Last night, just as I was finishing dinner, my phone rang.
Earlier this week, I shared something personal with a friend. Their response was immediate, instinctive, open and honest, delivered in that wonderfully indomitable manner that is so characteristic of them. I loved their response both for its honesty and for the spirit in which it was offered. When our conversation ended, I did not dwell on it.
Apparently, however, my friend did.
For them, the conversation kept replaying, like a movie caught on an endless loop, going around and around in their mind. The more they thought about it, the more unsettled they became by their own response.
So they picked up the phone and called.
“I want you to know that I am so sorry for my immediate, visceral response to our conversation the other day. I should have separated my own personal feelings about the situation from what I think would be right for you.”
I was deeply touched and moved by the call.
Not because I had been perseverating about our discussion, or waited for some sort of apology. I hadn’t given our words another thought. Rather, my friend had done something both difficult and profoundly beautiful. They had revisited their own words, examined them honestly, and recognized a distinction that is not always easy to make: the difference between ‘what I feel and what another person may need from me’.
Then, rather than allowing that realization to remain an internal conversation, they picked up the phone.
That is teshuvah.
We often translate teshuvah as “repentance,” but the Hebrew word comes from the root lashuv, “to turn.” Teshuvah is a turning. It is the willingness to look again at something we have said or done, to see it differently than we did in the moment, and, when necessary, to turn toward another human being and try to make it right.
Sometimes, as I experienced last night, the person toward whom we turn may not even know that anything needs repairing.
As the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holy Days, draw near, our tradition asks each of us to engage in precisely this kind of honest reflection.
Where have my words caused hurt?
Where have I allowed my own feelings, assumptions or judgments to prevent me from truly seeing another person?
Where do I need to say, “I am sorry. I was wrong. I mis-stepped. I was not thinking?”
There is the other side to saying “I am sorry” as well: where might I need to hear those words from someone else? How do I open my heart and spirit to allow room for this to take place?
What am I carrying that I might be ready, perhaps only tentatively, to begin releasing?
Our tradition does not pretend that forgiveness is simple. Some wounds are profound. Some relationships cannot, and should not, be restored to what they once were. Forgiveness does not require us to deny pain, excuse harmful behavior or abandon necessary boundaries.
These sacred days do, however, invite us to ask ourselves difficult questions:
What burden will I continue to bear if I do not forgive?
Could forgiveness be a gateway to a life of greater peace?
Forgiveness, like teshuvah, rarely happens all at once. Sometimes it begins with nothing more than a willingness to turn: to see ourselves more honestly and to see another person with different eyes.
This Saturday evening at 6:30 pm, we will begin this sacred work together as a Mizpah community when we gather for Selichot. Our program, “Seeing Ourselves, Seeing Others,” will use two short, evocative animated films by Hanan Harchol to open a conversation about judgment, forgiveness and the work of teshuvah. We will share dessert and Havdalah before entering into the beautiful, reflective prayers of Selichot together.
Selichot reminds us that we need not wait until Rosh Hashanah to begin.
Perhaps there is someone we need to call.
Perhaps there are words we need to say.
Perhaps there is something within ourselves we are finally ready to release.
Perhaps these days before Rosh Hashanah ask us, above all, to see: to see ourselves with greater honesty, to see others with greater compassion, to recognize where we have fallen short, to recognize where we have been hurt and, when we are able, to turn.
As Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl so beautifully teaches:
“Forgiveness is a hope and aspiration.
Forgiveness is a prayer – even for God;
maybe for all of us.” (Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl, “Forgiveness Is a Prayer,” Yom Kippur 2018, Central Synagogue, New York)
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Sharon L. Sobel