Tag: repentance

fast · high holy days · sermon

Creating cultures of repentance

levtaylor

We are, apparently, in the grips of a culture war. 

It must be an especially intense one, because the newspapers seem to report on it more than the wars in Syria, the Central African Republic, or Yemen, combined. 

According to the Telegraph, this war is our generation’s great fight. It was even the foremost topic in the leadership battle for who would be our next Prime Minister, far above the economy, climate change, or Coronavirus recovery.

Just this last month, its belligerents have included Disney, Buckingham Palace, the British Medical Journal, cyclists in Surrey, alien library mascots, and rural museums.

But which side should I choose? One side is called “the woke mob.” That seems like it should be my team. After all, they are the successor organisation to the Political Correctness Brigade, of which I was a card-carrying member when that was all the rage.

The so-called “woke mob” are drawing attention to many historic and present injustices. From acknowledging that much of Britain was built on the back of the slave trade to criticising comedians who say that Hitler did a good thing by murdering Gypsies, they are shining a light on wrongs in society.

The trouble is, I hate to be on the losing side. For all the noise and bluster, this campaign hasn’t managed to get anyone who deserves it. The most virulent racists, misogynists, abusers, and profiteers remain largely unabated. 

Even if they were successful, I find the underlying ideas troubling. It seems to assume that people’s wrong actions put them outside of rehabilitation into decent society. Some people are just too bad. 

This strikes as puritanical. While the claims that so-called “cancel culture” is ruining civilisation are wildly overstated, it is right to be concerned by a philosophy that excludes and punishes.

So, will I throw my lot in with the conservatives? Perhaps it’s time I joined this fightback against the woke mob. 

On this side, proponents say that they are combatting cancel culture. How are they doing this? By deliberately upsetting people. They actively endeavour to elicit a reaction by saying the most hurtful thing they can.

When, inevitably, these public figures receive the condemnation they deserve, they go on tour to lament how sensitive and censorious their opponents are. As a result, they get book deals, newspaper columns, and increased ticket sales. 

Ultimately, this reaction to “cancel culture” is a mirror of what it opposes. It agrees that people cannot heal or do wrong. It celebrates the idea that people are bad, and provides a foil that allows people to prop up their worst selves.

If this is the culture war, I want no part in it. Neither side is interested in the hard work of repentance, apologies, and forgiveness. It offers only two possible cultures: one in which nobody can do right and one in which nobody can do wrong.

This is the antithesis of the Jewish approach to harm. 

Our religion has never tried to divide up the world into good and bad people. We have no interest in flaunting our cruelty, nor in banishing people.

Instead, the Jewish approach is to accept that we are all broken people in a broken world. We are all doing wrong. We all hurt others, and have been hurt ourselves. The Jewish approach is to listen to the yetzer hatov within us: that force of conscience, willing us to do better.

The culture we want to create is one of teshuvah: one in which people acknowledge they have done wrong, seek to make amends, apologise, and earn forgiveness. 

A few weeks ago, just in time for Yom Kippur, Rabbi Danya Rutenberg released a new book, called Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World.

Rabbi Rutenberg argues that Jewish approaches to repentance and repair can help resolve the troubled society we live in.

She locates some of the issues in America’s lack of repentance culture in its history. After the Civil War, preachers and pundits encouraged the people of the now United States of America to forgive, forget and move on. It doesn’t matter now, they said, who owned slaves or campaigned for racism, now they were all Americans. 

The Civil War veterans established a social basis in which there was no need for repentance or reparations, but that forgiveness had to be offered unconditionally. Without investing the work in true teshuvah, they created an unapologetic society that refused to acknowledge harm.

We, in Britain, also have an unapologetic and unforgiving culture, but our history is different. 

True, we also failed to properly address our history of slavery. When the slave trade was abolished at the start of the 19th Century, former slave traders and slave owners were given substantial compensation. The former slaves themselves were not offered so much as an apology.

But we have not been through a conscious process of nation-building the way the United States has. 

