At-one-ment ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church September 24, 2023
You have to really admire the Ziz; the giant mythical bird in the story I told a few minutes ago. He had a good heart and a good soul; he meant well and didn’t want to hurt anyone. And yet, he continued to make mistakes and to cause harm. But the Ziz tried each time to repair his mistakes, and to make amends. First he tried flying only at night so he didn’t block the sun. Then he turned a hole in the ground into a pond for swimming. And then, of course, he created a problem that he was unable to fix. And I wonder how often that has happened to us?
This morning’s sermon is actually the second part of a sermon I preached a year ago during the Jewish Days of Awe. And I offer you complete forgiveness if you don’t remember the topic a year back; I wouldn’t expect you to. You have not harmed me or our relationship and you do not need to make amends.
We are returning to this topic today, of repentance and repair, because the Jewish High Holy Day of Yom Kippur, known as the Day of Atonement, begins this evening at sundown. Yom Kippur is the culmination of the 10-day period known as the Days of Awe, when Jews are asked to search their hearts and to confront and hold themselves accountable for their mistakes and for the ways in which they might have hurt other people in the previous year. Then, having prepared, and offered apologies, made amends, having asked for and maybe received forgiveness, Yom Kippur offers the opportunity to return to relationship with God, and with the community, to once again be at one. Atonement. At-one-ment.
Last year I taught you about the five steps toward repentance and repair first espoused by the Jewish scholar Maimonides in the 12th century. His master work was called the Mishnah Torah; it served to organize Jewish thinking and practice in a way that would help Jews lead a religious and lawful life. As I did last year, I chose as a resource the excellent book by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg titled On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World.
In the Mishnah Torah, one of the perplexing problems of life that Maimonides addressed was how we humans can repair the harm that we do to each other, and further, how we can become the kind of person that will not cause more of this harm going forward.
The five steps begin, according to Maimonides, with being able to name and own the harm we might have caused. This is confession, admitting and acknowledging that our words and or actions have done damage. This can be challenging in our culture; we are cautioned by lawyers to not admit to mistakes or risk legal action. And it requires courage: what if the person we choose to confess to lashes out at us, hurts us in return? We humans try to protect ourselves. It also requires us to feel some shame at our actions, and we humans go to great lengths – will do practically anything – to avoid feeling shame.
The second step is repentance. We have to take a close look at our actions, and see where we went wrong, and to commit to changing our behavior. Notice that this step comes before an apology. For if we have hurt someone – cheated on a spouse, perhaps – but still find ourselves tempted to do it again, we have not truly repented of our behavior. And so an apology will not be authentic.
The third step is making amends. Again, this cannot authentically take place until we have confronted and understood the extent of the harm we have caused. The amends we offer should correctly fit the hurt we caused, and we need to work to understand the impact of the harm. Years ago, a friend of mine and I were planning to take a short trip together. We talked about it for a few months, and reached the point where we were actively planning. And then she called me one day to say that she had discovered that another friend was about to leave on a trip, and she was going to join her. I was not invited. When my friend returned home, I told her how that felt, and she apologized. But she didn’t do anything to follow up – never mentioned it again, didn’t propose an excursion, or lunch, for the two of us, nothing. And so the apology never felt real.
Confession, repentance, making amends. Moving along to the fourth step in the process, we finally come to apology. We have a sense now of what needs to happen in order to offer a genuine, heartfelt apology. We heard in our story how ‘sorry’ is the hardest word. Certainly the singer Elton John thought so: he wrote a song with that title. I played the song yesterday for the first time in years and noticed that he didn’t offer much of a way forward. “What do I got to do?” he sang repeatedly.
There are a couple of rules for apologizing. First, it should never sound like, “I’m sorry I got caught.” Politicians and charismatic preachers, take note. And second, I tell people that an apology should never contain the word ‘but’ – as in, “Well, I’m sorry but you shouldn’t have made me mad.”
Confession, repentance, making amends, and apology. And so now we can finally talk about forgiveness, and atonement. They are not the same thing. Forgiveness can be the culmination of a very lengthy process, and it is a human process; one that takes place between people. In this culture we aren’t often taught about the steps leading to true forgiveness, in fact, we are often advised to forgive others as quickly as possible. “Forgive and forget!” we hear often. We are uncomfortable at the idea of confronting someone we’ve hurt. We like our comfort. But the task, as our author Victoria Safford, put it, is not comfort, but rather, truth.
Now, forgiveness is just one part of the process, the five steps that Maimonides set forth. It doesn’t always happen, even if the person who has harmed has tried to sincerely offer amends and apologies. Sometimes the hurt simply goes too deep. So forgiveness isn’t really the final goal.
Atonement is what we are seeking. Restoration. Rabbi Ruttenberg noted that for her, in her own religious understanding, the atonement that people seek on Yom Kippur is between a person and God. It is that moment, in the midst of prayer and fasting, when a person is able to feel fully restored, when Rabbi Ruttenberg says, suddenly the ‘spiritual reset button’ is pushed, and the relationship between you and God has been made intact again, and you can feel that you have been washed clean of all the errors, all the hurt.
For those who do not have a traditional belief in God, we look to restoration of relationships: to family, perhaps, or to the wider community. Perhaps someone has committed a crime, and is now leading a healthy and moral life. They have performed the work they needed to do to be restored to society; to confess, to make amends, to apologize. They can be made to feel whole, to be restored.
Here in our faith tradition, we say that we are people of covenant, that we come together to create a healthy community that supports each of us and is in turn supported by each one. It can happen that someone makes a terrible mistake, and is unable to participate in the community for a time. But if they demonstrate that they have changed, and they genuinely apologize and make amends, then they can be restored to the life of the community. In these ways people can still act to purify themselves, to be made whole, and to be restored. To be At One with themselves and with others again. To be in right relationship.
The Ziz really followed all the steps. He told God what he had done. He repented for his mistake, and he flew all over the world, day after day, searching for the word he needed to say. When he felt that he had failed, he confessed and apologized. And he made amends: taking fruit and vegetables from his own garden to the children to make up for ruining theirs.
Rabbi Ruttenberg wrote, “Repair is possible. Atonement is not out of reach. What is needed – and this, of course, is a great deal – is the willingness to do the work. What is needed is the bravery to begin. On the other side of the bridge, on the other side of transformation, is another more whole, more full, more free way of being, one that we can’t fully imagine from here. A way that we must simply bring into existence, step by step.
The Talmud teaches, in the name of Rabbi Bar Hanina, ‘Great is repentance, for it brings healing to the world.’”
May it be so,
Amen.
