A LITTLE FORGIVENESS, PLEASE: A ROSH HASHANAH SERMON, 5781 / 2020

 

              Shabbat Shalom, everyone, and Shanah Tovah—a good and a healthy year to all.

               Mr. Schwartz is taken in handcuffs to court and stands before the judge. The prosecutor rises and says, “Your honor, Mr. Schwartz was caught red-handed stealing a can of peaches from the local grocery and he admits his guilt.” The judge shakes his head and announces, “Mr Schwartz, we cannot have theft in the community. You must bear the consequences of your crime. There are six peaches in this can and I sentence you to six days in jail for every peach stolen,” and the judge slams his gavel on the bench. A woman rises in the back of the court room and calls out, “Your, Honor!” The judge immediately recognizes her and responds, “Mrs. Schwartz, I am not inclined to any leniency in this case,” to which Mrs. Schwartz replies, “I know, but he also stole a can of chick peas.”

              Rosh Hashanah is Yom HaDin—Judgment Day, a day when God judges all of humanity. Judges wield real power. Anyone authorized to take your money, in the form of a fine, or take your liberty, in the form of incarceration, wields real power. But the more immediate power we have had to deal with these days is the power of a pandemic. I was curious. I wanted to know the size of a single Corona virus particle. We’ve all seen its microscopic structure in the media, but what is its actual size? Turns out its size varies between 70-90 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter or 10 to the power of negative ten. In other words, it’s really small, yet left unchecked, Covid-19 brought the world to a standstill. That is real power. Who among has not felt during the past several months incarcerated in their own home? And the effects of that pause in our lives still reverberate—in empty sports stadiums, a darkened Broadway, half-empty restaurants, diminished air traffic, masked faces, unemployment, religious services in a tent, and much anxiety even with a rate of infection as low as it is in our own beloved New York State.

              If Covid-19 has not felt like a harsh judgment, perhaps the social unrest in the country does. We’ve had to deal with a lot these past several months—racial tensions, questions about policing protocols, second thoughts on statuary and how we represent our history, and on top of all this, a hot presidential election come this November. I suspect that having been locked up as long as we were exacerbated our responses to some of the more intractable fissures within our social fabric. And it seems very clear, in the polarized atmosphere of our nation, that we are presently engaged in an uncivil war. It’s no longer clear to me that we love our neighbors as ourselves, and if that is the case, if the Torah no longer holds sway over our beliefs and behaviors, it would be worth our while to reflect on that development and explore whether we are comfortable in the place we now find ourselves.

Daryl Davis is a professional musician, a pianist, who has played with BB King and Chuck Berry. Back in 1983, he was playing a gig in Frederick, Maryland, at the Silver Dollar Lounge, and at the end of the session, a man comes up to him and says that he had never in his whole life heard a black man play like Jerry Lee Lewis. So Mr. Davis said to this patron that both he and Jerry Lee Lewis had been influenced by the same black boogie-woogie and blues. The patron said—No, no that just wasn’t possible. So Mr. Davis said, it was possible because he knew Jerry Lee Lewis and the two were friends. So the patron said—No, no that’s not possible either. Then the patron invited Mr. Davis to the bar for a drink. The two sat down at the bar and the patron said that this was the first time he had ever had a drink with a black guy. So Mr. Davis asked why was that. And the patron hesitated for a bit and then said—because I belong to the Ku Klux Klan. That served as a turning point in Mr. Davis’ life as he sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan to talk with them with the intent of dispelling all the stereotypes and misconceptions they had about black people, It culminated in a book published in 1998 entitled, “Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan.” Mr. Davis eventually infiltrated the office of Robert Kelly, the Grand Dragon or so his title, and over time, moved Mr. Kelly to drop his membership and close down the chapter he ran in the state. Mr. Davis now owns a collection of white robes turned into him by members of the Klan whom he has befriended and influenced to abandon their racist points of view. 

              I don’t think Mr. Davis ever forgave Klansmen for their racism. But he did not see them so much as the enemy as he saw in them an opportunity for dialogue. It would have been easy to scream and protest against them. It was much harder to sit down and speak with them. Davis’ actions were either extraordinary foolishness or extraordinary courage—and maybe a little bit of both.

