Blog Posts

The Hanukkah Miracle of Steamboat Springs

12/12/2022

Dvar Torah - Vayishlach 5783

As we head into the Hanukkah season - only 10 more shopping days to find that one perfect gift for your kids, followed by 7 nights of socks - I wanted to share a story. My previous congregation of Har Mishpacha of Steamboat Springs Colorado was part of a little drama many years ago - that has taken on the stuff of legend.

Back in 2014, a member at my congregation, Randy Salky, created a big electric hanukkiah a few months before Hanukkah. Our shul didn’t have a building - we generally wandered between the community room of a local condo complex near the ski mountain, and the social hall of the local methodist church, depending on the vagaries of how the board was feeling that year. In the center of town, on the main street, the county courthouse had a big lawn, and every year at Christmas time, they strung lights on the large pine tree and set up a Santa’s hut with some empty boxes masquerading as presents. And so Randy asked the County commissioners if we could put up the hanukkah menorah next to the christmas tree. To which they replied: no.
Now, of course, this seemed strange. The county courthouse was public land, and they were willing to acknowledge a religious holiday - Christmas, which is the holiday of one specific religion. Most of you have likely heard of ‘the establishment clause’, which is the first section of the first amendment to the bill of rights. It reads: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’

The president of our congregation then attended the open county commissioners meeting to formally request that the county display the hanukkah menorah. The commissioner upheld the previous decision by the county manager to not allow the menorah.
At this point, the congregation’s leadership had a choice. We could press the issue by threatening legal action, or find another solution.
Now, many of you know me. I am not one to turn away from a fight. I also have an overdeveloped sense of justice, particularly when it comes to matters of the first amendment. I also tend to tell it like it is. However, Steamboat Springs in Routt County Colorado is not like Pittsburgh or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. This is a small mountain town. Steamboat’s most illustrious main street merchant, FM Light and Sons, sells cowboy hats. Until the mid 80s, the county’s main industries were coal mining and cattle ranching. Our congressional representatives have included both Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Lauren Boebert. The county has a total population of 24,000 people, which is slightly smaller than the population of Squirrel Hill. Har Mishpacha was the only synagogue located within a hundred miles in any direction, which is why I occasionally liked to brag that I was the Chief rabbi of all of Northwest Colorado.
This all means that being Jewish in Steamboat is a lot different than being Jewish in Pittsburgh. I was supremely aware of this when I walked down main street in a kippah, and I would notice that people regularly and frequently stared at me. In other words, suing the county for the right to display a hanukkah menorah wasn’t something the community was interested in.
I will add that, for those who have never explored the history of this matter in America, the legal proceedings regarding courthouse lawn religious displays in December are robust - there are at least three major supreme court decisions on the issue. I would guess that some of you actually know this quite well, like for instance Nate Firestone, or Sheldon Catz, or Kenny Steinberg, because in 1989, the issue of what religious or holiday symbols would or would not be allowed on federal, state, or municipal property came before the US Supreme Court in a case called - wait for it - County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union. The county courthouse had in front of it a nativity scene, a christmas tree, and a hanukkah menorah. By a 5 to 4 majority, the Supreme Court ruled that the nativity scene was a violation of the establishment clause. By a 6 to 3 majority, the court held that the display of the menorah was constitutional. Essentially the justices were greatly divided over whether a menorah is more of a religious symbol, making it akin to the nativity scene, or a secular holiday display, like a christmas tree, and thus left the door open for every county courthouse in America to do what it wanted regarding the hanukkiah. Routt County said no.
So Har Mishpacha was stuck with a giant electric menorah and no place to display it. Enter Reverend Tim Selby, my collegue and friend at Heart of Steamboat methodist church. Reverend Tim called our board president and said ‘put the menorah up at our church.’ And so we did. And at Friday night services on December 18, the Jewish Community lit our menorah in front of the Christian church and sang Hanukkah songs and drank hot chocolate. It was 10 degrees out. I wore two pairs of socks and I was still cold.
Fast forward two years. Har Mishpacha has met every month for our shabbat service at the Methodist church. Heart of Steamboat was about to renovate their social hall. And they asked our board if we had any requests of how and what the hall might look like. Because Heart of Steamboat wanted us to move in with them permanently. Today, if you go to Steamboat Springs, you’ll find a church that is also a synagogue just off the main street, with a sign out front for Heart of Steamboat, Har Mishpacha, and for good measure, the Buddhist Center of Steamboat Springs.

