Self-Forgiveness KN 5777 Daniel Cotzin Burg, Beth Am

What’s the hardest thing we do on ? What’s the most onerous demand the Day of Atonement places upon us? To be sure, we seek forgiveness and that’s tough because it requires us to be vulnerable and admit our mistakes. Harder still may be our need to forgive others because that requires letting go of our resentment, allowing open wounds to close. And weirdly, we sometimes crave those open wounds. But, the hardest thing is, in fact, neither of those: it’s to forgive ourselves!

So, how do we begin to tackle that task? The says: “V’ahavta l’re’echa kamokha, love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 18:19). If there’s a central commandment, a that animates all the others, it’s this one. So says Rabbi Akiva. So says the Ari z”l. We must love our neighbor, our fellow, in addition to loving ourselves. But more than this, we must love them the way we love ourselves – which raises all kinds of interesting questions about human capacity for true empathy. And that would be a useful thing to talk about this evening as it seems so many people these days are struggling to achieve empathy, if at this point, they’re even trying. But I’m not going to talk about that now, because the mitzvah v’ahavta l’re’ekha kamokha demands something else, something even more important I think; you can’t have empathy, true other-love without self-love. It may sound a bit cheesy, but think about it for a moment. What’s that like, to love ourselves? How does it feel? What are the words you say in your mind and heart to reinforce your value to yourself. Do you believe those words? Ok, assuming you do, now love someone else that way.

I won’t ask for a show of hands, but my guess is some of us had trouble with this exercise. And that’s okay, because self-love is really hard. And I mean real self-love. Not narcissism, not filling some gaping hole of self-pity or self-loathing with braggadocio so as to inflate yourself beyond yourself. I mean a simple, elegant, almost effortless feeling – those moments when we look ourselves in the mirror and say, “the person in front of me is imperfect and beautiful, and given the choice, I would choose to be him or her. My friends, we need to get there, for our own sake but also for the sake of others, because we cannot forgive anyone, not really, without forgiving ourselves, and we cannot do that unless we also love ourselves. Which is probably why this most famous verse is only half a verse. Here’s the whole pasuk: “You shall not take vengeance nor bear a grudge against your countryman; you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18). The pasuk is written in a counterintuitive way: “Forgive her because you love her because you love you.”

Why is the verse in this order? Why not start with the obvious: self-forgiveness, then forgiveness of others? Because too often, we confuse self-forgiveness with self-congratulation or self-serving excuses. We minimize our sins or deflect them to others. Have you ever noticed that when someone accuses another person of some wrong, how frequently it is in fact the accuser who is most guilty of that particular sin? It’s human nature to project our failings onto the ones we’ve wronged because it enables us to occupy that precarious space of self- preservation. But self-preservation is not the same as self-love nor self-forgiveness. Mere survival is not holy living. And Yom Kippur calls us to true atonement.

1

Researchers at Baylor University identified this distinction in a study a couple years ago. The only way to true self-forgiveness, they found, is through taking responsibility for our actions and making amends. Sound familiar? First we have to do t’shuvah. Doing right by others gives us more capacity to love ourselves. But trying to love ourselves, without an accounting of ourselves and real t’shuvah, can lead to self-absorption instead of self-love, a mockery of self- forgiveness. Yosef Soloveitchik explains why Rabbi Akiva calls v’ahavta l’re’akha kamokha” a klal gadol baTorah, a cardinal precept of Torah. The verse “…commands a caring concern for our fellow man. This social responsiveness is derived from one’s healthy self- regard, namely kamokha, as [you love] yourself. Individual importance is emphasized,” according to Soloveitchik, “but for goals beyond self-indulgence. Personal fulfillment is valued, but for sublime purposes.” Which, I would add, is why the verse concludes “Ani A’nai, I am the Lord.”

