KOL NIDRE 

10 TISHRI 5768 / 21 SEPTEMBER 2007

Rabbi Kenneth Chasen

“The Window Which Is Not Black”

You might say that this sermon actually began a little more than three and a half years ago.  You have my promise that it will not end three and a half years from now.

It was February 2004, about seven months into my first year here at Leo Baeck Temple , and the world’s Jews were filled with anxiety over the release of Mel Gibson’s controversial and grotesquely violent film, The Passion of the Christ.  It was the kind of moment when Jews look to their synagogues – to their rabbi – for guidance.  I remembered having experienced a few such overwhelming moments when I was working in New York , and being grateful that our Senior Rabbi had provided us with the necessary direction in those moments.  And while I was struggling with the multitude of questions raised by Gibson’s film, looking for answers, I remember a realization that hit me with total clarity and full force:  “Oh wait… I am the Senior Rabbi.”

It was time to offer direction.  So I went to see the film, spoke about it to the largest Shabbat evening crowd I saw during my first year at the temple, and enjoyed my first collaboration with my dear friend, Rev. Ed Bacon of All Saints Church in Pasadena, as together, we moderated a panel of Jewish and Christian experts who responded to the film at a shared event for our two congregations.  My own words, at that time, about Gibson and his film included the following:  “I can’t say whether Mel Gibson is anti-Semitic or not.  That is, I can’t know if his intent – or the intent of his film – is to generate hatred of Jews or not.”

This was my effort to embrace the Jewish value of dan l’kaf z’chut – give the benefit of the doubt.  But, as you can imagine, I was left feeling pretty foolish when just a little more than a year ago, Gibson was pulled over for a DUI, and instead of asking the officer how fast he was going or commenting on his driver’s license or registration, the first thing that Mel thought to say was:  “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.  Are you a Jew?”

You may recall that Gibson asked for our forgiveness – yours and mine – after this incident.  This is what he said:  “I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable.  I am deeply ashamed of everything I said.  I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a DUI charge.  I'm not just asking for forgiveness,” Gibson continued.  “I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one on one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.  There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-semitic remark.  Hatred of any kind goes against my faith.  I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help,” Gibson concluded.  “I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable.  But I pray that that door is not forever closed.”

Well… I don’t know about you, but I remember hearing Gibson’s words and thinking, “You know, this is a pretty big leap that this guy wants me to make.  With everything I know, with everything I’ve seen – to buy these words… to buy that he doesn’t believe what he told that cop?”  Indeed, I could be counted among the many in the Jewish community who wanted nothing to do with him.  And then I saw that Abe Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, was ready to comment on Gibson’s statement of contrition, and I got myself ready to watch Mel take a stiff shot to the jaw.  And then came Foxman’s words:  “This is the apology we had sought and requested.  We are glad that Mel Gibson has finally owned up to the fact that he made anti-Semitic remarks, and his apology sounds sincere.  We welcome his efforts to repair the damage he has caused, to reach out to the Jewish community, and to seek help.  Once he completes his rehabilitation for alcohol abuse, we will be ready and willing to help him with his second rehabilitation to combat this disease of prejudice.  You can’t just say I’m no longer a drunk; you can’t just say I’m no longer a bigot.  You need to work hard at it, and we’re ready to help him.”

At first, I was shocked.  Of all people, the head of the ADL – ready to forgive Mel Gibson, who had arguably done more than anyone in our time to portray Jews as worthy of hatred?  If he could forgive him, why couldn’t I?

Perhaps because forgiveness is not something that comes easily for us.  We know we’re supposed to… but actually doing it – fully and unequivocally – is awfully hard.  These holidays are all about teshuvah – about returning to the right path in our lives.  The tradition is crystal clear about how we’re expected to do that.  We’re to seek out those we’ve wronged, ask for their pardon, and resolve not to repeat the misdeed.  The only element in the equation that we don’t control is whether our request for forgiveness will be accepted… and it is that very acceptance which, so often, is the difference-maker in our attempts to change ourselves.  That’s why our ancient rabbis affirmed that once a person has approached you earnestly three times to beg your forgiveness for a particular failure – and you have refused to respond with your pardon – the weight of the sin in question, at that point, shifts to you.

