Rosh Hashanah Guilt Trip
Rosh Hashanah II 5771 / 10 September 2010
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg, Beth Am
Kol Nidre, the medieval prayer with the stunning melody which we will chant just nine days from now is the ultimate disclaimer. Think of it as a letter in which we say:
Dear God,
Just so you know, All-knowing One, we’re going to try really hard this year, but chances are we’re going to say some things that we don’t really mean. So, just in case that happens, we want you to pay attention to all the things we say which we should have said… and ignore the ones that we shouldn’t have.
Sincerely, your eternally trying and perpetually failing people,
The Jews
So, I guess it’s fitting then, that I begin my remarks today with my own disclaimer: This year I’m giving what might sound like a Yom Kippur Sermon on this second day of Rosh Hashanah. So often rabbis, including this one, use Rosh Hashanah to speak about the new year and newness, the infinite possibilities that are contained within it – the warm and fuzzy stuff. The fire and brimstone speeches, then, are reserved for Yom Kippur. “You better shape up” preach the rabbis, because the gates are closing and you don’t want to be left out in the cold. But Rosh Hashanah is not the secular new year. And unlike New Year’s Day, it demands a bit more from us. The poet, Dana Gioia, sums up his impression of January 1st with the following words (“New Year’s”):
Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.
He picks up a few stanzas later:
The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along-to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.
Gioia’s poem is beautifully pagan, depicting images of a self-renewing world, pregnant with possibility and promise. And yet, though Rosh Hashanah is certainly about renewal, it does not grant us tabula rasa. As we stand on the threshold of a new year, we are faced not with an untainted blanket of freshly fallen snow, but with the footprints of yesteryear. Our Jewish tradition views the new year as a palimpsest, not an open canvas. We will paint the experiences of 5771 over the memories of 5770, trying to improve the image from last year. That is why, I think, Yom Kippur comes after Rosh Hashanah. Because without the Day of Atonement looming before us, we might be tempted to simply see the new year as “the most mundane and human holiday” when, in reality, our New Year should “honor the miraculous,” and celebrate eternity.
So today I want to speak about a topic which may feel a bit “Yom Kippur-y.” It may not be fire and brimstone per se, but I’m hoping that it will steer us toward a more conscientious engagement with the Days of Awe. Today I want to speak about guilt.
That’s right, guilt: the time-honored Jewish tradition of doing bad stuff and then feeling lousy about it afterward. Or, as Ruth Andrew Ellenson puts it (with a bit more eloquence), “Between the ideal of who you should be, and the reality of who you are, lies guilt.” Ellenson is the editor and recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for her collection: The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt. If you haven’t read the book, male or female, you should. It’s funny, heartbreaking, thoughtful and poignant. It brings together some of the best Jewish women authors of our era to tackle a sensitive but important topic: How does Jewish guilt affect those who experience it? How does it bring people together? How does it tear them apart?
The essays range quite a bit in their outlook and scope. One essay, by Sharon Brous of Los Angeles, describes the difficulty, as a rabbi, of having to bear the burden of other people’s anger and disappointment with Judaism. She writes: “To those critics, I say, “Look, I’m sorry that Judaism’s not an easy entrance religion. I’m sorry that Religious School was so lame. I’m sorry that Hebrew makes your head spin. I’m sorry that Rosh Hashanah services are so damn long. I’m sorry I don’t have a big white beard. Most of all, I’m sorry for musaf – but it’s really not my fault! Everything worthwhile takes hard work and discipline.”
One of the most thought-provoking essays is entitled The House of Love and Bragging. In it, the author describes her recurring fantasy that she is having a really good day, happy and content, when a baby grand piano, which had not been properly secured in the freight airplane thousands of feet above her head, comes crashing down from the sky, flattening her into a pancake. “Better keep my eyes up,” she writes. “Better be vigilant, particularly on those good days. Any good day not marked by worry and vigilance will be met with tragedy.” Her epiphany comes when she is telling a friend about an upcoming trip to Italy for a reading of her second book. She is excited, but anxious. “I’m so scared the plane will crash!” she confesses to her friend, “because I have a book out!” The friend replies slowly, “Well, you know, the plane might crash. But it won’t be because you have a book out.” The author describes how freeing it was when she realized that she simply wasn’t that important. Her guilt over her success was unwarranted. God doesn’t drop pianos on people’s heads because they’re having a good day.