There is a somewhat ironic and humorous post-script to this story. A few days after our shabbat service, a lady and her dog were out for a walk in Steamboat Springs and stepped onto a sewer grate near the courthouse, and got a mild electrical shock. It seems the holiday lights connected to tree on the lawn and down the street had somehow gotten connected to the metal sewage pipes and become electrified. So, as a precaution, the city had to take down all the christmas lights in 2014. On December 23rd.

We’re living through contentious times. We’re living through anxious times. We come to this moment in 2022, before the twin holidays of Christmas and Hanukkah, which have often for our country provoked an open discussion about America’s relationship with religion in the public sphere, about America’s moral or religious degeneration. The pessimist might look at the story of America right now and see ominous warning signs for us going forward - religious fundamentalism on the rise, ugly public pronouncements and conspiracy theories about Jews from big celebrities, a feeling that the loudest voices in both our culture and our political realm are also the most toxic. That Jews are Other in this American culture, that we do not belong. Take your menorah off of the county lawn, please, and don’t come back. This is the paradigm of Jacob at the beginning of our parasha - the Jacob that is afraid of Esau, that splits his camp in two just in case, the Jacob that sends messengers saying ‘I have many flocks and servants’, implying that whatever violence Esau plans to do to Jacob can be forestalled with a big payoff.
But there’s another paradigm. One of optimism. One that says tomorrow will be better today because we will make it better. Because we will engage our neighbors and stay in dialogue with them and be patient through the ugly moments and build those relationships. We are not Other in this culture, and most people do not think ill of most Jews. Here, you can put your menorah in front of our church, and you are welcome here, and we are sisters and brothers together. Because ultimately, despite Jacob’s fears, Esau hugs him and kisses him and falls on his neck, and the two reunite as brothers. There is more that unites them then divides them. Shabbat Shalom.

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Lot and the Sins of Sodom - Vayera 5783

11/13/2022

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The midrash tells the following story:
“‘What were the sins of Sodom?
One that passed over a bridge was made to pay four zuz, and one that waded through the water was made to pay eight zuz.
One time a clothes washer came for judgment. The tollkeepers said 'pay four zuz.' He replied 'But I passed through the water'. They replied, 'If so, give us eight.' He did not pay, so they wounded him. He came before the judges. They said, pay the tollkeepers: both for the bloodletting, and eight zuz for passing by water.
Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, came to Sodom. There he met a man who hit him in the head with a rock, and Eliezer bled. The attacker dragged Eliezer to the judges of Sodom, complaining that the man had done Eliezer a service by providing him with a bloodletting. Eliezer picked up a rock and wounded the judge. Eliezer said 'My payment is there in your hand: pay the man in place of me.'”

This is just the first of a long series of stories in Bereshit Rabbah, a 3rd and 4th century Midrashic collection, of the sins of the city of Sodom, a subject of our torah portion today. But less than the place of our story, this year, I am most interested in one of main characters of our story for parshat vayera, and that is Lot. Mostly, my interest in Lot is in the strange inconsistent nature of his character, and his story. It’s filled with questions - and the main question is, is Lot good? Or bad?

We meet him in parshat Noach, learning that he is Abram’s deceased brother Haran’s son. When Abram and Sarai depart the town of Haran for Canaan, Lot goes with them - raising a first question.

Why? Why does he leave Haran for Canaan with Abraham. Abram’s brother Nahor stayed back in Haran - why doesn’t Lot stay with him? And if he’s going because he wants to be part of the Jewish people, or he sees the spiritual potential of this calling that Abraham is answering, doesn’t that make him a good guy?

Early in parshat Lech Lecha, Lot and Abram decide to go their separate ways, Lot dwelling in the plains near Sodom which are described as green and fertile, but are also mentioned, forebodingly, thusly in 13:13 “Now the inhabitants of Sodom were very wicked sinners against the Lord.” This raises our second question:

Is Lot going to Sodom because it is a place of sin? Meaning - is he a bad guy?

In our next parasha of Vayera, God tells Abraham of the plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham, rather than exclaim ‘but my nephew is down there!’ tries to bargain with God over the possibility that there may be some righteous folks mixed amongst the wicked.