I want to look at an example, but not a success story. No, here is an example of epic failure of forgiveness and t’shuvah at every level. It’s a story we will read tomorrow afternoon during the Mincha service – the story of Jonah. And I’ll give away the ending: Jonah’s epic fail is because he seems to have read Vayikra in reverse order. He starts with the self and, because he doesn’t follow the dialectical, dialogical protocol laid out in Torah, ends not with self-love but self- loathing. Many thanks to Dr. Micah Goodman, with whom I studied in this summer, for opening my eyes to some of the historical context surrounding Jonah. You remember the basic story: Jonah gets the call from God: Go to Ninveh where the people are sinning, and instruct them to repent. Jonah, for his part, goes in exactly the opposite direction. He heads to the port of Jaffa, maybe buys some oranges (it doesn’t say), and hops a boat westward toward Tarshish in Spain. Then what happens? There’s a great storm and the boat is tossed about in the squall. The sailors cast lots to determine the cause of this divine wrath. Jonah is implicated, and he doesn’t deny it. “Toss me overboard,” he says. You know the rest: he’s swallowed by a big fish (dag gadol). He spends three days and three nights in the fish’s belly and then gets vomited up el haYabashah, on dry land.

It’s a brilliantly constructed tale. There’s intertextual imagery: Jonah passes through the water to end up on dry land. Just as the sea parts to birth the Jewish people, so Jonah too gets a rebirth of sorts and finds his purpose – or at least he’s supposed to. The story has directionality, but it’s all reversed. Jonah is supposed to go East, so he goes West. Jonah is supposed go “up,” (kum, get up and go to Ninveh) so he goes down to the bowls of the ship and then the depths of the ocean in the innards of a fish. But after his prayer and his rescue from a watery grave, one would think this would be the moment of his great success, right? He gets the call again, “Get up, and go to Ninveh!” And he does, immediately. He marches himself to the center of this gargantuan city (one so big it takes three days to walk its diameter) and proclaims the city will be destroyed in forty days (again, an inter-text, a potent Biblical number). But it doesn’t take the Ninevites forty days to get their act together. They immediately proclaim a fast, put on sackcloth and sit in ashes. The Ninevite king does the same. They even make their animals fast – not sure what the cows did that was so bad, but hey, they are super-committed to t’shuvah! And God, of course, forgives them.

And what do you think is Jonah’s reaction to all this. How doesn’t the single most effective prophet in the history of prophesy feel about his superlative work? Lousy. He’s grieved.

2

Actually, “vayichar lo,” he’s pissed! “O Lord,” he says, “Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own land?” (That’s important – my own land). “That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know you are a compassionate God. “El chanun v’rachum, erekh apayim v’rav chesed…” Another inter-text – thirteen attributes. Two key changes though: rachum and chanun (mercy and grace) are reversed to put grace first; Maybe important – Grace is unearned forgiveness. And the second change: emet (truth) is omitted. Because who has the truth? Who thinks he’s knows better than God? Jonah. What’s Jonah’s full name? “Yonah ben Ammitai,” he is literally the son of truth. So what happens? Jonah is so depressed with God’s forgiving nature, he’s utterly despondent; he even prays for death. And God tries to teach him a lesson by producing a kikayon, some sort of plant, and then capriciously destroying it. But even the brutal sacrifice of the poor kikayon does not appear to sway Jonah from his anger and despondency.

A few questions we need to address: Why does Jonah flee? Why is Jonah so successful in convincing the people to repent – seemingly without effort? Why can’t Jonah forgive them? And, most importantly, why does Jonah have a death wish? (Throw me overboard! You spared the people, kill me now!) So, here’s what we need to know about Jonah. Jonah lives in the mid 8th century BCE, during the reign of Jeroboam II, a very successful King of Israel, the Northern Kingdom. Yeravam ben Yoash rules for 41 years, which is a freakishly long time in those days, especially because the Tana”kh (which tends to favor Judah in the South), isn’t a big fan of his. Nevertheless, here’s what it says about Jeroboam II in II Kings (14:25): “It was he who restored the territory of Israel from Levo-Chamat to the Sea of the Aravah, in accordance with the promise the Lord, the God of Israel, had made through His servant, the prophet Yonah ben Amittai from Gat-Chefer.” This is the only mention of Jonah outside of his own book in Tana”kh, and what do we know about him? Jonah is into territorial expansion! And Jonah’s a prophet, of course, he may know what’s coming. What’s coming? Jeroboam reigns until the 740’s. But in 722, just a few chapters later, King Sennachariv of Assyria will come and decimate the Northern Kingdom, dispersing its ten tribes and ending Jewish occupation of the Galilee, the Golan and the Jordan River Valley. And what is Ninveh, Jonah’s charge? It’s the capital of Assyria, the sworn enemy of Israel. Jonah has spent his career restoring Jewish territory at God’s command and now along comes the Kadosh Baruch Hu to this ultra-nationalist prophet and tells him to go save Israel’s mortal enemy! Dr. Goodman says this would be like sending Avigdor Lieberman to save Iran. The plot thickens.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Jonah isn’t the only prophet operating in the North at this time. There’s another, one who famously prophesies the fall of the Kingdom of Israel. His name is Amos. And Amos is like anti-Jonah. Whereas Jonah is about Jewish parochialism, nationalism and sovereign land-holdings, Amos is more inclined to the universal. My bar mitzvah Haftarah portion (Acharei Mot) begins: “haloh khivnei khushi’im atem li, b’nai Yisrael. To me, Children of Israel, you are just like the Ethiopians. True, I brought Israel up from the land of Egypt, but also the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir.” (Amos 9:7). In other words, you are special, but I have a special relationship with lots of people. You’re not that special!