Still another essay is by an author who misses Kol Nidre because she is sitting in a nail salon waiting for the paint on her toenails to dry. She describes breaking into tears upon her arrival at home that evening and attending shul all day the next day, barely lifting her head from the Mahzor.
Guilt, as in this vignette, can be redemptive. It can lead us back to our tradition, our families or back to ourselves. Guilt can tear us down, but it can also build us up, motivating us to move closer to the ideal. Moreover, guilt is not simply about disappointing ourselves. In fact, it’s most often about the twinge we feel in our kishkes when we’ve disappointed others: our loved ones and our community, when we’ve disappointed God. But, here’s the thing: God wants us to succeed. The Kadosh Baruch Hu, through our tradition, has provided us a road map, a way to lead lives of blessing and righteousness. And God believes in us. That’s why it hurts so much when we fail. That’s why we feel guilty. We see ourselves through God’s eyes, and we don’t like what we see.
There’s a story of a King who visits a small town. The members of the town want to honor him with a barrel of good wine, but there is not enough money in the town coffers to purchase a cask. So each person agrees to pour a bottle of his own wine into an empty cask in the town square.
Each night for a week, various individuals approach the cask. Each person thinks, “I have so little. The others will give wine, it won’t make a difference if I simply pour in little bit of water.” Finally, at week’s end, each person has contributed his bottle’s worth. The visiting King is presented with the barrel of fine wine. He opens the barrel and, as he takes a drink, there is a strange expression on his face. He takes a second sip and then pours it out upon the ground. And it is apparent to everyone assembled that the barrel contains only water.
A little bit of guilt can be a good thing. The story is compelling because we can all imagine the hush that falls over the crowd, the embarrassment they feel as they realize that each has held back his best. We know what it feels like to punt, to phone it in, to withhold our best when our best is what’s needed. How many times have we brought water when we should have brought wine?
Guilt is certainly not a new Jewish phenomenon. Included among the various forms of sacrifices done in Temple-times is the “guilt-offering,” the asham. This sacrifice is unique in that it is required of one who has sinned intentionally, but a sin not so severe as to incur the ultimate punishment: karet or divine excommunication. For example, the misuse of sacred objects and the offering of certain kinds of false oaths are cause for bringing a guilt-offering.
And this, I want to suggest to you today, can be our criterion for discerning the difference between destructive and constructive guilt: What was our intention? Did we sin knowing full well that what we were doing was wrong? Did we allow ourselves to justify an improper or even immoral act in the name of truth or ignorance or progress, or the common good? In other words are we feeling guilty because we actually are guilty? Abraham Joshua Heschel writes that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible. I’ve always loved that quote, but I have come to realize that it sets the bar just a bit too high. The sin of indifference is a significant one to be sure, but today I want to suggest that we start with the sins we have committed b’zadon, with knowledge, intent or with criminal negligence. Then, if we play our cards right, by focusing on those things for which we are guilty, we will eventually come to a better understanding of our responsibilities with regard to the rest.
So, in those cases when we are guilty, of anger or malice, of bribery or slander, what do we do? What’s the next step? To help us answer this question, we should look more closely at the ritual of the guilt-offering. Though we no longer practice animal sacrifice, I think two further details can be instructive:
First, the asham is considered one of the Kodshei Kodoshim, sacrifices of the highest order, and may only be eaten on the day on which it is offered. Guilt, it seems, unlike revenge, is a dish best served hot. Think about a time you did something you know you shouldn’t have. How does it feel the next day, a week or a year later? Guilt tends to fester and rot if it is not dealt with immediately. The more we postpone atoning for our sins, the more they tend to consume us.
Second, the asham may only be offered with a ram and not any other animal. In our tradition, the ram immediately makes us think of Rosh Hashanah. The ram’s horn is the symbol of our new year, the shofar’s blast calling us to a different level of awareness. The Akedah, the story of the binding of Isaac, is read on Rosh Hashanah, in part, because it ends with the sacrifice of a ram. When we think ram, we think of the new year, and here the asham comes to teach us a valuable lesson: Guilt, at its best, can be a force for renewal.
So who or what can be our guide in this process? I want to suggest that the mahzor can be of great assistance. Think about it, the mahzor is the ultimate guilt trip! The prayers and piyyutim included within these pages are dripping with the most profound guilt.