This brings us to a third question - are we to presume that Abraham thinks Lot is one of the righteous mixed in with the wicked, and if so, what makes Abraham think that? I think that implication is there - which means, once again, wait, is Lot a good guy? Did he go to a wicked place specifically TO BE the good amidst the evil? Is he like a baptist preacher in a seedy bar - trying to save souls, Or a baptist preacher in a seedy bar - making really questionable life choices?

Our fourth question is - wait, why didn’t Abraham open his debate against God with ‘hey you can’t blow up Sodom my nephew lives there!’ And a related question - when God says ‘I’m going to destroy the city’, why doesn’t Abraham reply, ‘ok but give me a minute to go down there and rescue my nephew.’ Instead, Abraham says nothing, and God sends two angels.

So the angels go, and as you can see in genesis chapter 19, the townspeople attempt to assault them. And Lot defends and protects them. So again, we are thinking, ok, Lot’s a good guy. And then one sentence later, he offers up to the townspeople his daughters to assault instead.

This leads to our fifth question, which I will simply state as ‘Lot, what are you doing?’ And of course, we are also left to conclude, once again, that Lot is a bad guy.

He and the angels and his wife and daughters flee the city in advance of its destruction -

Thus our sixth question: why would God bother to save Lot if not because he is the one righteous man in Sodom? A parenthetical question - were his wife and daughters righteous as well? And thus we have pinged backwards again - Lot is good, I guess.

But rather than go where the angels told him to go, to the town of Tzohar, Lot goes to a cave. Maybe not a bad guy decision, but definitely a morally questionable one in the sense that when two angels save your life and tell you what to do, you should probably do it. And this leads to the final detail we learn of Lot in the bible, living in a cave with his two daughters with whom he has intimate relations and fathers two inbred children. No questions here - that’s bad.

Taking the entire arc of Lot’s life into view, we have a hard time trying to understand who this person is. Our commentators, from midrashic to medieval to modern, all weigh in to answer some of these questions. Our first source for answers, of course, is Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, a French rabbi of the 11th and 12th century. Rashi does what he always does with non-protagonist characters in the Bible - he decides Abraham is good, and therefore Lot must be bad. Rashi comments on one verse in the midst of the Sodom story “Lot participated in their evil ways, and only for the sake of Abraham was he saved.” In noting that Lot is found sitting in the city gate, Rashi tells us “because he was a judge there.” Now, Rashi knows all of the midrashim of the judges of Sodom - he knows they’re basically the corrupt and evil leadership of a morally bankrupt city. When he says “he was a judge”, what Rashi means is - this guy isn’t just bad, he’s one of the ringleaders of a totally morally corrupt society. He’s the worst of the worst.

Modern commentator Nahum Sarna also seems to have disdain for Lot. Regarding his rescue, Sarna comments “Lot’s deliverance is an act of divine grace undeserved by any merit on his part, as verse 29 states - God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval.” He equivocates a bit though, saying, “Perhaps his hospitality to strangers was a contributory factor.” On Lot’s sitting at the gate, and in a verse in which he is referred to as a ger, sojourner, Sarna thinks this means the opposite of what Rashi says - he’s not a judge or a resident or a homeowner. The locals regard him as an outsider, perhaps explaining why he’s being rescued in the first place - it’s not that he’s righteous, it’s just that God called for the obliteration of all the locals, and Lot’s not a local; he’s a tourist.

Richard Elliott Friedman, a bible scholar at UC San Diego who I had the pleasure of learning from at Ramah Darom for several years, suggests that “as a matter of near Eastern hospitality, a host must do anything to protect his guests.” I’m not sure if that gives clarity to Lot’s ultimate moral character, but it does imply that, if the most important thing for a man is to be hospitable, then Lot is to be regarded as good in these culturally important respects, and questionable in others.

