Sermons
How Not to Apologize
Yom Kippur 5769
by Rabbi Jared Saks
After passing my driving test, even before I pulled out of the Department of Motor Vehicles testing center, my mom had me stop the car so that she could tell me something important. She wanted me to know what her and my dad’s priorities were, now that I had a license. If I were ever in accident, she told me, I needed to remember that my parents cared about me and not the car. And if I were ever in a situation where I shouldn’t be behind the wheel that I should call them and they would help, no questions asked.
Had I heard my mom correctly? No questions asked? But that was what she and my dad believed. I wasn’t going to be perfect, they knew this. And they gave me permission not to be perfect, and – if only for that moment when I needed their help most – they even gave me permission not to say I was sorry, not to apologize. Sure, we’d have to deal with the situation later, perhaps the next morning, maybe after a few days when we were all ready, but my parents recognized that at first, the most important thing was that I was safe, not that I was sorry. That put a whole new spin on ‘better safe than sorry.’
As a teenager, this sounded like a pretty remarkable breakthrough for my parents. But the reality is, now that I am a rabbi, I see that this is the way the world ought to work. And I think that God understands this, too. If I were to ask any of you what the overarching theme of the High Holy Days is, I’m sure that you would talk about saying we’re sorry or seeking forgiveness. But I’m here today to teach you how not to apologize. I believe that sometimes, God prefers us safe, rather than sorry.
First, let’s look at this day, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. As Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, “Men and women who come to no other service during the year come” (Harold Kushner, How Good Do We Have to Be?, p. 5) to worship on Yom Kippur. People who typically arrive late are sure to come on time. Why is this the day when we see most of your faces at Temple? The Yom Kippur liturgy speaks “repeatedly of our failings, our neglect of duties, our hard-heartedness toward others” (Kushner, p. 6). But I know that you are not here today to be told that you have gotten it wrong over the past year. We all know that about ourselves, perhaps all too well. So, then, why be here today? We come to Temple on Yom Kippur especially because we want to hear that our mistakes and missteps have not separated us from God, that even when we have made a mistake, God loves us more than God loves the car, so to speak.
Our tradition teaches us what God thinks of the mistakes we make. But unfortunately, we get mixed messages. Yom Kippur teaches us that God is waiting for us to do teshuvah, waiting for us to return to God. But the first story of a mistake sends us a very different lesson. In the Garden of Eden, one of the only rules given to Adam and Eve concerned the tree of knowledge of good and evil. “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat,” God said to Adam, “but as for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you will die” (Genesis 2:16-17). And what happens? The serpent convinces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, which she shares with Adam. And the two are exiled from the Garden.
Unfortunately, the lesson we learn from the Garden of Eden is that if we make one mistake – and Adam and Eve had no full knowledge of the mistake they were making until after it was too late – God is through with us. We mimic this behavior with one another. Someone does something wrong and the other person responds by withdrawing love or even withdrawing all contact.
But “God does not stop loving us every time we do something wrong” (Kushner, p. 4). Rabbi Kushner believes that rather than the story being about God punishing Adam and Eve for eating of the tree, it is a coming-of-age story. God sort of pushes Adam and Eve out of the nest and teaches them to begin to function on their own. They can call on God when they need help, but God has to learn to let them be grown up.
God does not withdraw from us because we have made a mistake. Sometimes, however, the people in our lives do. Sometimes, when we need to apologize, those whom we’ve hurt can’t or won’t let us close enough to seek forgiveness. In the Talmud, when discussing the laws of repentance, the rabbis recount how Rabbi Zera handled situations where forgiveness was owed to him. When Rabbi Zera had any complaint against anyone, he would repeatedly pass by the offender to make himself available, making it easier for the offender to come and seek forgiveness (BT Yoma 87a). The offender may think that Rabbi Zera is not ready to be approached, that he is too angry to grant forgiveness, but Rabbi Zera goes out of his way to make it clear that he is approachable and forgiving. The people in our lives aren’t always that unselfish.