              We all know that this is a time of selihah, forgiveness. We are encouraged to forgive others for the sins they have committed against us. That’s the pious directive we encounter year after year. Do we succeed? Do we forgive others for their sins? Let me put it another way. Think of the person whom you do not like. We all probably have a few people like that in our lives. This person is not a nice person. How did you think of this person last Rosh Hashanah? Is this person still on your no-fly list? Did you forgive this person? I bet some of you did, but I also bet a much larger percentage did not. How do I know? Because forgiveness is one of the most difficult things in the world to grant. People generally don’t want the sinners of this world to be forgiven. We want them punished. We want justice. Were we to forgive, it be almost as if we didn’t care about justice. And that grates against us. It doesn’t seem fair. And that’s why it is so hard to forgive. If you haven’t forgiven that person or people or whomever it is you’ve got issues with, I don’t blame you. I only want to acknowledge the challenge forgiveness presents and how we by and large resist its fulfillment.

As the western world continues to move further and further away from its religious moorings in Judaism and Christianity, we have replaced the culture of guilt with the culture of shame. I know that we typically use the terms of shame and guilt interchangeably, but they are different. Ruth Benedict (1887-1948), the American anthropologist and folklorist, did great work in defining the difference between a shame culture and a guilt culture. A shame culture is one in which a sin committed renders the sinner an object of embarrassment and ridicule. The sin and the sinner merge and the one is indistinguishable from the other. Time may erode the shame but there isn’t much you can do to rid yourself of it. The sinner may seek refuge in another city, hide, or even commit suicide. Greek culture was very much a shame culture. But Judaism and by extension, Christianity, opted for guilt. We understand guilt. With guilt, the sinner has committed some wrong, might even feel shame, but there is a way to remove the guilt through all the ways we talk about removing guilt—confession, repentance, prayer, doing acts of goodness, etc. In other words, the sin and the sinner are two different entities. There’s a great story in the Talmud (Berakhot 10a) about this. It’s about Rabi Meir and his brilliant wife Beruriah. There were some undesirables in the neighborhood who bothered Rabbi Meir. He prayed to God for their death. Beruriah turned to her husband and said, Meir, the verse in Psalms reads: 

Hata’im yitamu min ha’aretz / may sins disappear from the earth (Psalm 104:35)

It doesn’t say, hot’im, the sinners 

The verse teaches us to pray that sin disappears. How does that happen? It happens when the sinner repents. A sinner repents and sin is removed from the earth. And Rabi Meir accepted her interpretation, prayed accordingly, and the undesirables did repent of their evil ways (Berakhot 10a).

That kind of thinking is not fashionable in America today where the sinner and the sin have merged into one. It is because we are increasingly a shame culture.  Once you have committed the sin, you are a sinner forever. It’s no recipe for a society as diverse as ours if there would be any hope to get along with each other. 

              If I told you there were people in this world who do not deserve forgiveness, I bet many of you would agree with me. I would agree with me. But guess who may just disagree: God. The Talmud discusses three Jewish kings who were so bad, they were denied entry into the World to Come. One was Menasheh ben Hizkiyahu, a seventh century BCE ruler. The Bible describes Menasheh as having put to death so many innocent people that he filled Jerusalem with blood from one end of the city to another (II Kings 21:16). And yet, one of the rabbis, Rabbi Judah, comes to his defense claiming, as the Bible also lets us know, that Menashe did teshuvah and his years of repentance far exceeded his years of sin. When it came time for Menashe to leave this world, the middat hadin, the Angel of Justice, blocked his entry into the World to Come. In other words, justice demanded that a man with a history of such grave sins be thrown into the dustbin of history, there to decompose and be forgotten. No way could someone with so much blood on his hands make his way into eternity. God disagreed, Rabbi Judah claimed. God dug a tunnel by which Menashe could secretly slip into the World to Come right under the nose of the angel. Think about that—God allowing compassion to override justice. Did Menashe really deserve entry into eternity? I don’t think I’m that forgiving. But according to Rabbi Judah at least, God is.

              I like to think of God’s capacity to forgive and humanity’s resistance to forgive as one of the features distinguishing God from humans. History proves that when it comes to forgiveness, people are infamously not up to the challenge. There is a scene in Schindler’s List where Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than one thousand Jews during the Shoah, is talking to Ammon Goth, the SS officer in charge of the construction of the Plaszow Concentration Camp. Goth is heartless and sadistic. He kills Jews as a sport. It makes him feel good. After all, Jews are the problem. The cause of all Germany’s problems points to one and only one source: the Jews. Goth and Schindler are talking power. What is power? “Why do they fear us?” Schindler asks. Goth says they fear us because we can kill them, and that’s power. Schindler says, “That’s not power.” And he tells Goth a story. A criminal is brought before an emperor. The man knows he has committed a crime. The emperor knows that he can put this man to death. But instead of invoking the death penalty, the emperor pardons the man. That, Schindler says, is power. To know that you can ruin another person’s life, but choose not to, to descend into accusations and recriminations against another, but choose not to, that is a kind of unearthly self-control that runs counter to human history and perhaps even human character. That is power.