You see, no matter how much we crave acceptance for our own apologies, we are frequently not the most forgiving of creatures.  Our own Torah foreshadows it.  After all, as I emphasized on Rosh Hashanah evening, our Torah teaches that we humans are created in God’s image – and that image is wildly unpredictable when it comes to the virtue of forgiveness.  The God of our Hebrew Bible is a lot like us.  Sometimes, God is astonishingly patient and willing to forgive – a model for generosity of spirit.  Example:  God carves our people’s laws onto stone tablets, and Moses, in a temper tantrum, smashes them to bits.  One would think there’s no saying sorry for something like that.  I mean, as a kid, if I lost my cool, and I broke a vase or a lamp – that was scary.  I knew I was in for it.  Moses broke sacred tablets carved by God!  He had to know that he was divinely in for it.  He must have been scared.  But God not only refrains from punishing Moses in any way… God does so without any evidence of an apology from Moses whatsoever.  Those broken tablets are so holy that they’re ultimately placed into the ark right along with their replacements – even broken, they are sacrosanct.  And yet, Moses gets a free pass after destroying them.

Of course, there are other times… when the God of our Bible is hopelessly vengeful.  No apology will do.  When Moses strikes that rock to bring forth water, instead of commanding it to do so, he suddenly –and without warning – is barred from entering the Promised Land.  There is no court of appeals.  He’s out.  He didn’t break the rock.  He just hit it instead of talking to it.  It would seem to be a fairly minor offense – certainly, a much lesser tantrum than the one that led to the first Tablets of the Law being turned to rubble.  And yet forgiveness this time is out of the question.  The rabbis of the midrash say that Moses desperately sought a pardon for this offense.  He would have done anything to receive a second chance.  But none was to be had.

Same God.  Same Moses.  The inconsistency is troubling – but no more troubling than the grand inconsistency that is the human condition.  Created in the image of God, we are sometimes soft, sometimes hard – and sometimes, there is no rational explanation for our movement between the two.  To be sure, there are those sins which are so heinous, so truly evil, that the only just thing to do is to withhold forgiveness – forgiving them would, in essence, provide sanction for their repetition, and possibly even their magnification.  But these are the exceptions, not the rule.  In the overwhelming majority of instances in which our forgiveness is sought, it can ethically be offered.  The task, of course, is to work as hard as we can, especially on days like this one, to draw closer to our softer, kinder selves – the part of us that is as ready to grant pardon as it is ready to request it.

It all sounds very simple.  But in practice, it’s harder than we might care to admit – and it may be harder today than ever before.  After all, we’ve become increasingly conditioned to look with cynicism upon the motives of those seeking our forgiveness in this, the era of the “overly-lawyered apology” – that odd concoction of words that speaks strangely of remorse and responsibility and then studiously admits to nothing.  We’re treated to them all the time.  Just this past week, Bill Belichick, head coach of the National Football League’s New England Patriots, received the stiffest penalty in league history for cheating – he’d been caught red-handed videotaping the defensive signals of his opponent.  His contrition was expressed in a carefully crafted written statement that he never bothered even to read – he simply released it to the media.  Forget about love – apparently, it’s cheating that means never having to actually say you’re sorry.  Belichick’s statement included the requisite acceptance of the penalty for his misdeed, and then veered into the bizarre, as he attributed his actions to a misinterpretation of the league rule which explicitly bans videotaping another team’s signals from the sidelines… which is, to the letter, exactly what Belichick dispatched one of his assistants to do.

Some apology.  But Belichick’s charade doesn’t even qualify for my personal top ten.  We each have our favorites.  For my money, there may never be an apology that surpasses the one which ran in the July 4, 2004 edition of the Herald-Ledger of Lexington , Kentucky .  It read:  “It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Ledger neglected to cover the civil-rights movement.  We regret the omission.”  It seems that the paper had previously adhered to a forty-year policy of relegating all news of sit-ins, marches and similar unwelcome disruptions to the desire to be prejudiced in peace to a small section buried deep in the paper, entitled, “Colored Notes.”  Oops.  Perhaps this Kentucky-style apology accounts for the elevation of another one up my personal list.  Maybe you caught it, about four years ago, when Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Taylor referred to potential jurors residing in the eastern Kentucky mountains as “illiterate cave-dwellers.”  His statement of contrition?  “The comment was not meant to be a regional slur,” he declared.  “To the extent that it was misinterpreted to be one, I apologize.”  I’m sure the misinterpreting, illiterate cave-dwellers were relieved to hear that the attorney’s slur was not, in fact, regional.  It was only personal.  Thank you.

Look, we humans are really no better at apologizing than we are at forgiving.  All the more reason why we simply have to avoid letting the failure at one cause failure at the other.  Sometimes – maybe a lot of the time – we’re going to be denied the satisfying apology to which we are entitled… and even then, it’s still in our best interests to find a way truly to move on, just as God did when an unapologetic Moses broke those tablets.  There are so many good reasons to do it.  We should do it because our tradition establishes forgiveness as a sacred value.  We should do it because forgiving plants the seedlings for a more peaceful world.  We should do it because it’s in our own best interests to forgive.  Countless studies over the past ten years suggest a long list of health benefits to relinquishing the toxic grudges that we carry around with us.  Forgiving seems to lower our blood pressure, lower our heart rates, decrease muscle tension, improve kidney function – put it all together, and it seems that forgiving actually helps us to live longer.  As psychologist Brenda Goodman puts it, “If physical exercise had a mental equivalent, it would probably be the process of forgiveness.”  And the benefits transcend the physical – forgiving people have been shown to be more empathetic and warm, more skillful at maintaining satisfying relationships, and less lonely.  They even succeed more at business – forgiveness seems to be associated with collective outcomes such as higher morale, greater job satisfaction and increased trust in the workplace.

We’ve got every good reason to be more forgiving.  So how do we do it?  Well, for these twenty-four hours that we’re spending here together, there is a familiar refrain that we share.  We sing it in Hebrew and say it in English, over and over again.  “V’al kulam, Eloah selichot, s’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kaper lanu” – “For all these sins, O God of forgiveness, bear with us, pardon us, forgive us.”  You could say it with me without even opening your prayer book.  We’ve memorized that plea… but have we truly made it our own?  Have we thought about what we’re asking God here, and whether we’re ready to ask it of ourselves, too?

Well, whatever we’re asking, it seems like we’re asking it three times in a row.  The prayer does seem redundant, doesn’t it?  Why the list of synonyms for forgiveness?  Our sages are quick to point out that the three words are not, in fact, synonyms.  They represent three different levels in the whole that comprises Jewish forgiveness.  So it would serve us well to become better acquainted with each one.

S’lach lanu – literally, it means forgive us.  This is seen by Judaism’s greatest teachers as the foundational level of forgiveness in our tradition.  The great twentieth century scholar, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik spoke of selichah, forgiveness, as the “process which cleanses and sanctifies the… personality.”  And with a scholar the likes of Soloveitchik, it’s no surprise that his interpretation holds up etymologically.  You see, the word selichah is derived from an ancient Akkadian word, salachu, which means “to sprinkle water.”  So we’re talking here about a simple act of purification – an acknowledgment of some sort… not a profound resolution, but a demonstration of openness from one to another that enables healing to begin.

It’s the willingness simply to speak to an estranged family member after years of silence over a falling out.  It’s the conscious effort to cease reminding someone of the time when he or she hurt you most deeply.  It’s the offering of an intentional, knowing smile… the sign that it’s okay to resume contact on some meaningful, human level.

Even though selichah may be the most fundamental level of forgiving, it is, in some ways, the hardest to achieve, for it represents that uncertain first step in repairing a genuine breach between two people.  It requires the forgiver to be courageous – to break the dam of hard feelings, when it’s much easier and arguably safer just to leave it alone.  It demands a leap of faith – that a generous, hopeful act on my part might lead to a healing act of contrition from you.

Tonight is a night for thinking of those awaiting your selichah – your forgiveness.  Is there someone on whom you’re ready to take one more chance?  Someone who will probably never set things right between you unless you move the bar a little lower… unless you send the message that it’s safe to try?  Is there somebody who, if you’re fully honest with yourself, has suffered your anger or indifference or grudge for longer than is truly justified?  Might this be the moment of turning?

M’chal lanu – pardon us.  This is actually a juridical concept in Judaism… an interpersonal mechanism that is drawn from civil law.  Mechilah, or a pardon, is a release from further responsibility that can be given by a creditor to his debtor, for whatever reason he may choose.  Like a pardon that might be granted to a convicted criminal by the President of the United States, a Jewish pardon is a statement that no further reparation must be made in response to the crime that was committed.  In interpersonal terms, mechilah takes place whenever an offended party makes it clear that “the person who hurt me no longer owes me anything for what happened between us.”

