These ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur are widely known as the Ten Days of Repentance, and so they are (or
should be): the ten days of the year during which we finally find the courage
to look into our own hearts without flinching, to resolve to repair what we
find there broken, and to return to the Torah-based values that, when asked, we
insist we hold dear…but which most of us are more than capable of ignoring
entirely for most of the rest of the
year. The rest of the season—the huge
meals, the company of family and friends, the warm communal feeling that draws
us to worship—is entirely pleasant and, for many, the part of the holiday
season that is the most gratifying. But this other part—the part about there
only being three tools in our hands, and t’shuvah foremost among them, that
could conceivably avert a severe degree that might otherwise be levied against
us in the heavenly tribunal and that it is never too late, nor is any sin or
crime or indiscretion to major, to be atoned for through the medium of t’shuvah—that
is the part that seems hard even to believe, let alone fully to accept. And yet
we repeat words to that effect over and over in our prayers as though these were
commonplace ideas that we are expected to find almost self-evident.
On the one hand, tradition insists that the gates
of t’shuvah, of repentance, are always open. I always think in this
regard of the lesson of Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani, who compared the possibility
of prayer to the feasibility of repentance by observing that “prayer is like a mikveh,
but repentance is like the sea: just as a mikveh is sometimes open and
sometimes locked, so are the gates of prayer are sometimes locked and sometimes
opened; but just as the sea is always open so too are always open the gates of
repentance.” I’ve always liked that teaching, preserved. (For one thing, it
makes me feel slightly better about occasionally finding the gates of prayer
locked.) But, like it though I may, I also find myself wondering what it really
means. Are the gates of repentance really always open? Does that not
imply that, no matter how grievously we sin, no matter how horrific our
behavior, we retain the capacity always to do t’shuvah, to return
to God, to re-invent ourselves as people who do not sin or behave in
that specific way? It sounds like it does!
I was thinking about these issues anyway in the
course of this week—what rabbi wasn’t?—but they came to a head the other day
when I read Ronell Wilson’s story in the paper earlier this week. Probably you
saw it too—Wilson now has the distinction of being the first New Yorker to be
sent to federal death row in more than sixty years, which distinction he richly
earned by murdering two undercover New York City police detectives in cold
blood. Even more remarkably, this was actually Wilson’s second experience
being sentenced to death: although the verdict was eventually overturned due to
some (in my opinion minor) prosecutorial violation of the defendant’s civil
rights, Wilson was originally sentenced to death in 2007. Clemency was rejected by the jurors partially
because of the terribleness of the crime and partially because of his conduct
in prison since his arrest, during which time he behaved violently, refused to
cooperate with the correctional officers assigned to him, intimidated other
inmates and, remarkably, managed to father a child with a female prison guard. (The child, a boy, was
born last June.)
I recall one of my teachers in rabbinical school
constantly reminding us that philosophical ideas can be promoted in the academy
but only tested in the crucible of real life. In other words, no one can answer
any of the Big Questions that attend our existence in God’s world merely by
thinking about them or by reading other people’s books on the topic. Instead,
they need to be tested in the great laboratory that is the world in which we
live: to know how you feel about a specific issue requires encountering that
issue in the context of the real lives of real people…and then seeing how
useful or ridiculous the idea under consideration sounds when spoken aloud to people
in need of solace, not a lecture on Jewish philosophy. I’m not sure that I
fully understood what a profound lesson that was back then. (What did I know? I
wasn’t much more than a teenager myself when I began at JTS and what I knew of
the real world was, to say the very least, limited.) Later on, however, I did
understand.
And so I began
to wonder about this specific case. A terrible crime. A violent, horrible
offense against several of society’s most foundational ideas at once: the
sanctity of all life, the need to construct a just justice system that includes
peace officers being able to do their jobs without risking their lives, and the
importance of society itself appearing unwilling to sanction mayhem in the
streets of its cities and towns. Are the gates of t’shuvah open for
Ronell Wilson? Maimonides would have thought so. Indeed, he wrote almost
unambiguously that t’shuvah “atones for all sins so that even people who were wicked in the
course of entire lifetimes yet who repent in their final moments will not
[presumably in the next life] be reminded of any aspect of their wickedness as
the prophet said, "the wickedness of the evil one will not cause him to
stumble on the day he repents his wickedness" (Ezekiel 33:12). And for
those who repent, Yom Kippur effects atonement, as it is written, “This day
shall atone for you” (Leviticus 16:20).
That much seems clear, yet Rambam then goes on to complicate the
situation by noting that if the sin is grave enough, then t’shuvah and
Yom Kippur only pave the way to forgiveness…but that society still has
an obligation to punish the wrongdoer, even possibly to execute such a person.
In other words, t’shuvah can make a person right with God. But it cannot
stave of punishment by the earthly tribunal, nor should it.
What that should mean to us as we approach Yom Kippur is that t’shuvah
is the first, not the last step, towards grappling with sin. Identifying
our errors of judgment, our poor decisions, all the instances in which we
failed to live up to the ideals we spent the rest of the year professing to
hold dear—of that should be viewed as preparatory work that leads up to the
inner resolve to sin no more. That is what t’shuvah is…but the
process of atonement begins, not ends, there…and Yom Kippur and the verdict of
the earthly court are part of the process as well that leads to absolution, to catharsis,
to peace.
I’ve been thinking a lot about capital punishment lately. I read,
for example, Elizabeth Silver’s very compelling novel, The Execution of Noa
P. Singleton, which is about a young woman on death row, her appeals (by
her own decision) exhausted, her execution date looming. Then I read Life after Death by Damien
Echols, an innocent man who spent eighteen years on death row in Arkansas. Written by a man without any literary training
or university education, the book reads simply and forcefully as an
individual’s plainly-put testimony regarding what happened to him when
everything that could possibly go wrong in a death penalty case went wrong…with
the result of him being not only convicted of a crime he didn’t commit—which has
now been proven conclusively—but actually sentenced to death. And then, to
complete the series (I tend to read books on the same topic in threes for some
reason), I reread a book I hadn’t picked up since college, Victor Hugo’s
remarkable 1829 novel, The Last Day in the Life of a Condemned Man,
which I found just as compelling as I did all those years ago. It would make a
good literary diptych with Echols book, the latter being about whether the
death penalty can be administered fairly and the former being about whether it
should be in use at all in civilized countries that truly value the worth of
human life.
All this thinking about life and death seems to me to be precisely
the right way to enter into Yom Kippur. Tradition teaches us, after all, that
our lives too are on the line during these days of awe and judgment. To accuse
the divine court of impropriety or misconduct makes no sense when the Judge is
all-knowing and serves as the heavenly ground of earthly morality. To wonder if
it is reasonable that any of us could be falsely convicted of sins we haven’t
committed or written up harshly in the great Book of Life by error seems
ridiculous. And so we are left to contemplate the simple idea that churns and
roils at the heart of Yom Kippur: that if we are successful in
identifying our errors of judgment and our missteps and we resolve to
abandon them and to live finer lives…then Yom Kippur will put us in
God’s good graces. The piper may still have to be paid. But the very fact that
the piper may be paid is God’s gift to all humankind and, as Yom Kippur
looms, particularly to the House of Israel.
I wish you all an easy and successful fast and a g’mar hatimah
tovah.