In fact, Britain has not really gone through any process of cultural rebuild since the collapse of its Empire. In 1960, the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his famous speech, in which he acknowledged “the wind of change” driving decolonisation. Whether Brits liked it or not, he said, the national liberation of former colonies was a political fact. 

At that time, he warned “what is now on trial is much more than our military strength or our diplomatic and administrative skill. It is our way of life.” Britain would need to work out who it was and what its values were before it could move forward and expect the family of nations to work with it.

More than 60 years later, it seems we still have not done that. As a nation, we are simply not clear on who we are. We do not know what makes us good, where we have gone wrong, or what we could do to be better.

So, we are caught in shame and denial. Shame that, if we admitted to having caused harm, we would have to accept being irredeemably evil. Denial that we could be bad, and so could ever have done wrong.

The two sides of the so-called “cancel culture” debate represent those two responses to our uncertainty. Those who are so ashamed of Britain’s history of racism and sexism that they have no idea how to move forward. And those who are so in denial of history that they refuse to accept it ever happened, or that it really represented the great moral injury that its victims perceived.

This creates a toxic national culture, stultified by its past and incapable of looking toward its future. 

So, Rabbi Rutenberg suggests, we need to build an alternative culture, one built on teshuvah. We need a culture where people feel guilty about what they have done wrong and try to repair it. For those who have been hurt, that means centering their needs as victims. For those who have done wrong, that means offering them the love and support to become better people. 

Rutenberg draws on the teachings of the Rambam to suggest how that might happen.  The Rambam outlined five steps people could take towards atonement, in his major law code, Mishneh Torah. 

First, you must admit to having done wrong. Ideally, you should stand up publicly, with witnesses, and declare your errors. 

Next, you must try to become a better person. 

Then, you must make amends, however possible. 

Then, and only then, can you make an apology. 

Finally, you will be faced with a similar opportunity to do wrong again. If you have taken the preceding steps seriously, you will not repeat your past mistakes.

For me, the crucial thing about Ruttenberg’s reframing of Rambam, is that it puts apologies nearly last. It centres the more difficult part: becoming the kind of person that does not repeat offences. It asks us to cultivate virtue, looking for what is best in us and trying to improve it.

You must investigate why you did what you did, and understand better the harm you caused. You must read and reflect and listen so that you can empathise with the wronged party. And, through this process, you must cultivate the personality of one who does not hurt again.

That is what Yom Kippur is really about. It is not about beating ourselves up for things we cannot change, nor about stubbornly holding onto our worst habits. It is not about shrugging off past injustices, nor is it about asking others to forget our faults.

It’s about the real effort needed to look at who we are, examine ourselves, and become a better version of that.

If there is a culture war going on, that is the culture I want to see. 

I want us to live in a society where people think about their actions and seek to do good. I want us to see a world where nobody is excluded – not because they are wrong or because they have been wronged. One where we are all included, together, in improving ourselves and our cultural life.

To build such a system, we need to start small. We cannot change Britain overnight. 

We have to begin with the smallest pieces first. Tonight, we begin doing that work on ourselves.

Gmar chatimah tovah – may you be sealed for good.

judaism · theology

We are not our past mistakes.

levtaylor

We are not our past mistakes.

Rabbi Meir was the greatest rabbi of his generation. He learnt from both the great masters of Mishnah, Akiva and Eliezer. He was ordained a rabbi by his teacher, Elisha ben Abuyah, younger than any of his contemporaries and gave more rulings than any of them.[1]

Meir was a great rabbi, but his wife, Beruriah, was even greater. She once learnt 300 rulings from 300 different sages in one day.[2] She was the only woman to be credited with making religious decisions. Sometimes she even overruled her husband. 

One day, Beruriah came in on her husband and heard him praying. He had been harassed by local hooligans. Rabbi Meir cried out in supplication to God: “Sovereign of All Worlds, I wish You would kill those bandits!”