I will admit that attempting to discern whether Lot is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is overly simplistic. With notable exceptions at the extremes, most people are not judged solely by either the worst thing they ever did in their life or the best thing they ever did in their life. Twentieth century bible commentator Gunther Plaut perhaps has the most nuanced stance towards Lot when he writes “Lot is in many ways the average man. He has streaks of greatness, moments of courage, but he is all too often subject to the attractions of comfort and pleasure. These in time cause his downfall.” But Plaut adds, “Attracted by Sodom's affluence, he chooses that city as his home, despite its debased condition. Whatever other customs and habits he adopts, he preserves his sense of hospitality and decency toward strangers. He risks his own and his family’s safety in order to protect the men who are under his roof. This courage redeems much of his indecisiveness, faint heartedness, and anxiety, which the remainder of the story reveals.”
The thing about Lot that is hard, and troubling, which Guther Plaut is tugging at, is that his sin isn’t that he’s a bad person. It may simply be that he is an inadequately good person living in a bad society - that he chooses to live in a place filled with bad actors, and is insufficiently outraged to either leave or be an agent of change. To that end, both the Spanish 13th century commentator Ramban and the 20th c commentator Nechama Leibovitz note that the most egregious sins of Sodom are not violence, or sexual assault, or vice or lawlessness, but rather the twin evils of indifference towards the poor and the perpetuation of a society of systemic injustice - as we saw in the courtroom drama of our midrash above.

This is hard, and troubling, because we too are average women and men living in a society that is rife with injustice and economic struggle.

Our very democracy, the foundation of American justice, has shown evidence of cracks in the most recent years, from the January 6 insurrection to wildly dishonest claims of voter fraud, to partisan gerrymandering and the questionable decisionmaking of the Supreme Court. And there is so much poverty. The vast majority of American wealth is in the hands of just 0.1% of the population. Our nations food banks see rising demand each year. The city I grew up in, Los Angeles, estimates it currently has a homeless population of 65,000, and it grows year over year as the city puts its resources towards other things. Nachmanides, first quoting Ezekial, writes of Sodom, “‘Only this was the sin of your sister Sodom: arrogance! She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility; yet she did not support the poor and the needy.’” He continues - “The traditional view is that they were evil in every respect, but that this sin of not supporting the poor - the sin they most frequently practiced, that sealed their doom.”

When we ask questions about whether Lot was good or bad or complacent or inadequate, all I can think of is whether we are good or bad or complacent or inadequate.

There is another midrash in conjunction with destruction of Sodom - explaining that line in Genesis 18:20 in which it says that “their sin was so great” . The city of Sodom decreed that anyone that fed or gave water to the poor and the indigent and the resident alien would be burned. A woman named Plotit, wife of a prominent leader, went every day to the square to draw from the well. And everyday, she would bring a jug with food and water to provide for a poor man. And the people of Sodom asked, ‘how is he still alive?’ And when they caught him and he cried out to God, that is when the city was judged too far gone.

The message for me is twofold. One, sometimes to be a just person, we must take a hard look at the conventions of the society in which we live, the normalization of inequality or injustice or mistreatment, and be willing to defy that society in order to say ‘I refuse to be a part of this, and I refuse for the society I live in to behave like this.’ And two, the story ultimately isn’t about whether Lot is good or bad or indifferent, but whether Lot is tasked with doing it all by himself. A rotten society is rotten because too few people step up to do the good work - we rely on tzaddikim to do the heavy lifting of doing good, instead of commiting to the idea that average persons are the backbone of good in a society. It’s not somebody else’s job. It’s your job. Us average people are the tzaddikim. Shabbat shalom.

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YK 5783 - On Repentance and Repair

10/7/2022

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The past half decade in America, ever since the breakout of Hashtag #MeToo, there has been a paradigm shift in accountability, responsibility, and apology. At no time in American history have we as a society watched a huge swath of powerful individuals in politics, media, and business fall from grace for their actions and simultaneously seek a path back to being accepted once more into society. Some have done it properly, but most have done it poorly, or not at all. Listen to the way Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg summarized it:

“Owning the harm caused means that it must actually be owned fully, entirely. Many of the public statements offered by famous men in the first year after #MeToo broke offer a master class in how to fail at this. Their slippery apologies offered to the press could, at best, be considered to be part of the first step of repentance, except that they didn’t begin to take ownership of their actions - not Kevin Spacey’s bet hedging language - ‘If I did behave then as he describes’, not Garrison Keillor’s whining about how being named as an abuser has impacted his work, not Matt Lauer’s moaning about how the revelation that he assaulted women hurt his family, not Mario Batali’s focus on how his predatory behavior will be received by his fans, not Charlie Rose’s minimizing of the complaints against him, not Bill O’Reilly’s blaming of God, and not Louis C.K.s speculation about what the victims might have thought. These perfunctory, narcissistic public statements didn’t center their victims, didn’t name comprehensively and clearly what the men had done, and didn’t address their bad behavior without justifying it or making excuses. There are other ways to do it.”