It’s the word of reassurance to a friend who self-punitively continues to go overboard in trying to make amends.  It’s the nod of acceptance from a grown child to his or her mother, indicating that she will no longer be blamed for every failure or weakness that was learned or observed during the growing-up years.  It’s the statement made between adult siblings:  “Who you were when we were kids is not who I will assume you to be today.”

Mechilah poses a great challenge to us.  It calls upon us to surrender our marker… to affirm that the statute of limitations has run out on our right to be compensated for the wound that another person has caused us.  It forces us to relinquish a claim that has long been an important part of our identity… that has been our strength, our emotional armor, in facing the vulnerabilities we feel before a person who has injured us.

Tonight is a night for thinking of those awaiting your mechilah – your pardon.  Is there someone in your life who really deserves to be let off the hook by now?  Someone whose apology can be found in the innocent passage of time since the breach occurred between you?  Is there a person – perhaps dead, perhaps alive – who has waited long enough for you to signal that the emotional debt is paid in full…or that you are ready to write off that part of the debt that remains – that you’re okay with bearing some measure of it?  Might this be the moment of turning?

Kaper lanu – grant us atonement.  Kaper... kapparah – the Hebrew word bears the same root as kippur, as in this Yom Kippur, this Day of Atonement.  The word is borrowed from Jewish property law, and it means “acquittal” – acquittal from sins – and it carries the same associations that we usually attach to acquittals… freedom, liberation, the unfettered contentment that comes with knowing that something painful or daunting or frightening is truly and completely over.  It can never come back to haunt you.  This is more than just a pardon, which releases a guilty person from any further obligation to answer.  Kapparah suggests that the grounds for having had to answer in the first place are now gone.  They may not be forgotten, but they are genuinely forgiven, and the matter is forever closed.

            It is much harder to describe what kapparah looks or feels like, as compared to selichah and mechilah, since kapparah is a transformative experience in which the reality between the two parties is reshaped.  That is to say, we’re not just talking about a claim being completed or satisfied… here, the claim itself is withdrawn.  The cause for its existence disappears.  You see, kapparah comes from an Arabic root, meaning “to cover over” – the offense is now permanently covered over, obscured.  Where mechilah is like a prisoner being either paroled or released from jail because his sentence has expired, kapparah is like a prisoner going free because he has been exonerated of all charges.  In a court of law, we know what that looks like.  But in our personal worlds of repentance and forgiveness, something unplanned and unmanipulated must occur for kapparah to happen.  Something indescribable.  Something holy.

            It is kapparah for which we all long.  We may not even realize it on a conscious level, but that’s what brings us to temple on these High Holydays.  It’s this notion that we can somehow be relieved of these onerous weights that we carry – the dream that we can wipe the slate of our guilt so clean that its former markings on our souls will be undetectable.

            So tonight is a night for thinking:  Might there be one person in my life with whom kapparah – true acquittal – could be possible?  Is there someone that I love so much – someone whose place in my heart is so invulnerable – that, together, we can take all the risks and speak all the truths that will clear the ledger and open us to a healing holiness that defies reason?  Might this be the moment of turning?

            I cannot say for sure.  None of us can.  But neither can I suggest any more worthy pursuit to which we could devote the minutes and hours of our lives.

            The Israeli poet, Chaim Guri, gave voice to the wonder, and the mystery, and the blessed optimism of that pursuit – to the prospect of what forgiving can do for us – when he wrote:

For this is not the road against which stand enemy lines, or foreign

languages

            Or muteness….

            I walk and…

I come at last to the house.  I stop.  I knock at the door.

            All men who forgive say.  What has been has been.  I repeat.

            All women who forgive stand on the porches sooner or later.

            There is a window which is not black.  There is a letter which is

not lost on the way.

            And if it did not arrive yesterday it will certainly arrive tomorrow.

            May we be brave and dedicated and open-spirited enough to walk to that house of forgiveness… to peer through that window which is not black, and to await that letter which is not lost on the way.  For if our efforts are bold and sincere, that letter… it will certainly arrive tomorrow.