Sermons

Rosh Hashanah 5786

You can listen to Rabbi Eleanor's sermon here or read it below.

The author of one of the best books on teshuvah, a book I return to often at this time of year, was born 250 years ago this December; although at this time of viddui, of confession, I can also admit that I rarely need a specific excuse to reread her work. In this season especially, you could be forgiven for thinking that Jane Austen just wrote romantic novels; but perhaps if I remind you of how the plot develops, it might begin to be a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a failing must be in want of teshuvah.

The first time Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy, it’s pretty disastrous: she overhears him making a rude comment about her and takes great offence. Between his aloof manners, her quickness to judgment, and the many imperfections of the people around them, the pair are set for a series of misunderstandings, which compound themselves time and again. This culminates in a fiery proposal scene: Mr Darcy is rather too honest while asking Elizabeth to be his wife, also listing all the reasons that he shouldn’t marry her; Elizabeth lets fly with all the reasons that he is the last man in the world whom she could possibly be induced to marry. Both are left fuming as they part company.

For Pride and Prejudice to reach its happy ending, it’s easy to see what needs to happen in the second half of the book: Mr Darcy needs to apologise, to put right what he can, and to change his ways to become worthy of the heroine. He needs to do teshuvah. Spoiler alert: he does, and although Elizabeth will later report that “In essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was” (P&P Ch.41), his behaviour will come to be a better expression of those worthy essentials, enough that the book will end with the couple getting married.

Yet there’s something else at work that’s just as important as the changes in Mr Darcy – something that’s more evident when you read the book than when you watch a film version – and that’s Elizabeth’s willingness to see those changes and to accept them as real. It doesn’t come easily, and she needs time and encouragement from her sister, but she does eventually learn to look again and change her mind. Had she insisted on seeing him as she did initially, or dismissed the changes as not the real man, Mr Darcy might have forever retreated into heartbroken rejection; Elizabeth’s willingness to change her opinion based on new evidence is what enables both of them to move forward and create a new future together.

In Pride and Prejudice this is such an inevitable part of the story that we almost take it for granted, but in real life, it’s often harder to handle other people’s teshuvah than it is to do our own. When someone makes a particularly strong first impression, or when we have known them for a long time, our image of them can become quite fixed – which is understandable, but can prove tricky when they try to change. Perhaps that’s one reason why each year we return to the prayer Unetaneh Tokef (which we’ll come to in our Mussaf service today).

Buried among some challenging theology are two particularly beautiful lines, whose translation in our Reform Machzor tries to get to the heart of what we’re doing here over these Ten Days. It says of God, “You open the Book of Memory, and it speaks for itself, for each of us has signed it by our life.” Each year, our actions leave their imprint in the Divine book: our very life creates a signature, recognised by God. Yet that signature can also change, from year to year and moment to moment: it says a little later in Unetaneh Tokef, “וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה

מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֽוֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה And t’shuvah – returning/repentance, and t’fillah – prayer, and tz’dakah – acts of justice, can change the harshness of the decree.” Every year God opens the book anew: and when our lives create a new signature, God will see us differently, judge us differently, and act accordingly. God will; but for humans, even humans who want to be able to change ourselves, allowing others to change does not always come easily.

There is comfort in feeling that we understand how things are; there is a security in feeling that we have pegged who someone is. I don’t think we need to lose that entirely, and we definitely don’t need to be wilfully blind when someone has hurt us and doesn’t care. Rabbinic tradition, however, distinguishes carefully between how we should treat someone who doesn’t really care that they have done wrong and someone who is sincerely trying to make amends or behave differently. In the Talmud (Yoma 87a), we’re taught that it is not good to respect an unrepentantly wicked person… yet later in the same passage, in addition to dealing with how the person who wishes to atone should behave, the rabbis also address the other party in this equation.

Rabbi Yosei bar Ḥanina teaches that “Anyone who asks forgiveness of his friend should not ask more than three times.” The ensuing discussions clarify that no-one should have to ask more than three times, because before then, the other person should forgive them. Maimonides notes on this that of course a person cannot forgive until real acts of restitution and apology have happened, but if those do happen, his prescription is clear (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 2:10): “It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and refuse to be appeased. … When the person who wronged [you] asks for forgiveness, [you] should forgive [them] with a complete heart and a willing spirit. Even if [they] aggravated and wronged [you] severely, [you] should not seek revenge or bear a grudge.” There is a responsibility on the person who did wrong, to try to make things right; and there is a responsibility on the wronged person, to accept a genuine apology.

Again, after deep hurt, no-one should feel that they can’t take some time to process or recover from whatever happened. Far more common than extreme cases of harm, however, are all the small ways that we let our ideas of people around us become fixed, which then shape how we treat or speak to them. The ancient Rabbis (Mishnah Bava Metzia 4:10) recognise a problematic behaviour that they call oppressing a person with words – and their examples of this are saying to a penitent person, “Remember your former deeds”, and saying to someone who converted, “Remember your ancestors’ deeds.” With these examples, the Rabbis express concern that reminding people of pasts they are trying to leave behind can be a form of oppression; one which unfairly traps them.

This rabbinic perspective is not so far from that of Jane Austen, who has her heroine comfort the repentant Mr Darcy by teaching him her philosophy: “Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure” (P&P, Ch. 48); though perhaps the rabbis might say, ‘remind others of the past only as gives both of you pleasure.’ To understand unhelpful remindings, you need only imagine being the spouse still seen by in-laws, after years of marriage, as not really ‘family’, or being the twenty-something doctoral student still seen as a cute but mischievous toddler. When we insist on seeing people only as they were, we limit who they can become; when we try to see them where they are now, we give them the gift of possibility.

It’s a gift that we often find far from easy to give, and we aren’t helped by a public mood that seems to suggest we must fix on an opinion, publicly pin our colours to the mast and when challenged, double down or espouse that opinion more emphatically. Yet when new evidence comes to light – when circumstances or behaviours change – a wiser course might be really to look and listen, to reassess the possibilities, perhaps even to change our minds. In a passage now included in our Yom Kippur machzor (p.358), Martin Buber writes, “No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a person’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.” Buber’s idea that our beliefs must inevitably change invites us to explore and experience: to look past our assumptions and pay real attention to what and who is in front of us now; to open our minds to discover new developments.

Buber claims this as his own path, contrasting it against comfortable life in the “broad upland of… secure statements”, and acknowledging that living with growth and change is not an easy path. Yet openness to discovery is what creates the possibility of a different life for individuals and perhaps a better world for us all. It may even help keep us hopeful in a troubled world, because supporting each other in making change means refusing to despair of the possibility that we may yet learn to do better, from repairing relationships stretched to breaking point by quarrels, to turning the tide of climate catastrophe. Progress from being stuck in a present that is merely endurable to creating a future worth living may begin with accepting that we do not always have to be as we were, and neither do those around us.

This year, Unetaneh Tokef once again reminds us that [uT’shuvah ut’fillah utz’dakah] וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֽוֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה – through our actions, we can change even a Divine decree. God doesn’t just believe in the possibility of us changing; God actively invites us to change ourselves for the better, and annually calls us to this day of opening the Book of Memory and reading anew the signature that our lives have created this year. If God can allow us to change, perhaps we too can try to be a bit more God-like and let these days challenge us to enable other people’s teshuvah, by seeing them as they are now. May neither pride nor prejudice prevent us from giving others the gift of possibility; may that gift enable us to behave in ways that allow the worthiest essentials within us to show through; and may recognising growth and change lead us closer to the happy endings of which we dream.