These words come from Danya Ruttenberg’s new book, On Repentance and Repair. The origin story of the book is almost as fascinating as the book itself. Danya is the chief rabbi of twitter, and, full disclosure, a friend of mine from back in rabbinical school. When I say ‘chief rabbi of twitter’, I really mean it. Danya has 164,000 followers on twitter. England’s chief rabbi, by comparison, has 28K followers. During the beginnings of #MeToo, Danya began to tweet about differentiating between ‘repentance’, ‘forgiveness’, and ‘atonement’. Her explanations became a viral sensation, and led to a Washington Post op-ed and a couple of interviews on NPR. And everyone was asking the same questions: “What can Judaism tell us about the right ways and the wrong ways to apologize when we have made mistakes.” Danya’s book then spends 202 meticulously researched pages exploring a huge variety of questions.

The first questions it answers, for an intended audience primarily of non-Jews, are regarding the steps back from causing someone else harm. And the amazing thing is - you have all learned this. We talk about the teshuvah process every single year, and our primary text for the steps to teshuvah - return - is from Maimonides. In his hilchot teshuvah, Maimonides goes through the steps, in simplified language.
Step 1 is to name and own the harm.
Step 2 is starting to change.
Step 3 is to make restitution and accept the consequences of one’s actions
Step 4 is apology.
And step 5 is making different choices.
Again, you all have heard this before, many times and likely from many different rabbis, but the message is ultimately the same each year. But I want us to think about how a non-Jew hearing this for the first time might interpret it. America, or at least the perception of a broad swath of the American public, struggles with all of these steps,
starting with step 1 - naming and owning harm. The non-apology apology usually starts with a non-committal non-recognition of the harm done. The above-mentioned non-apology PR statement by Kevin Spacey is the exemplar of this entire genre - he states ‘If I did behave as the alleged victim describes.’ What in the heck is that?!? Is this a dodge because a person has forgotten that they did something bad? Because they were drunk? And if they were drunk, doesn’t the acceptance of fault need to begin with ‘I cannot account for my actions because I drank too much, and that’s bad, and I accept that I did wrong.’
To me, this response is one concocted not by a person who feels contrite, or even a public relations firm trying to do damage control of a valuable client. As the son of a lawyer and the nephew of three lawyers, this reads like something produced by a law firm that might shunt off guilt in case these matters ultimately end up in court. While starting the sentence with ‘if I did behave’ might keep your words from being used against you by a plaintiff, it also completely invalidates the claim of the person that you have harmed. Nothing can take place until a person recognizes what it was that they did which was harmful.
The most frequently heard version of this non-acknowledgement of harm done which feigns recognition of error is the phrase ‘I’m sorry that you were offended.’ These are words I would advise as your spiritual advisor that you should excise from your vocabulary. Moreover, if you hear someone use these words, you should either raise an eyebrow, or put a hand on the person next to you’s shoulder, and if you are particularly close with the person that said it, look at them and say ‘Bubbelah, don’t go there.’ The reason is this - if Dave is offended by something Sally said, and Sally is the one that said the harmful thing, then Sally is the offender, not Dave.

I’ll give three examples, all three that have happened to me - two in which I was the offender, and one when I was the one that received harm. Many years ago the phrase ‘gypped’ was a standard of American colloquial language, and so was the expression of being an ‘Indian giver’. We now know that both these terms are racial in nature, and racist - gypped derives from Gypsy, and Indian giver implies that Native Americans are untrustworthy in negotiations, which is realistically the opposite of the historical truth of US-Native relations in the 19th century. But at some point, I had to be told that these terms were racist. So in two separate moments several years apart, the specifics of which are lost in my memory, I used those two terms nonchalantly in conversation. And someone wise to the linguistic roots of those phrases - gyp and indian giver, told me they were inappropriate. And I apologized and expressed that I did not know it meant that and resolved not to use those terms anymore. Around the same era - the late 90s, when I was in college, someone at my university was expressing that they’d scored a bargain in negotiating, and said ‘yeah, I really Jewed them down’, not knowing that I was Jewish, or that the term itself was racist. Another person we were with said ‘Dude, you can’t say that, that’s super racist,’ and then explained it, and they apologized, although not to me specifically, since I wasn’t the one that objected. But all three had a satisfactory resolution, simply because the locus of responsibility was on the offender, not the offended person. The reply ‘I didn’t know, but now I do, and I won’t do that again’ was the right way to resolve it. However, growing up a boy at summer camp or a guy in a fraternity, all manner of degrading and insulting invective was used in my presence, often discarded or discounted with the phrase ‘oh, man, I was only kidding.’ Again, this is not owning the harm. The words we say have power, and we need to own them. Sure, that can be trying sometimes - I think I police my own thoughts a lot more than I used to, and I still say ‘I’m sorry’ with frequency. But this is part of the path of being your best self.