Our friends, family, and coworkers, those people to whom we look for advice and feedback offer criticism of the things we have done. We hear that criticism and translate it into a comment about what sort of person we are (Kushner p. 36). Think of the child who gets a bad report card or the staff member at work who gets a bad evaluation. Instead of seeing it as an evaluation of one’s performance, we see it as an evaluation of our self-worth. Unfortunately, sometimes those whom we love offer criticism, intentionally or unintentionally, in a way that comes across as an attack of our character, not of our deeds. Sometimes, it’s not just our interpretation of the feedback that leads us to believe that we are inadequate.
Studies have shown that the athlete who kicks himself over the ‘I should haves’ does worse in his field than the one who says, “That wasn’t my best performance. I’ll do better next time.” God understands our resolution to do better the next time, even when the people we’ve hurt aren’t ready to hear it. God doesn’t expect us to meet God’s needs. God accepts us as we are, faults and all.
The Yom Kippur service teaches us that for sins against God, the Day of Atonement grants forgiveness, but for sins against one another, God cannot grant forgiveness until we have apologized to those whom we’ve hurt. What this means is that we have to seek forgiveness for the things we have done to other people before we can seek forgiveness for our sins against God. I’d like to consider understanding this differently. I believe that God is always ready to receive our request for forgiveness, but the people in our lives may not be ready for or may not be capable of that request.
The clearest example of such a situation is someone who is no longer living. This can often happen in our relationships with our parents. “We had in mind to apologize to them for having hurt them with the excesses of our adolescence and kept putting it off because it was hard to do, because we said to ourselves, ‘It was so long ago, why bring it up now’” (Kushner, p. 88). And then, after that parent has died, we realize that it is too late and we will never have the chance to seek forgiveness. The rabbis were aware of such situations, even in their time, and developed ways for us to seek forgiveness from someone who is no longer living.
They teach us that if we have sinned against someone who is now no longer living, we should bring ten people to the hurt one’s grave and declare before them and before God that we wronged this person when he or she was alive and now seek forgiveness both from them and from God. Therapists today recommend that we write a letter saying all the things that we wish we had said. They also recommend that we write a second letter, from the person whom we’d hurt, saying all of the things we need to hear.
Of course, neither of these solutions really allows the person we hurt to hear our apology or to grant us forgiveness, but it allows us to move forward and to put our mistakes behind us. The rabbis’ solution has us publicly acknowledge our failings, while the psychotherapeutic community recommends that we deal with the situation privately. Both are acceptable options, I think, and can help us move forward, even if our apology comes ‘too late.’
But the harder question, is what do we do when the person we’ve hurt is still living and we are not ready to seek forgiveness or when that person is not yet ready to be approached? Does our tradition grant us permission not to apologize? I think so.
The first thing to understand is that I am not granting you blanketed permission not to apologize. None of us gets to walk out of Temple after Neilah without having apologized to those whom we’ve hurt and say, “Rabbi Saks said I don’t have to apologize. I’m off the hook.” That’s not what I’m saying. But I am saying that there are certain situations where seeking forgiveness is going to cause more harm, where approaching the person whom we’ve wronged is only going to hurt them more deeply.
Rabbi Zera, of whom I spoke earlier, understood that he had to make himself present to convince his offender that he was approachable. Sometimes, the people whom we’ve hurt have made it clear to us that they are not approachable, that they are not ready to grant forgiveness. Our tradition teaches us that we need to seek forgiveness three times and after that, if the offended party has not granted forgiveness, our wrongdoing is upon them. That might help us in the World to Come, but does it really accomplish what teshuvah is supposed to accomplish for us?
The Biblical narrative provided our ancestors with more tangible ways to atone for their sins. In ancient Israel there was something you could do to lift the emotional burden of having missed the mark and having disappointed God. We offered sacrifices. The purpose was not to appease God or to balance the scales by doing one good thing to outweigh the bad thing we had done. Instead, the sacrificial system showed us that we were capable of something better, that we had a higher potential than the mistake we had made (Kushner, p. 65). But today, how can we convince ourselves that our mistakes do not define who we are, even when others are unwilling to grant us forgiveness or when we are unready to ask?