Beruriah was shocked. “What are you thinking?!” she demanded. Meir looked surprised: “I am only asking for what it already says in the Psalms – let sinners disappear from the earth and the wicked be no more.”[3]

“That’s not what the verse says,” retorted Beruriah. “It says: let sins disappear from the earth, not sinners. The wicked won’t just disappear because someone wishes them away. They will only disappear because they will repent and give up their sins. The wicked do not disappear because God takes vengeance on them, but because God has mercy on them.”

From then on, Rabbi Meir changed his prayer. Instead, he said: “May God have mercy on them and may they change their ways.”[4]

God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but wishes only that they will turn from their evil ways and live.[5]

That is the message at the heart of this season. This is the last Shabbat in Elul, opening the last week of this month of repentance. Tonight, in Ashkenazi custom, we begin the practice of Selichot – reciting penitential prayers in the evenings. They are intended to help us acknowledge where we are going wrong so that we can correct our ways. 

As we approach the end of the year, we also approach the end of the Torah. We have been on a journey through the wilderness, and God has journeyed with us. 

When our story began, God wanted to destroy humanity. At the start, God flooded the world in anger at our violence. At Babel, God struck down the nations for our defiance. At Sodom, too, God destroyed a city for failing in its moral obligations. 

Now, at the end of the narrative, God no longer wishes to destroy us, but instead promises to rescue us. We are told that if we try to return, God will bring us back in love. No matter how far we think we have gone, God can find us and return us. No matter how much of an outcast you imagine yourself to be, God will be in your corner.[6]

That is the essence of teshuvah. Although often translated as repentance, it really means returning. It is the practice of becoming who you already are. At core, you are good, honest and faithful. If you do wrong, you are departing from your natural state. 

Contrary to the Christian doctrine that preaches we are born in a state of original sin, Judaism teaches that we are constantly reborn in a state of moral purity. Each morning, God sends us back our soul, renewed and ready to do good.

God has already given you the greatest gift you could need to face up to your flaws: you have another day. You have the chance to get up this morning and correct what you did wrong. You have the opportunity to be better than you were. You can revert to your initial state of holiness.

Teshuvah is the process we undergo to turn away from doing wrong. We look inside ourselves. We acknowledge where we have gone wrong. We announce that we will not make the same mistakes again. We make amends for what we did. And then, faced with the same situation again, we do not repeat our old errors.[7]

At this time of year, we are forced to face up to our mistakes. The more we look at them, the more we realise how many there are. Faced with our own inadequacies, we might despair. We might think that our lives our not worth living or that we are better off destroyed. This week’s parashah teaches us: it is not too late. We are not our past mistakes.

Rabbi Meir only truly learnt this much later in life. His teacher, Elisha ben Abuya, had given up on Judaism entirely. He had stopped believing and stopped pretending to believe. He was acting immorally. Meir came to find him. He said to him: “Come back, rabbi, make teshuvah.”

But Elisha replied: “I cannot. Because I have heard the divine voice reverberating: “Return, O backsliding children,”[8] except for Elisha ben Abyuah, who knew My strength and yet rebelled against Me.” Meir’s teacher, Elisha, believed he was beyond redemption. He believed he had gone too far for God to still love him.

At the end of Elisha’s life, he fell ill, and Rabbi Meir went to visit him. He said: “Return!” Elisha asked: “Having gone so far, will I be accepted?” Rabbi Meir replied: “The Torah teaches: “God will allow a person to return, up to their being crushed,”[9] even up to the time that life is being crushed out of them.” In that instant, Elisha ben Abuyah began to weep, and then he died. Rabbi Meir rejoiced, saying: “My master departed in a state of repentance!”

But the story doesn’t end there. After Elisha was buried, fire came down from heaven to burn his grave. The other rabbis came and told Meir: “The grave of your master is on fire!” Rabbi Meir went out, spread his cloak over the grave, and prayed that God would redeem Elisha. “But if God is not willing to redeem you, then I, Meir, will redeem you.” Then the fire went out.[10]

When he was young, Meir learned that he should pray for sins to be destroyed, not sinners. And when he was old, Rabbi Meir learned that he should pray for people to make teshuvah, even when he believed it was too late.

