Tent of Meeting Text Study
Yom Kippur 5771
To Forgive and Forget?
Is it still possible to affect true teshuvah
teshuvah in an internet age?
Intro:
Our Torah portion for today- Nitzvavim opens on the last day of Moses life. He
gathers together every member of the Jewish people from the most exalted to
the lowliest, old and young, men and women and initiates them for the last
time into the covenant of God. What was new about this covenant was the
concept of a-re-vut, responsibility for one another, through which we are
obligated to help each other succeed in living a moral and ethical life.
In verse 13 & 14 of chapter 29, God says
:,t«Z©v vk¨t¨v,¤t±u ,t«ºZ©v ,h¦rC©v,¤t ,¥r«F hf«b¨t o·"f§S%ck o"f§T¦t tO±udh
:oIH©v Ub¨Ng v«P UB®bh¥t r¤J£t ,¥t±u Ubh·¥vO¡t v²Iv±h h¯bpk oIºH©v s¥n«g Ub¨Ng v«P Ib§J®h r¤J£t,¤t hFsh
Not with you alone do I seal this covenant and this imprecation, but with
whoever is here, standing with us today before Adonai, our God and with
whoever is not here with us today.
The implication being, according to the rabbinic commentaries, that the
covenant with God is binding even on unborn generations who were not
present to enter into it. In other words, once you seal the deal, it will be binding
for all time! Its powerful! But also a bit scary. Why should I be held accountable
for a decision my parents, or grandparents…or in this case my ancestors made
with God? This is the question that most b’nei mitzvah who get parashat
Nitzavim…like to ask. How can something agreed upon so many thousands of
years ago still hold sway today?
This actually strikes me as a bit ironic considering our topic of discussion this
morning.
For in today’s digital world, whatever we write, post, text, upload or download
on line will most likely be available for all time. Which means that we may be
accountable for everything we post into the unforeseeable future.
Looking out at who is in the tent today, I realize that this means different things
for different people. Some of you may mostly reject the internet age. You
probably all have access to a computer and most of you probably have an
email address, but it is not your go to means of communication or personal
Tent of Meeting Text Study
Yom Kippur 5771
expression. But the younger you get, the more likely you are to have a smart
phone, or at least text-ing as part of your cel phone bundle. You might have a
facebook account or belong to linked in, or plaxo or some other net working
site. A large percentage of us share a tremendous amount of information about
ourselves on line without stopping to think about the ramifications. But good or
bad, silly or stupid, what we say or put on line is available for most of the world
to see.
What happens when we do or say something on line that we later regret?
Certainly we should be able to repent, apologize and amend our ways. Only
these days this might not be such an easy thing to accomplish. Which is why I
found Jeff Rosen’s article in the NYT magazine this past July so fascinating.
The End of Forgetting, challenges us to reflect on the true meaning of teshuvah
and how able we really are to move past our transgressions in a world that
prides itself on its inability to forget. We will look at some excerpts from his
article in the context of a larger discussion on teshuvah. We start by looking at
a traditional definition of how repentance…teshuvah works.
RAMBAM (12th Century Spain, Morocco, Israel & Egypt)…Teshuvah makes atonement for all
transgressions; even if a man has transgressed all the days of his life, if he does teshuvah at
the end, nothing of his wickedness is remembered unto him, as it is said: “And as for the
wickedness of the wicked, he shall not stumble thereby in the day that he turns from his
wickedness. [Ezekiel 33:12].
JEFFREY ROSEN (Law Professor at George Washington University)…“Its often said we live in a permissive
era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the
permanent memory bank of the web increasingly means there are no second chances-no
opportunities to escape…your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first
thing everyone knows about you.
[The End of Forgetting, NYT Magazine, 7/25/10]
REUVEN HAMMER (Conservative Rabbi and author, Jerusalem)…Judaism teaches that human begins
are not basically sinful. We come into the world neither carrying the burden of sin committed
by our ancestors nor tainted by it. Rather, sin/chet, is the result of our human inclinations,
the yetzer, which must be properly channeled. Chet literally means something that goes
astray. It is a term used in archery to indicate that the arrow has missed its target. This
concept of sin suggests a straying from the correct ways, from what is good and straight.
[Entering the High Holidays]
Tent of Meeting Text Study
Yom Kippur 5771
VICTOR MAYERMAYER-SCHOENBERGER….
SCHOENBERGER….By
…. erasing external memories, our society accepts that
human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences
and adjust our behavior. In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not
necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually
forgotten. By contrast….a society in which everything is recorded will forever tether us to all
our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them. Without some form of
forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking. [Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.]
JEFFREY ROSEN…It
might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is
ROSEN
slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleading called a ‘global village,”
to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the
Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people-oral
or written, true or false, friendly or mean- was considered a terrible sin because small
communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought
to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But
these…villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village,
where much of the content on the internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip.
Although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the
book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins
by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation
not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and
grown spiritually from their mistakes….Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes
our slate clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their
all-powerful divine predecessor.
RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER…(Conservative Rabbi and Author), The question is not whether or not we
will make mistakes, whether or not we will get some important things wrong from time to
time and feel terrible about it. Of course we will. Anyone who takes the moral demands of a
human life seriously will make his or her share of mistakes. The question is how shall we
deal with our imperfection, our sense of inadequacy? How do you relieve guilt? How do you
cure shame…..To say that God forgives us for our misdeeds, is not a statement about God or
about God’s emotional generosity. It is a statement about us. To feel forgiven is to feel free
to step into the future uncontaminated by the mistakes of the past, encouraged by the
knowledge that we can grow and change and need not repeat the same mistakes again……If
we are afraid to make a mistake because we have to maintain the pretense of
perfection…we will never be brave enough to try anything new or anything challenging. We
will only do things that are guaranteed to turn out right. We will never learn; we will never
grow….But God doesn’t need us to meet His needs, and His expectations of us are more
realistic than are those of the people around us.…God accepts us as we are, and that
acceptance is the beginning of the process of healing our shame, because only when we
know that we are acceptable and loveable will we be able to change the things we don’t like
about ourselves.
[How Good Do We Have To Be?]
JEFFREY ROSEN…Privacy
protects us from being unfairly judged out of context on the basis
ROSEN
of snippets of private information that have been exposed against our will; but we can be
just as unfairly judged out of context on the basis of snippets of public information that we
have unwisely chosen to reveal to the wrong audience….Moreover, the narrow focus on
Tent of Meeting Text Study
Yom Kippur 5771
privacy as a form of control misses what really worries people on the Internet today. What
people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over
their online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations is, of course,
an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think
about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others
give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns
out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the
empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in
context, there’s noting we can do about.
RABBI SHELLY ZIMMERMAN…
ZIMMERMAN (Reform Rabbi, The Jewish Center of The Hamptons, NY) the demand of
teshuvah is not to uproot the past but to shape and mold it. Through the creative capacity
and power you and I learn to live as subjects and not as objects. The dialectical dynamic of
sin is that the very thing that severs man from God, which makes him abominable and
unclean, is the very thing which leads him after repentance to that high peak. The new
spiritual force and energy can be sanctified and directed heavenward. The goal is the
transformation of the past with destiny and not fate in mind. The past is never erased. We
learn to use our creative powers in the face of what seems forever fated and transform it
and ourselves by focusing on destiny-directed existence. This is no easy task, but essential;
it is a task that is painful and at times unrelenting. No excuses or justification will do here—
only hard work.
[CCAR Journal, Summer 2005]
Tent of Meeting Text Study
Yom Kippur 5771
CONCL.
So for all the implications of a digital world which collects and retains not only
everything that we have ever placed on line, but also everything that has ever
been posted about us as well, I still think that the process of teshuvah can help
us keep the missteps that are part of our lives in perspective.
I’ve told this story before but to me, it perfectly reflects the meaning of our
study today.
The story is told of a king who possessed a truly extraordinary emerald. He kept
it carefully stored so that it was certain to remain perfect. From time to time he
would go to visit his treasured possession, taking it out to hold and admire it
before returning it to its container and storing it safely away once again. But
eventually, holding the gem one day, he dropped it and to his horror saw as he
picked it up with trembling hands that the emerald now contained a huge
scratch from within. The king frantically summoned the best gem workers from
around the kingdom to repair his most prized possession, yet the news was
always the same—it was impossible to fix—the gem was now worthless. Yet one
artisan came and saw the gem in a different light. Working slowly, tenderly, he
used the deep scratch as the beginnings of an engraving and created a
beautiful flower—thus allowing the King to see that his emerald, despite its
flaw, remained extraordinary just the same.
Each of us despite our flaws, remains an extraordinary human being created in
the image of God. The deeper goal of teshuvah is not to create a perfectsqueaky clean reputation but to begin to transform ourselves so that we can
realize our greatest potential and enable ourselves to fulfill our greatest worth.
Teshuvah is not a “born again” experience. That’s not the point. Judaism does
not preach a clean slate but rather believes deeply in a fresh start. After all, a
tabla rasa would erase all of our life experiences and our deeds both
miraculous and flawed. We need our past not only for how it shapes us but
essentially because it is a part of us and it can help us to grow and evolve into
the truly sacred human beings we desire to become.
So maybe the internet is doing us a favor….If we are strong enough and brave
enough to look back with a critical eye we can use the digital world as just
another tool towards deepening our understanding of who we are and what we
strive to become.
Tent of Meeting Text Study
Yom Kippur 5771
That’s not to say you shouldn’t think twice before posting in appropriate
pictures on your ‘private’ face book page, but it does mean that all those
scratches, snags and other internal imperfections that show themselves from
time to time are part of who we are. The purpose of this soul searching is not to
wish our imperfections away, but rather to use them to help create a better
future for ourselves, our families and our world. If we undertake this mission
with a full heart, then not only can God be found during our process of
teshuvah, but hopefully we can be found too!