Avinu Malkeinu, our Father our King: we have sinned before You! Inscribe us in the book of life because we have had the courage to admit our wrongs and we have done our best to make amends. And though we may not truly deserve to be forgiven for these wrongs, we know that you are a compassionate God, a God of Rachamim, who loves us despite our flaws.
What would this coming year be like if each Jew who said the viddui on Yom Kippur, each Jew the world over, really believed it: Ashamnu, we are guilty! What does it mean to be guilty? So often, I think, we dismiss guilt as if it were a sickness passed down through the generations. Or, we explain it away. Or we rationalize it. Can you imagine the confessional prayer translated by a post-modernist?
Ashamnu, we are guilty… except that I’m not really guilty because my truth is not your truth. And anyway, I’m only behaving this way because of my mother, or my boss, or my 4th grade Hebrew school teacher.
And so on and so forth, until there is no one left to take responsibility for anything and the King of kings, HaMelech Malchei Ham’lachim is left to drink only water when, with just a bit more effort, we could have offered wine.
Rav Yosef Be’er Soloveitchik once observed that both King Saul and King David committed great sins. Why then was Saul rejected and David was hailed as progenitor of the messianic line? Soloveitchik explains that it was simply David’s ability to acknowledge his mistake and ask forgiveness. When guilt moves us toward conciliation and away from arrogant pride, it can be a powerful ally.
But, guilt can also be exhausting. Enough to drive many of us to think, “age-old tradition or not, Jews would be better off without all the guilt.” I submit to you that the answer lies not in “quitting guilt,” as with the title of the final essay in Ms. Ellenson’s book, but in redeeming it from its stigmatized past, in knowing its value as well as its limitations. It is no accident that the shofar service takes place on Rosh Hashanah, and not on Yom Kippur. If the new year is about taking cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of our souls, there is, perhaps, no greater tool than the shofar. The notes are piercing and true, and music has a way of entering our hearts faster and with greater impact than words ever can.
But the shofar can only be blown in one direction, from the narrow end so that the sound emerges from the wider end. Rabbi Louis Jacobs, alav hashalom, observes that with regard to this phenomenon the verse is quoted, ‘Min hameitzar karati ya, aneini bamirkhav ya,’ ‘Out of the straits I called upon the Lord; God answered me with great enlargement’ (Ps. 118:5). Jacobs writes that the purpose of Judaism and indeed all true religions is, “To help us emerge from the narrow, restricted, egoistic view to the wider, more exalted one, to help us achieve a more magnanimous view of life and to emerge into a world of broader horizons….” (Jacobs, A Guide to Rosh HaShanah).
While it is true that some of us feel guilty about our happiness, most of us, I think, spend little time worrying about pianos falling on our heads. For most of us, then, the guilt we experience comes in two varieties: the guilt we feel when we’ve done something wrong and the guilt we feel when we haven’t done something wrong, but we or others think we have. When we are consumed by this second kind of guilt, it’s like trying the blow the shofar from the wide end. We get nowhere, end up drained of energy and out of breath. Or we try to please everyone and feel guilty when we cannot. This too is like blowing the shofar backwards. But when we start from the narrow end, when we focus on the behaviors we can change, on the good we can do and on the person each of us would like to become, then we can emerge from egoism to broader horizons, then the notes ring true and clear.
Ashamnu, we are guilty. We feel the disconnect between the real and the ideal. We know when we are not looking out for our brothers, our sisters and our friends. We know when we have not reached for our highest principles, when we look back on the past year and realize that we have withheld our best. Without a sense of guilt, we have no sense of purpose. Without purpose, we cannot begin the arduous task of t’shuvah.
If we can recognize the guilt that we feel as a wake-up call, if we can acknowledge the times when we have knowingly hurt others, when we have knowingly hurt ourselves, if we can incline our hearts and minds toward the path of righteousness and Godliness, then the guilt we feel will not have been in vain. And when we see ourselves through God’s eyes, I suspect that we will better like what we see there.
So this year, let’s not wait until the closing of the gates at Ne’ilah, let’s get started right now. This year, let’s not let the guilt rankle and eat us up inside, but listen instead to the call of the shofar. This Rosh Hashanah, let us raise proudly our glasses of wine (not water) and toast the arrival of a better new year.
Shana Tova!