And his prayer for others, that God have mercy on them and they change their ways, reverberated and affected his teacher in his tomb. God’s mercy extended beyond the grave.

Yes, God can bring us back even in our dying moments. God can help us make teshuvah even after death.

Our mistakes do not define us.

We are not our past mistakes.

Shabbat shalom.

I gave this sermon on Shabbat 12th September 2020, Parashat Nitzavim, for Newcastle Reform Synagogue.

[1] Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 14a

[2] Babylonian Talmud Pesachim 62b

[3] Psalms 104:35

[4] Babylonian Talmud Berachot 10a

[5] Ezekiel 3:11

[6] Deuteronomy 30

[7] Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah, 2:2

[8] Jeremiah 3:14

[9] Psalms 90:3

[10] Jerusalem Talmud, Hagiga 77b

judaism · sermon

What makes people change?

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What is it that makes people change? People do change, after all. Change is a foundational principle of our religion. We call it teshuvah: turning, repenting. Although we Jews hold fast to few dogmas, we know that people can make mistakes and correct them. We know that people can be better tomorrow than they were yesterday. Without this belief, our religion would be meaningless and our lives devoid of hope.

So what is it that makes people change? In this week’s parashah, Emor, God gives the Israelites a framework for repentance. They will have rest-days and festivals. They will come together on Yom Kippur and present an offering of food in the Temple. But repentance can’t be limited to only one day a year. Week after week, the Israelites must bring offerings of bread and oil to burn on the altar.

Today, it is hard to imagine how these rituals might have brought about meaningful change. We are too far removed from a Temple-centred agrarian society to imagine the spiritual significance of priests sacrificing grain on an altar. But, to those who practised it, this must have been a meaningful experience. They set aside time for worship and brought their only source of income – the harvest and livestock on which they depended for a living – then watched their offerings publicly go up in flames. Perhaps this itself was enough to make people reconsider their lives and commit to acting differently.

In the parallel haftarah, Nehemiah, the Jews throw dust on their heads, separate themselves off and wear sackcloth. They fast and cry. This was how they repented after the return from the Great Exile, when the First Temple had been destroyed. It is a spiritual world that seems so strange and yet so familiar, and we feel a sense of how that ancient cult of Temple priests evolved into the religion we practise today.

Today, we offer up prayers; we take time to reflect in silence or recite ancient meditations. To the Temple cultists, our approaches to changing ourselves might look as bizarre as their rituals appear to us. That’s because they can’t see what’s going on behind our penitentiary words: that, with them, we are examining ourselves and finding ways to be better people. These songs and silences prompt us to repair relations with people we’ve wronged, and adjust our views and actions. At least, we hope they do.

We believe that people change, but it’s hard to put that faith into practice. I have watched with some concern as news has unfolded around political scandals over the last week, both of Amber Rudd stepping down as Home Secretary for her racist policies and the beginnings of expulsions of Labour Party members accused of antisemitism. There can be absolutely no doubt that there is no place for antisemitism, anti-Black discrimination or xenophobic feeling in our public sphere. Everybody who has drawn attention to it has done the right thing. Their campaigns have been wholly legitimate.

But what comes out of them leaving their ministerial posts or their political parties? Have their views changed? Have the political forces that engendered racism been challenged? Or have we got rid of certain people from the public eye so that we can pretend that issues of bigotry are confined to individuals, rather than something we all, collectively, need to address? It seems like we have ruled out the possibility that people can change. By removing them, it seems we assume that Amber Rudd and Labour Party antisemites cannot change. And it seems we assume that we, ourselves, do not need to change. The Jewish principle of teshuvah is made obsolete.