Goth wants power. He tries to pardon a Jew. Instead, he ends up doing what he always does: he kills yet another Jew. He has no control over the basest of his instincts. He thinks himself justified in every insult he hurls at Jews. He does so not because he is powerful. To the contrary, history exposes him as an utter fool. His problem is not only his inhumanity, which is clear enough, but even more importantly, an almost absolute disconnect from God. 

Ki imekha haselihah / [God], Yours is the power to forgive

Lema’an tivarei / And thus You are feared.

 So Psalm 103:4. Feared? Why? It would seem more likely that the power to forgive would produce not fear but relief or jubilation or wonder. Instead, it is fear that the power to forgive generates. And it does so because the power to forgive runs so counter to ordinary experience. It comes as a surprise or a shock as if you were walking down a street turned the corner and suddenly came face to face with some person you thought dead long ago. Forgiveness is that rare. It’s so contrary to normal human operations. But Judaism is rarely satisfied with normal human operations. It has always sought to guide us in the path of elevated human operations, to go beyond our emotional reflexes. Beyond the animal instinct, and respond in ways more thoughtful, more deliberate. 

               Let’s be real. We are all essentially imperfect beings. We have selective memories, we stretch the truth, we fall victim to jealousy, we may be selfish, we are not above the unkind word, we get stuck in bad habits, we let our tempers get the best of us, and our prejudices sometimes expose the worst of us. How do we live with ourselves? The shame society says you can’t. The guilt society says you can. The guilt society says don’t confuse yourself with your shortcomings, and don’t confuse your neighbors with their shortcomings, because we have the power to reflect, we have the power to regroup, we have the power to repent, and we thus have the power to forgive others as we do ourselves.

              Of course, we could ask ourselves philosophically, if you have a power and never use it, do you really have the power? Whatever the answer to that question is, I’m telling you now that we are all invested with an incredible power, and that in a world so poised to kill the sinners, we ought to focus less on justice, which roots us in the past, and more about forgiveness, which opens up the possibility of the future.

              Two Martians are doing research on earth from the safety of their spaceship, gathering all the information they can on this bi-ped, earth-bound species we know as humans. One says to the other, “Very interesting. They have developed satellite-based nuclear weapons.” The other says, “Interesting, indeed. So we’re dealing here with organisms that are an emerging intelligence.” But the first Martian counters, “I don’t think so. The weapons are pointed at themselves.”

              I think we need to cut each other a little slack. I think we need to admit that no one of us has the total answer. I think if we are serious about this other principle we espouse, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” then we have to embrace the fact that such a principle is without meaning if we think it applies to only the neighbors who share our views, as opposed to those who do not.

              I had a professor at the Seminary who once told a group of us something that always stuck with me and that was this: people are going to have many opinions about you and express them to you. So just remember this. You’re not as good as people say you are, but you’re also not as bad. I found that comforting. And I think it applies to the world in which we live. And don’t get me wrong. I am not as forgiving as God. But I don’t have to be. I’m not God. None of us are. Then again, we could all be a little more forgiving of our neighbors than we have been in this deeply politicized, polarized world that we now find ourselves. We could use the power of forgiveness to begin the conversations that make for a better world. Because though there are clearly people in this world who are in fact, really, really bad, there’s a whole huge demographic out there that are not as bad as they have been portrayed, and another huge demographic that isn’t as good as they have been portrayed. A little more humility all the way around is in order.

              You may ask: well, how forgiving do I have to be rabbi? And I can actually quantify that answer. You have to start somewhere. If you start out small, that’s okay. I would suggest that you all begin to look at each other a little more sympathetically, and with just a little more forgiveness, I would say that all it takes is about 70-90 nanometers worth of forgiveness. If a despicable virus of that size can change the world, think of what just a little more beloved forgiveness in our lives could do.

              Ketivah vahatimah Tovah—everyone—May we all be inscribed and sealed into a year of life and good health, mutual respect, and understanding.