What’s the hardest thing we do on Yom Kippur? 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. But, the hardest thing I think is in fact neither of those: it’s to forgive ourselves!
I want to suggest to you this evening that self-forgiveness is among the most important work we can do at this season. It may be the lynchpin of our entire process of teshuvah! At first this may seem counterintuitive. Rabbi Akiva says a central commandment of our Torah is “v’ahavta l’re’echa kamokha, love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). We must love our neighbor. This is familiar. But more than this, we must love them the way we love ourselves—kamocha! This, of course, begs a question: can we actually love anyone if we don’t love ourselves?
I won’t ask for a show of hands, but my guess is some of us have trouble with this, probably more of us that you might think. Sure, there’s plenty of posturing. Supercharged by social media, self-aggrandizement has become a feature of our discourse, political and otherwise. But truth be told, self-love is really hard. Many of us were beaten down by others, friends, teachers, sometimes by the ones who purported to love us most. Some of us internalized that doubt until it became a voice in our own minds. How many of us can easily 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? I only wish to be 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 our whole selves. Which is probably why this famous verse “v’ahavta l’re’echa kamokha” 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.” In other words, “forgive him because you love him 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 we make excuses to ourselves for our bad behavior. Sound familiar? Who among us had not minimized our own sins while deflecting responsibility to others? 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 honest living. It’s surely not holy living.
Yom Kippur calls us to true atonement. A 2014 study from researchers at Baylor University identified the only way to true self-forgiveness is through taking responsibility for our actions and making amends.” One of the barriers people face in forgiving themselves,” they write, “appears to be that people feel morally obligated to hang on to those feelings. They feel they deserve to feel bad. Our study found that making amends gives us permission to let go.” Too bad they didn’t just read Leviticus 19! Start with t’shuvah, in other words. This is crucial: doing right by others gives us the capacity to love ourselves. Doing the opposite, trying to love ourselves without an accounting of ourselves, leads to arrogance, self-importance instead of self-love. Rav Yosef Be’er Soloveitchik, the principal modern Orthodox Rabbi of the 20th century, 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 probably why our verse concludes “Ani Hashem, I am the Lord.”
There’s a story that illustrates this paradigm quite well. It’s in our Mahzor, in fact. Any ideas? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not a success story. In fact, it’s a fitting counterexample to what our tradition demands of us, an epic failure of forgiveness and t’shuvah. It’s the story we read tomorrow afternoon during the Mincha service—the story of Jonah. Jonah’s epic failure, I want to suggest to you, 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.
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 or North Africa. 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 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 in reverse. 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. And 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 does the single most effective prophet in the history of prophesy feel about his superlative work? Lousy. He’s aggrieved. Actually, “vayichar lo,” he’s ticked off! “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—we’ll come back to that). “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—the thirteen attributes of God’s kindness. 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 in this brilliant satirical work? Who thinks he’s knows better than God? Jonah, of course. 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 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 should address to help us understand why Jonah seems to get it all wrong: Why does he flee? Why is Jonah so successful in convincing the people to repent—seemingly without effort? Why can’t Jonah forgive? And, most importantly, why does Jonah have a death wish? (Throw me overboard! You spared the repentant Ninevites, kill me now!) So, with appreciation to Dr. Micah Goodman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem from whom I learned some important answers to these questions, 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 was an especially long time in those days, especially because the Tanakh (which tends to favor the Southern Kingdom of Judah), is not a big fan. 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 Tanakh, and what do we know about him? Jonah is into territorial expansion! And, of course, Jonah is a prophet, so let’s assume for a moment he knows what’s coming next. What’s that? Jeroboam reigns until the 740’s. But in 722, just two decades and a few Biblical 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 does any of this have to do with Nineveh? Nineveh is, wait for it, the capital of Assyria! Jonah has spent his career restoring Jewish territory, seemingly 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! This would be like Betzalel Smotrich sending military aid to Iran. Unlikely to say the least.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. Jonah is not the only prophet operating in the North at this time. There’s another, one who famously prophesies the fall of the Kingdom of Israel, and his is name is Amos. Amos is like the anti-Jonah. Whereas Jonah is about Jewish parochialism, nationalism and sovereign landholdings, Amos is more inclined to the universal. My bar mitzvah Haftarah portion 37 years ago begins:
הֲל֣וֹא כִבְנֵי֩ כֻשִׁיִּ֨ים אַתֶּ֥ם לִ֛י בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל
“To me, B’nai Yisrael, 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 people may be chosen, but you’re not that special! I have a special relationship with lots of people!
And this is the fascinating tension at the heart of the Yom Kippur canonical readings, because the traditional Torah reading Yom Kippur afternoon is the erva laws from Parashat Acharei Mot, all the prohibited sexual liaisons—the upshot of which is don’t behave like the Canaanites! On a regular Shabbat Acherei Mot, as I had at my bar mitzvah, to keep us in balance, the Rabbis supply Amos with its universal themes as a counterpoint. Similarly, the Haftarah for Yom Kippur Mincha is Jonah, a book whose characters are at once not Jewish (not one single character other than Jonah in the book is a Jew) but, crucially, they are (to a person) morally upstanding. 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 and deeply ironic message of Sefer Yonah?—be like these Gentiles and not like this Jewish prophet!
So, at long last we can return to Jonah and our question of forgiveness, because our ultimate problem with Jonah isn’t that he’s a patriot. After all, the story isn’t presented in those terms. It’s a 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. Jonah has a death-wish. God is Melech Hafetz 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. As Goodman puts it: “Jonah is the antagonist to Yom Kippur.”
The story of Jonah reminds us there is a symbiotic 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. Jonah motivates others to do t’shuvah, but can’t do so himself. No, his sin is that he refuses to forgive those worthy of forgiveness. Not being able to forgive others makes it impossible to forgive himself. And feeling, innately, that betrayal of his best self, he descends into sociopathy becoming an eved atzmo, a servant of self instead of an eved Hashem, a servant of God.
This, then, 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 toward ourselves as well. To be kind to the person we see in the mirror. We love, are loved, we forgive, we are forgiven, we ask forgiveness, we forgive ourselves. We make mistakes. Rinse and repeat. But sometimes, hopefully not only occasionally, we improve! And through it all, we strive to be worthy of the blessings we have been given. When conductor and celebrated movie composer, John Williams, was given an AFI lifetime achievement award, do 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 the hard and essential work of this season. And may that work which stands before us be made clear in the eyes of those who stand beside us.