In the Unetaneh Tokef, the prayer that reminds us of the magnitude of this day, we recite the words “U’teshuvah, u’tefilah, u’tzedakah ma’avirin et ro’a g’zeirah… But repentance, prayer, and charity temper judgment’s severe decree.” We have long understood that God demands all three of these from us in order to gain forgiveness. Our perception has been that we must seek forgiveness, we must pray, and we must give tzedakah in order to be forgiven. But I believe that God does not demand these three things of us in equal proportions. In fact, I believe that the measure of each changes with each and every situation. I believe that in situations where we cannot seek forgiveness, where we cannot yet do the work of teshuvah, God gives us permission to pray a little harder or give a little more.
“If guilt results from what we have done,” writes Rabbi Kushner, “the cure is to do other things, better things: random acts of thoughtfulness, giving charity, helping a neighbor” (Kushner, p. 63). On a rational level, giving tzedakah, like offering the sacrifices of old, does not undo what we’ve done, but religion doesn’t always exist at the rational level. On a non-rational level, “where our souls live, it does introduce us to our better, nobler self” (Kushner, p. 63). Consider this example shared by Rabbi Kushner:
“Some years ago, a prominent Boston hospital faced a dilemma. A notorious slumlord wanted to donate a very significant sum of money to name a building in his parents’ memory. Some people who knew his reputation and where his money had come from, urged the hospital not to be tainted by his gift. Others, mindful of the hospital’s precarious financial condition, urged it to accept … I was among those who argued for acceptance, less out of concern for the hospital than for the donor. If he felt guilty for the way he had accumulated his fortune, I found it appropriate for him to work off his guilt by giving a significant part of that fortune to a worthy cause” (Kushner, pp. 63-4).
Another alternative to seeking forgiveness is suggested by the mystical tradition of Judaism. Kabbalah and subsequently the Chasidic movement connected teshuvah with tikkun olam, the restoration and repair of the world. They believed that when we engage in tikkun olam we are not only reuniting the Divine sparks that are scattered throughout the world, we are not only repairing the world, but we are also returning ourselves to God and to one another, in essence, engaging in the process of teshuvah.
Perhaps if we choose to engage in tikkun olam or give tzedakah, we ought to choose a cause worthy of the transgression we have committed, just as the Boston slumlord gave money because he had cheated his tenants out of their money. In the Talmud, Rabbi Judah teaches us that true repentance is evident when we are faced with the same decision and we make a better choice (BT Yoma 86b). Sometimes, we can better apologize through a change in behavior than through our words.
We may have come here today out of fear that God will reject us. We believed that our tradition told us that if we haven’t apologized to those whom we’ve hurt in the past year, then God was not ready to forgive us. But God isn’t that uncaring. God understands that they may have pushed us away, they may not be ready to hear our apology or capable of it, and that we might not yet have the strength to seek forgiveness. We are not unapologetic. We just have not yet apologized. To be unapologetic is to be unwilling to make or express an apology. We are willing, we may just not yet be able.
Rabbi Kushner writes of people who have connected better with God through 12-step programs than they have through their faith communities. He tells the story of one participant in a support group for compulsive eaters who spoke of fishing food out of the trash after her family had gone to sleep. Her friends told her she was sick and that she had a real problem. But her support group told her something different: “We’ve done that too and we know how terrible we feel when we do that. It will always be a struggle, but you can learn to control yourself” (Kushner, p. 52). They did not offer her shared strength. Instead, they offered shared weakness.
Today, each of us is weak and we stand before God with shared weakness. We might think that God will reject us for what we have done over the past year, but we are far less likely to think that God will reject the person sitting beside us. And so, we share our weaknesses together this Yom Kippur and convince one another that God has not pushed any one us away, nor will God not forgive us just because we are not yet ready to apologize to those whom we’ve hurt. Our tradition teaches us that perhaps we still have until the last night of Chanukah to seek forgiveness. So this Yom Kippur, we seek to understand that sometimes it is better to be safe than sorry. We ask that God forgive us, even if we are not yet ready to forgive others. And we ask that God grant us the strength in the coming year that we lacked in the year that has passed. G’mar chatimah tovah… May you be sealed for blessing in the Book of Life. Shanah tovah.