I wanted also to note step 3 - making restitution and accepting consequences - in the context of the broader American acceptance of the lesson of this book ‘On Repentance and Repair.’ On page 40, Rabbi Ruttenberg notes the well-known case from a decade ago of Barry Freundel, a rabbi in the Washington DC area who filmed women getting undressed going to the mikvah, the ritual bath. He issued an apology and acknowledged wrongdoing. Because of the statute of limitations, although over a hundred women had been victimized, only a small number of cases were eligible for prosecution. However - quote “as one of his victims noted, his words were profoundly undermined by his actions, which included appeals for a lighter sentence based on the claim that he had committed a single crime. Because he shortcutted the ‘accepting consequences’ phase by trying to find loopholes that would circumvent accepting responsibility for all the harm he caused, his teshuvah is not real teshuvah, and thus he never merited to have his victims forgive him.

I don’t want to get too hung up in the mechanics of sin and repentance as if it were a mathematical formula or a machine that needs repair. When your refrigerator is broken, you find the offending part, remove it, and put in a functioning part. Teshuvah and return don’t work this way. If someone causes harm, the repair for the harm is not instantaneous. The real hard work of teshuvah is step 5 - making different choices. This is another way to say that you’ve demonstrated that you’ve changed.

Last year, I spoke of the Lifer Bakery, a bakery in San Francisco staffed entirely by formerly incarcerated persons - not because it’s some sort of social services organization or a 501c3 with a charitable mission. It’s just a bakery run by a Jewish guy that believes in second chances. Every day an employee wakes up and decides to knead dough instead of committing a felony, they demonstrate step 5 - making different choices than the ones that cause others harm. But it’s an every day thing. And those who have done wrong become a little more trustworthy and a little more deserving each day they make the right choices, the different choice, from the ones that got them into the state of error in the first place.

Personal self-improvement is a big part of Yom Kippur - we resolve to take the errors of the past year - the greed, the laziness, the small-mindedness, the gossip, the lust, the selfishness - and repent them, and in reflecting and repenting, hoping to do better for the next year. But we must also consider a question I have approached in past years regarding how the greater collective of society finds teshuvah for an act with awful consequences. I spoke several years ago about Germany’s attempts to rectify the wrongs of the Holocaust, while in comparison, Poland, who bore some culpability for atrocities in World War II against the Jews, stands idly by. We as a nation are still wrestling with our role in slavery, and what we did to the indigenous peoples of this country. Rabbi Ruttenberg’s book brings up the example of Canada’s apology to its native people in 2011 for generations of abusive residential schools that decimated their Native youth. However, this was concurrent with Canada’s exploration of gas and oil drilling and pipelines in protected lands - at one point 94 of 105 oil and gas projects were on Native Canadian lands. Does an official governmental apology matter if the behavior that caused the harm - the disregard for Native peoples as poor and powerless and therefore victimiz-able - has not changed? It’s actual sort of worse - an apology in one hand with the demonstration of doing more harm with the other. Of this, Maimonides wrote ‘Anyone who verbalizes his confession without resolving in his heart to abandon [sin] can be compared to [a person] who immerses himself [in a mikvah] while [holding the carcass of] a lizard in his hand. His immersion will not be of avail until he casts away the carcass.’ (Hilchot Teshuvah 2:3)

