The Challenge of Jewish Repentance

GLOBAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks The Challenge of Jewish Repentance he Ten Days of Repentance And at the end of a long and humans have in common with G-d are the holy of holies of wrenching day, we finish as we is freedom and moral responsibility. Jewish time. They begin with began 10 days earlier, with the TRosh Hashanah, the Jewish New sound of the ram’s horn – this time The Jewish drama is less about character and fate than about will Year, and culminate 10 days later not with tears and fears but with and choice. To the monotheistic with Yom Kippur, our Day of Atone- cautious yet confident hope. We mind, the real battles are not “out ment. At no other time do I feel so have admitted the worst about our- there,” against external forces of close to G-d, and I suspect the same selves and survived. is true for most Jews. darkness, but “in here,” between the Beneath the surface of this long bad and better angels of our nature. These days constitute a courtroom religious ritual lies one of the more As the religion writer Jack Miles drama like no other. The judge is transformative stories of the human once pointed out, you can see the G-d Himself, and we are on trial spirit. The sociologist Philip Rieff difference in the contrast between for our lives. It begins on Rosh pointed out that the movement Sophocles and Shakespeare. For Hashanah, with the sounding of the from paganism to monotheism was Sophocles, Oedipus must battle shofar, the ram’s horn, announc- a transition from fate to faith. By against blind, inexorable fate. For ing that the court is in session. The this, he meant that in the world of Shakespeare, writing in a mono- Book of Life, in which our fate will myth, people were pitted against theistic age, the drama of “Hamlet” be inscribed, now lies open. As we powerful, capricious forces person- lies within, between “the native hue say in prayer, “On Rosh Hashanah ified as gods who were at best indif- of resolution” and “the pale cast of it is written, and on Yom Kippur, ferent, at worst hostile, to human- thought.” it is sealed, who will live and who will die.” At home, we eat an apple kind. All you could do was try to The trouble is, of course, that faced dipped in honey as a symbol of our propitiate, battle or outwit them. with a choice, we often make the hope for a sweet new year. This was a culture of character and wrong one. Given a second chance, fate, and its noblest expression was Adam and Eve would probably pass On Yom Kippur, the atmosphere the literature of Greek tragedy. on the fruit. Cain might work a reaches a peak of intensity on a day little harder on his anger manage- Jews came to see the world in a of fasting and prayer. Repeatedly we ment. And there is a straight line completely different way. The book confess our sins, whole alphabeti- from these biblical episodes to the of Bereishit opens with G-d making cal litanies of them, including ones destruction left by Homosapiens: humans “in His image and likeness.” we probably had neither the time war, murder, human devastation This phrase has become so familiar nor the imagination to commit. We and environmental destruction. throw ourselves on the mercy of the to us that we forget how paradoxical court, which is to say on G-d Him- it is for the Hebrew Bible since G-d That is still our world today. The self. Write us, we say, in the Book of has no image and likeness. As the key fact about us, according to Life. narrative quickly makes clear, what the Bible, is that uniquely in an 22 | GLOBAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS otherwise law-governed universe, the work of creation, but we repeat- you brought healing to a place of we are able to break the law – a edly disappointed Him. Yet He never human pain or hope where you power that we too often exercise gives up. He forgives us time and found despair? You may have been with relish. again. The real religious mystery of a success, but have you also been a Judaism is not our faith in G-d but blessing? Have you written other This raises an acute theological G-d’s faith in us. people in the Book of Life? dilemma. How are we to recon- cile G-d’s high hopes for humanity This is not, as atheists and skeptics To ask these questions once a year with our shabby and threadbare sometimes claim, a comforting fic- in the company of others publicly moral record? The short answer is tion but quite the opposite. Juda- willing to confess their faults, lifted forgiveness. ism is G-d’s call to human respon- by the words and music of ancient sibility, to create a world that is a prayers, knowing that G-d forgives G-d wrote forgiveness into the worthy home for His presence. That every failure we acknowledge as a script. He always gives us a second is why Jews are so often to be found failure and that He has faith in us chance, and more. All we have to do as doctors fighting disease, econ- even when we lose faith in ourselves, is to acknowledge our wrongs, apol- omists fighting poverty, lawyers can be a life-changing experience. ogize, make amends and resolve to fighting injustice, teachers fighting That is when we discover that, even behave better. And G-d forgives. It ignorance and therapists fighting in a secular age, G-d is still there, allows us to hold simultaneously to depression and despair. open to us whenever we are willing the highest moral aspirations while to open ourselves to Him. admitting honestly our deepest Judaism is a supremely activist faith moral failings. That is the drama of for which the greatest religious Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is Emeritus the Jewish High Holy Days. challenge is to heal some Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Con- of the wounds of our gregations of the Commonwealth. At the heart of this vision is deeply fractured world. what the post-Holocaust writer As Frankl put it: the Viktor Frankl called our “search real question is not for meaning.” The great institu- what do we want tions of modernity were not con- from life but structed to provide meaning. Sci- what does ence tells us how the world came life want to be but not why. Technology gives from us. us power but cannot tell us how to use it. The market gives us choices but no guidance as to which choices to make. Modern democracies give us a maximum of personal freedom but a minimum of shared morality. That is You can acknowledge the beauty of the ques- all these institutions, yet most of us tion we are seek something more. asked on Rosh Hasha- nah and Yom Kippur. As we ask Meaning comes not from systems G-d to write us in the Book of Life, of thought but from stories, and He asks us, what have you done the Jewish story is among the most with your life thus far? Have unusual of all. It tells us that G-d you thought about others or sought to make us His partners in only about yourself? Have | 23.

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