In praise of Jewish Guilt

[rhu]

As a son, and now as a father, I am acutely aware that the most devastating thing one person can say to another is "I'll always love you, but right now I'm disappointed in you." And they don't have to be said together; merely saying "I love you" to comfort a young child who knows that what she just did was wrong can be enough to send her running in tears for the privacy of her room.

We are proud of ourselves when we feel we deserve another person's love. We are angry with ourselves when we have lost another person's love through our actions. But we are deeply ashamed of ourselves when we know that we have disappointed a loved one, when we feel that we no longer deserve the same amount of love from them, and yet they love us anyway.

That, I think, is the essence of "Jewish guilt."

This morning, during the selichot service (a special liturgy that precedes the morning prayers for several weeks, starting before Rosh Hashanah and ending at the final service of Yom Kippur), I was struck by the brilliant structure of one passage in the liturgy.

First, we read, "May it be Your will that our urge to do good be stronger than our urge to do wrong, that evildoers return from their path, and that inadvertent sinners mend their ways." And a few paragraphs later, we were into the famous ashamnu, the communal confessional: "We are not so baldfaced as to say 'We are tzadikim and have not sinned.' We have sinned, we have stolen, we have erred in matters of food and drink, we have gone astray, we have led others astray."

What a brilliant structure:

1. We are responsible for our own actions. There's no external tempter in this weltanschauung: there is our urge to do what's right and our urge to do what's wrong, and we pray that God help strengthen our conscience.

1a. The implication is: it's my responsibility; I can't blame anyone else if I fall short; and therefore God must expect that I can live up to God's expectations.

2. We don't pray for God to exact vengeance on or send punishments to the evildoers or the inadvertent sinners. Instead, we pray that they repent. And note the use of the third person: we can, for this brief moment, indulge in the idea that we're talking about someone else.

3. Bam! Oh, right, we're not perfect. Now, because the preceding section dealt with both evildoers and inadvertent sinners, we are able to admit to ourselves that we're not tzadikim without therefore classifying ourselves as evildoers. We have been put in our place, and that place is with the other inadvertent sinners.

3a. But that's not such a horrible place to be: we haven't called upon God to exact punishment against this group of people that we just discovered we're a part of; we asked God to help these people strengthen their consciences and return to the correct path.

But then we go on to say, "As a parent treats the child with tender mercy, so do You treat us." We are hit smack in the face with Jewish guilt. We have disappointed God. We have forgotten the right way. And yet, God still loves us, God still cares for us. And we don't feel we deserve it. After all, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

And so deep in our hearts, we resolve: this year, I'll do better.

And that, I submit, is the whole point of Jewish guilt, the whole point of the Days of Awe. It's to get us to honestly assess ourselves, figure out where we've fallen short, and motivate us by triggering our most fundamental sense of self-dignity, to declare:

I can be a better person, I will be a better person, and it all depends on strengthening my desire to do what's right.

Comments

[cellio]

Thank you for posting this. (I had hoped to say something more coherent, but I at least want to respond before this comment moves from "late" to "really late".)