And this is the fascinating tension at the heart of the Yom Kippur canonical readings, because the Torah reading Yom Kippur afternoon is the Erva laws, Parashat Acharei Mot, all the prohibited sexual liaisons which are framed in fundamentally parochial terms – don’t behave like

3

the Canaanites! On a regular Acherei Mot, as I had at my bar mitzvah, the supply Amos as a counterpoint with its universal themes. And the Haftarah for Yom Kippur Mincha is Jonah, a book whose characters, other than the prophet himself, are at once not Jewish (not one single character in the book is Jewish) and, importantly, morally upright (think of the sailors who are loath to put at risk the life of a potentially innocent man, or the Ninevites who repent without hesitation). What’s the ultimate message of Sefer Yonah? – be like the Gentiles and not like this Jewish prophet!

Ok, so let’s return now to Jonah and our question of forgiveness, because our ultimate problem with Jonah isn’t that he’s a chauvinist, a patriot. After all, the story isn’t presented in those terms. It’s a very personal story, the story of a prophet who wishes he would fail and disappear. As you know, there is no better indication that someone hates himself, that someone is struggling profoundly with self-forgiveness, than self-harm. That’s the great tragedy of suicide. Jonah has a death-wish. God is Melech chafez bahayim, the King who desires life above all else, who wants us to repent and be inscribed in the book of life. And on Yom Kippur, in the afternoon, as the gates are swinging closed, we read about a man who has vision but no hope. Goodman says, “Jonah is the antagonist to Yom Kippur.”

The story of Jonah reminds us there is a dialogical relationship between empathy and self-love, between forgiveness of others and forgiveness of self. V’ahavtah l’re’acha kamokha, Love your fellow as yourself. What was Jonah’s sin? For what did he need to do t’shuvah? Ostensibly it’s fleeing from God, but Jonah rights that wrong and still hates himself. No, I think Jonah’s real sin is this: Jonah reduces God’s creation to something less than b’tzelem Elohim, he believes some people are unworthy of forgiveness, and chastises the Kadosh Baruch Hu for being a forgiving God. Jonah gets others to do t’shuvah, but ironically can’t do so himself. And feeling, innately, that betrayal of his best self, he becomes a sort of sociopath, a servant of self instead of being a lover of humanity and an eved Hashem, a servant of God.

Hevre, this is the work of the season, the task of Yom Kippur: To recognize our failings and remember they don’t make us failures. To make amends so that we may move beyond ourselves and in so doing move back into ourselves as well. We love, are loved, we forgive, we are forgiven, we ask forgiveness, we forgive ourselves. We make mistakes and repeat and repeat and repeat and, God willing, improve! And through all of it, we strive to be worthy of the blessings we have been given. The conductor and celebrated movie composer, John Williams, was given an AFI lifetime achievement award this year. You know what he said? “Tomorrow morning, when I’m back at work, I’ll try to deserve all of this.”

May we have the humility to contribute well and wisely, the strength to live fully and with conviction and the vision to see not the future, not portents and prophesy but work that stands before us, made clear in the eyes of those who stand beside us.

4