Our Elul challenge theme this week is teshuvah/repent, the act and idea that is at the heart of the High Holy Days season.
Robin Casarjian, M.A., is the Founder and Director of the Lionheart Foundation and its National Emotional Literacy Projects. Years ago, I read something by her that has stuck with me:
Forgiveness holds the promise that we will find the peace that we all really want. It promises our release from the hold that another’s attitudes and actions have over us. It awakes us to the truth of our own goodness and loveableness. It holds the sure promise that we will be able to increasingly unburden ourselves from the emotional turmoil and move on to feeling better about ourselves and life.
Is that how we imagine forgiveness?
Each and every year, my eyes turn to the same teaching for the High Holy Days. No matter what new texts I have learned, no matter what I’m reading or teaching—I end up back in the very same place, looking at the words of the Mishnah that teach us that:
For transgressions between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones; however, for transgressions between a person and another, Yom Kippur does not atone until we appease the other person. (Mishnah Yoma, 8:9)
Because teshuvah itself is not actually about forgiveness—that is the work of Yom Kippur, perhaps. Teshuvah is the pre-work, the homework, the spiritual work. Teshuvah is the work of repentance and repair, not of appeasing our loved ones, but of reconnecting with them, of reopening relationships. It is the work of deep introspection, of honest apology, of the vulnerability to say and hear things that are hard, that are hurtful, and that might have the power to release us and change us, to bring us closer to the lives we want to live and the selves we want to be.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer