connect to an image of God as judge in the sky before the open Book of Life.

“A good portion of the liturgy is about you getting to play God and holding yourself accountable,” said Rabbi Irwin Kula, an author and speaker on spirituality, and president of Clal — The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York.

“If you understand that this is a place of judgment internally, if you can locate where to judge yourself, you’ll get to a better place and become more forgiving yourself.”

Having to directly admit offenses to another human being gives concrete form to the abstract ideas of honesty, humility and empathy. 

“This concept of seeking forgiveness is a very wholesome concept, it’s a chastening concept,” said Rabbi Jacob Pressman, rabbi emeritus at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles. “It gets you off your high horse of infallibility and allows you to admit to yourself and to others, ‘I’m not infallible.’ ”

Recognizing shortcomings can help make people more tolerant of others’ foibles or transgressions and, ideally, creates human interaction with less strife.

“Basically, what an apology does is it puts you back on an even keel. When you have dissed a person, you are saying you are above that person. Now we have to create equality again,” said Kula, author of “Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life” (2006), and host of the 2003 public television series “Simple Wisdom.”

Of course, apologizing is hard.

“Admitting offenses is self-diminishing to an extent. People don’t like to face the fact that they’re nasty or have lied or stolen, and asking forgiveness is a confession of an inadequacy,” Pressman said.

But Katie Rope understands that any humiliation is washed away by the relief an apology brings to both parties.

“Apologies are so crucial for loving someone, you don’t ever need to feel ashamed for apologizing because it’s such a healing experience and takes so much courage to do,” she said.

The fact that human connectedness is at the center of what is supposed to be one of the most ethereally focused times of year is no accident.

Hazzan Judy Greenfeld has spent much of her life thinking about forgiveness.

In December 1975, when she was 16, her parents were held up in an inner-city Cleveland parking structure after seeing a play with some friends. The assailants were three teenage boys with a sawed-off shotgun, and the one holding the gun panicked. He shot her father, and he died immediately.

Greenfeld, her four siblings and her mother were so immobilized by the pain and shock, it took them a year just to be able to move, she said. Each Friday night and each holiday brought a fresh wave of grief.

Greenfeld doesn’t know what she would do if she ran into the murderer, who was sentenced to a juvenile detention center and then a few years in prison.

“Part of me felt like, why do these kids get to live? They should be dead. These boys should know who they killed,” said Greenfeld, who founded the Nachshon Minyan, a spiritual and educational community in Encino.

For decades, Greenfeld has done the psychological and spiritual work necessary to move on with her life.

“If someone really hurts you or ruins your life, there is this sense that if you forgive them, they are not going to pay, and they’re not going to really feel what you felt. There is a desire for somebody to be as pained as you are,” she said. “Well, we don’t get to do that, because the truth is we don’t have control over that.”

So Greenfeld reconceptualized what forgiveness means, parsing the word to derive a nuance that has led her to spiritual healing.

“I turned the word ‘forgiving’ into ‘for giving’ to God to take care of. When I do that, it puts me into a place where I can release myself of the personal responsibility of having to bring someone to justice. The true healing of forgiveness is that it releases you,” she said. 

Greenfeld has devised a meditation to help visualize the process of forgiveness, which she says works for offenses mundane or life-altering. 

She pictures the offense — in her case, the murderers — and imagines an electrical cord extending from her solar plexus out to these boys. The energy is draining from her and going to them.

“I have something that weakens me and is so painful. It is the energy that runs from me to that picture, that scene. Part of the work is untying myself from that energetic cord, so that I can pull my energy back to me,” she said.

For smaller offenses, it might just be a thin thread that needs snipping. For larger offenses, it might be a cable of twisted wires.

“I have to cut that cable. And all those little fibers, all the little wires hanging out, I have to smooth them, and then pull that cable back into my own heart to re-empower myself,” she said.

“And what I have found is that when I take it into that realm, I’m released. I don’t know if I can tell you, if I ever saw these men, what I would do, and I can’t tell you that I feel there is justice in the world. But I know I have been able to live my life and turn it into good, which is what I feel teshuvah (repentance) is — being able to bring good where there has been something that isn’t good.”

Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, rabbi emeritus at Stephen S. Wise Temple, said his years on the pulpit and working with people has led him to believe that it is forgiving, and not apologizing, that is at the core of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

“I’ve discovered that worshippers always look upon the High Holy Days as a wonderful therapy session, because they know they can begin with a new slate. But I would like the emphasis to be that the worshipper, in his or her relationships, lets the other have a new slate. And that is why one of the most important commandants is, ‘Thou shall not bear a grudge,” Zeldin said.

People who are forgiving recognize their own faults and thus empathize with others, according to Rabbi Mark Borovitz, founder and director of Beit T’Shuvah, a residential recovery facility in Culver City.

“The only person who would rebuff teshuvah is someone who needs to be angry, and it’s just really sad,” he said. “Some people are addicted to being miserable.”

Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of Clal — The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and an author and speaker on spiritual and interpersonal issues, said those who are unable to forgive need to look inside themselves.

“Generally speaking, I find the inability to forgive somebody else has to do with that person internally not forgiving themselves, or not having been forgiven for something they did,” he said, noting that it is specific to each case. “Until it creates some kind of anxiety that undermines the person’s way of being in the world, there is nothing much you can do,” he said.

Of course, there are some transgressions and betrayals that are so deep, they can’t be forgiven.

“Sometimes we hurt people so deeply, that the brokenness, at least in the near term, is irreparable, and then we live with it. Brokenness is part of life,” Kula said.

Jewish sources require one who is apologizing to make three sincere attempts. If after three attempts the apology is rebuffed, the wrongdoer is absolved.

Of course, divine absolution might do little to heal someone whose apology goes unaccepted.

“One thing you may feel is grief. What you’re expecting is to reattach to the person, and the grief is that the person will not be who you wish them to be,” said Wendy Mogel, a psychologist and author of the forthcoming “The Blessing of a B Minus.”

There are shades of gray on the forgiveness spectrum. You can forgive someone but not have an interest in continuing the relationship, according to Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector and professor of philosophy at the American Jewish University. Or, you can reconcile without forgiving — he points to America and Japan, following the mutually destructive deeds of World War II. Or, you can offer a pardon, so the person is not absolved of guilt, but no longer has to suffer the punishment.

What Greenfeld understands is that finding some way to resolve enmity between people helps both parties.

“When people are really tired, I ask them to look at the resentments in their life, because resentments drain you,” she said.

“In the end, you have to ask the question, how do we want to continue to bring goodness into the world? Forgiveness allows us an opportunity to move forward.”