Erev Yom Kippur

IF YOU CAN’T FORGIVE OTHERS, START WITH FORGIVING YOURSELF.   

We all know the High Holy Days are a time for apologizing, asking for forgiveness, and finding the strength to forgive others.  It is not such an easy thing to ask for forgiveness and it is not such an easy thing to forgive somebody that has hurt you and let you down.   It is particularly challenging to forgive someone else for doing something you would never do, or can’t imagine you would ever do. It is particularly difficult to forgive someone else for doing something you would never be able to forgive yourself for doing.  

That is why tonight I want to talk about the importance of being more forgiving of ourselves, not in some navel-gazing, self-care way, but because not being able to forgive ourselves often leads us to becoming very unforgiving of others.  

The fear of doing something we could never forgive ourselves for often pushes us to do the right thing, but it also can turn us into people who spend a great deal of our energy holding ourselves and others to standards that are unforgiving. 

How much of our lives do we spend running from task to task, from obligation to obligation because we don’t want to fail because we don’t want to be like “those people?” How much of our stress is from the fear we might fail and have to forgive ourselves for being a person we would have trouble forgiving?    Fear of failure hardens the heart.   

Fear of failure causes us to focus on what we are running from, not what we might be running toward. 

Fear of failure breeds anxiety and resentment, instead of love and connection.

And no matter how hard we try to live up to our own standards, sometimes we also fail.  We all fail. 

·      Sometimes everybody decides to take a nap.

·      Sometimes everybody decides to eat that apple. 

·      Sometimes everybody fails to pay attention where they should have paid attention. 

·      We all make promises that we can’t keep. 

·      We all have done something we would have trouble forgiving someone else for doing to us.

This sounds way too much like what I heard in Baptist churches in Georgia growing up, but here it is:  “We are all sinners.” 

Nobody likes to admit that.  We spend a good deal of energy rationalizing why we did things we did, trying very hard to find a narrative in which we are the central complex character instead of the villain. 

Our Yom Kippur liturgy seems to grasp this. Our Vidui prayers for confession begins:

“We are all arrogant and stubborn enough to say in God’s presence, “Our God and God of our fathers and mothers, we are saints and have not sinned.” 

We will say to God that we are good, it’s not our fault.  But then our liturgy adds this short crucial line:    But we have sinned. 

Our prayers on Yom Kippur grasp that at a certain point, forgiveness is not about understanding ourselves better, or why we did something.  Indeed, sometimes looking into the subconscious reasons and neuroses that led us to do something crappy becomes a way of avoiding taking responsibility. 

Instead, sometimes, we just need to look in the mirror and accept that we are human beings with conflicting impulses, and while we often do the right thing, and we work hard at it, sometimes we just fail.

Sometimes our negative impulses get the better of us.  Sometimes, we are bad. Sometimes, we are mean. Selfish. Hurtful. Rude. Dishonest. Unfaithful.  We should have done better.  We could have done better, but we didn’t.    

I am not advocating that we let go of the guilt.  There is a large self-help industry that makes billions off our desire to not feel guilty, that teaches us that guilt is just a way we hold ourselves back from happiness, but I think Guilt is extremely useful.  Guilt is a core Jewish virtue. Guilt reminds us we are made in the image of God.  

I don’t want to live in a world where people don’t feel guilty for doing crappy things to others.  Forgiveness doesn’t mean, can’t mean letting ourselves off the hook. Admitting that we are wrong, and feeling regret for what we have done is integral to forgiveness in Jewish thinking.   The can be no forgiveness if we don’t first take responsibility for our actions without excuses.

To me, the challenge is learning to accept and love ourselves even as we feel guilty and know we did something wrong. The challenge is to accept ourselves while we are on the hook, stop spending so much energy wriggling to get off the hook and look at our failures unflinchingly in the face.  That is not easy for us to do, particularly for those of us who over-function and hold ourselves and others to high standards.    

I find that some of the things I am most unforgiving about are the very things I have trouble forgiving in myself.  Perhaps, if we can learn to be honest with ourselves and still forgive ourselves, then perhaps we can learn to be more understanding and forgiving to others who let us down. 

And as a society, we could use more forgiveness toward one another, especially after the last few years.  

As one of my great teachers, Rabbi RuPaul says,
“If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?”

And on this Yom Kippur,  I ask you,

“If you can’t forgive yourself, how the hell you gonna forgive somebody else?”

Now can I get an Amen up in here? 

Amen.