But this is not the end of the story. Ruttenberg also takes a look at two other nations that have been and are currently embarking in the process of teshuvah from unspeakable atrocities. Germany, or specifically West Germany, began to take account for the atrocities of the Holocaust in 1949, but slowly, and with great reluctance. Only with the Adolf Eichman trial in 1961 and student protests in 1968 did Germany truly put sufficient effort into its guilt in nearly eliminating Jews and Jewish culture from the entire European continent. That process of teshuvah is not over. Germany will continue to wrestle with its history for generations. Similarly there is the case of South Africa, which attempted to address the wrongdoing of the apartheid generation with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Formed in 1995, the TRC attempted to gather testimony, allow for restitution, and grant amnesty. While the TRC accomplished much, many of the desired taxes on perpetrators and payments for victims were never implemented, and many of the leaders of systematic violence against blacks in South Africa neither admitted to wrongdoing nor received any consequences for their malicious deeds. As Ruttenberg writes “The repentance did not happen, and neither did the profound, and profoundly hoped for social transformation.” She quotes Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who in 2014 wrote “The commission played a magnificent role in facilitating the telling of a story of the true horrors of apartheid. I believe truth is central to any healing process, because in order to forgive, one needs to know whom one is forgiving, and why.[He continues] But healing is a process. How we deal with the truth after its telling defines the success of the process.” I see it the same way - we are constantly moving in a direction towards right, and away from wrong. One error, one apology, one reconciliation, one failure, one rebound at a time.

We make mistakes, we correct them. Our nation makes mistakes, we press it to correct them too. Maimonides, in his formulation of the preamble to the ashamnu bagadnu prayer writes that the text should read:
שֶׁאֵין אָנוּ עַזֵּי פָנִים וּקְשֵׁי עֹרֶף שֶׁנֹּאמַר לְפָנֶיךָ צַדִּיקִים אֲנַחְנוּ וְלֹא חָטָאנוּ אֲבָל אֲנַחְנוּ וַאֲבוֹתֵינוּ חטאנו
‘We would not be insolent or stiff necked enough to say before you ‘we are righteous and have not sinned’ for we and our ancestors have sinned.’

Maimonides implies in this language that the sins of our ancestors are upon us to atone for, and to rectify. Interesting side note: if you go looking for this language in our machzor, the Harlow edition, it isn’t there. Harlow chose a variant of the text by another rabbi which uses ‘aval anachnu chatanu’ - we have sinned, not we and our ancestors have sinned. I don’t know why that choice was made, because I do think most rabbis would agree that we all live in the shadow of the actions of those that lived before us, both in our families and in our nations, and although I don’t directly need to atone for the wrongs of my grandparents, neither am I blameless or permitted to be a bystander to an unequal system or society that they set in place.

Ultimately, the message of the High Holidays for the individuals is deceptive. We are told to come here to get atonement from God for our sins - that this day, that these prayers, that this fast, that our presence, that our contritions, that our resolutions, bring about cosmic realignment that wipes the slate clean and allows us to enter into the 11th day of Tishrei, 5783, blameless, cleansed, new, and whole. This is true. And also it is not true. We are new tomorrow because of our resolve to change, but the resolve to change isn’t a moment or a rebirth. It’s every day, every moment.

And of course, if you need a little inspiration as to why you are here - why you need to do teshuvah - it’s because it is incredibly holy and transcendent. We grow and improve from it, and God delights in that growth and improvement. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, known as the Kedushat Levi, writes:
ובאמת זה הוא תענוג גדול להבורא ברוך הוא כשהנצוצות יש להם עליות למשל כשהבן הרחוק בא אל אביו אז יש לאב יותר תענוג כמבואר ברבותינו ז"ל (סנהדרין צט.) במקום שבעלי תשובה עומדין כו'
‘In truth, something that greatly delights the Creator, blessed be, is that the Divine Sparks are raised up by human beings through their action. This is compared to a far away child, who comes home to their parent, and that parent is more joyous than anything. This is like our sages say ‘ In the place where baalei teshuvah - masters of repentance and return stand, even the completely righteous cannot not stand.’ It is holier to be imperfect and in the process of self-improvement than it is to be perfect and flawless.

The message of Yom Kippur and of doing teshuvah is that we commit to working on ourselves, and also to zooming out a little wider - to working within our families, to working on our communities that we live in, and our nation and our world. We must keep working on ourselves, doing the work, of doing things, doing them imperfectly, finding the ways in which what we did created harm, taking responsibility, repairing and restoring the damage, and doing it differently in the future, in our words and our actions.

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A 'Dvar Torah'; literally a 'word of Torah', is an explanation of a verse or a concept from the Torah. Enjoy Rabbi Goodman's takes on the weekly Torah portion, the holidays, or a matter of Jewish ethics here.

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