This leaves me wondering: is there an alternative? Is there a way to encourage people to change their bigoted views that can have a lasting impact? This week, I watched a documentary, called ‘Keep Quiet’, about the Hungarian neo-Nazi Csanad Szegedi. He was a leader of the feared far-right party Jobbik, heading up their racist street army. He was celebrated by white supremacists across the world when he won a seat in the European Parliament to promote Holocaust denial, racist conspiracy theories, and anti-immigration policies.

And then something shocking happened. His grandmother informed him that she was Jewish. She had survived Auschwitz. Her daughter, his mother, was also Jewish. In Orthodox religious law, he, too, was Jewish. These revelations forced him to embark on a journey of self-discovery that dramatically changed him.

Only a few days after his Jewish status leaked to the press, Szegedi called up his local rabbi, Boruch Oberlander, a Chabad Lubavitcher, originally from New York, whose parents were Shoah survivors. Although Szegedi was very much the star of the documentary, it was his rabbi, Oberlander, who really stood out to me. Nobody else was willing to engage with Szegedi. Oberlander’s own congregants and funders actively discouraged him from meeting with the neo-Nazi. But Oberlander believed, against all evidence, and against what everyone else was saying, that Szegedi could change. He told the filmmakers that he saw Szegedi as a Jew and believed that every Jew deserved a chance at repentance.

Rabbi Oberlander opened up that space for Szegedi to become someone new. He met with him weekly, then bi-weekly. Over a period of years, he introduced him to the principles of Judaism, educated him about life under the Nazis, and showed him the compassion we would expect of a Jew. Szegedi resigned his membership of Jobbik. He bought up all the copies of his own fascist book he could find, and burnt them. He got circumcised. He began davening daily. And he publicly renounced his racist views. At each stage, Rabbi Oberlander encouraged him, saying: “You’re not done yet. You still have more repenting to do. You still can go further.” And Szegedi believed in that encouragement.

This is a totally different model of engaging bigotry to the one we have seen in British politics. It is one of patience and compassion. It builds from the assumption that people with unpalatable views are on a journey, and that they can be transformed with enough kindness, encouragement and care. It is a model that appeals to me on a deeply spiritual level.

As Jews, we have, by necessity, become hardened to antisemitism, but we should not become so hard that we forget our core values: that all people are created with a spark of the Divine; that the world is perfectible; and that we are tasked as a people to show what a world rooted in ethics might look like. Although it may seem politically unrealistic, it is religiously necessary that we engage people in uncomfortable conversations. The appeal of racism is that it offers easy answers. Our response, therefore, must be a willingness to pose hard questions, and listen sensitively to the answers.

Just as the Temple priests of old knew that repentance was not something that could be done as a one off by one person, but needed to be done constantly by everyone, Britain as a nation must also be willing to engage in teshuvah. We as a nation must face up to our country’s horrible past. Antisemitism owes its origins to the Crusades, where Jews were treated as a fifth column, and physically attacked as stand-in representatives of Palestine that the knights sought out to conquer for Christianity. Tropes of Jew hatred are part of Britain’s class system, where Jews were used by monarchs as pawns for collecting taxes, and for directing the hatred of the masses when rebellion was in the air.

Similarly, anti-Black racism comes out of Britain’s colonial history. Black people were taken from Africa to the Caribbean as slaves and forced to work on plantations. Britain called over its subjects from the colonies to help rebuild it after the war, often taking on menial jobs and living in squalid conditions. That is why the Windrush generation are here, and that is why they are being oppressed as they are.

If we really want to rid our world of the scourge of racism, Szegedi’s story will not be enough. All of us need to examine the racism in our own hearts and throughout our society. We need to create a culture where everyone is willing to learn, develop, and be better people than they have been. We also all need to learn from Rabbi Oberlander’s example: to be more willing to engage with people who have objectionable views, and patiently believe in their capacity to change. If we can meet the world with compassion and self-reflection, we may be able to restore hope.

Shabbat shalom.

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I gave this sermon on Friday 4th May at Manchester Liberal Jewish Community. The day before, the country had gone to the polls in local elections, where racism and antisemitism were live issues.