Taking the Peace Train

The G20 Summit is not an event that often captures my attention. Yes, it’s a theoretical big deal—the twenty wealthiest and most powerful nations and international organizations meeting annually (or at least theoretically annually) to discuss issues relating to the global economy, the earth’s changing climate, international financial issues, and matters relating to the question of sustainable development. Lots of talking! But that’s all it generally feels like to me: lots of talking, not much action, rarely any reason to foresee real or positive change. Maybe it’s just me! (And, just to be precise, the G20 has twenty-one members now that they voted to admit the African Union at this year’s summit.)

But this year’s summit was different. For one thing, it was the first G20 held in India. For another, certain key players were missing: Vladimir Putin sent his Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Xi Jinping sent Chinese premier Li Qiang in his stead. But what caught my attention this year had nothing to do with people in or not in attendance, but with an announcement by Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modai that President Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had agreed to join him in working to create a rail- and sea corridor that will pass through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel to link Europe and India in a way that even a year or two ago would have seemed unimaginable. That caught my attention. It won’t come cheap: conservative estimates put the price tag at something like $20 billion. But this project has the potential truly to change the face of the Middle East and I couldn’t agree more with President Biden’s assessment of the project as, and I quote, “a real big deal.” That, it surely is. Will it be possible to take a train from Paris to Tel Aviv and then continue on to Abu Dhabi…and then take advantage of a dedicated ferry link to Mumbai? Now that would be a trip I’d take in a heartbeat!

There was a time when the Middle East, including Turkish Palestine, was linked by a vast network of railroad tracks. I think of that often when I imagine what could be in the future in the Middle East. But, of course, thinking of the future by remembering the past is so basic to the way Jews think of the world that that kind of fantasy comes almost naturally.

Abdul Hamid II, forgotten today by most in the West, was the last sultan of the soon-to-be-mostly-dismantled Ottoman Empire. He reigned from 1876 to 1909, and left behind a legacy so brutal that he was known in his own day as the Red Sultan (i.e., with reference to the amount of innocent blood his forces spilled). But he was also a railroad enthusiast and built the Hijaz Railroad, connecting Damascus, Haifa, Basra (today in southern Iraq), Lod, and Medina (in today’s Saudi Arabia). It cost a fortune to build—the final price was the equivalent of 15% of the budget of the entire empire—and was financed entirely by the Ottomans with contributions from Muslims around the world. The remainder, the Sultan made up himself with public funds. It took years to complete the project and then, finally, passenger service began in 1908.

Israel was then still part of the Ottoman Empire. World War I was years in the future. No one imagined then that a war of almost unimaginable barbarism was a mere six years away. But even fewer, if anyone at all, could have guessed that when the dust settled Israel would be wrested from the Ottomans and handed over to, of all nations, Great Britain. That actually did happen, of course. But I believe that prospect would have struck most, if not all, as unimaginable in 1908. And so, when the railroad began operating, it was to the Ottoman Empire what the Transcontinental Railroad was for the United States in 1869: a way to united a large nation of disparate states and regions by making travel reasonable, inexpensive, and easy between its far-flung states or provinces. By 1914, there were three weekly trains from Damascus to Medina and seven weekly trains ferrying people from Damascus to Haifa. (The trip from Damascus to Haifa took 11.5 hours. By way of comparison, it took 83.5 hours to travel from New York to San Francisco by rail in 1876.)  

Not many people think about what life was like in Ottoman times these days. But, of course, the great efforts of the early Zionists was precisely to bring Jews to Turkish Palestine. When Joan and I got married in 1980, some of her great-uncles were still alive and I heard lots of stories from them about their aliyah in 1909 to what was then a moshavah outside of Petach Tikvah called Ein Ganim. They had a lot to tell, but the detail that stuck me then was Uncle Shimshon’s comment that they fully expected the Jewish State to be born on land wrested from the Ottoman Empire. And so these Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews took Hebrew lessons out of conviction, but they also took daily Turkish class so as to be able to deal with the government, the bank, the post office, the local police, etc. Shimshon himself worked as a trumpet player in the Turkish Police Orchestra in Jerusalem, a job that most Israelis today would find surprising even to know once existed at all, let alone was open to Jewish musicians. But it was!

The announcement of a new rail-and-sea link from Europe to India G20 got me to remember the old Hijaz Railroad. (Hijaz, by the way, is the name of the western part of Saudia Arabia  where Mecca and Medina both are located.) And then I noted in the paper something even more surprising: that Hayim Katz, the Israeli Minister of Tourism, entered Saudi Arabia a few days ago to attend a U.N. Conference, thus becoming the first Israeli cabinet minister to travel in public to that nation…and that Naif al-Sudairi, the Saudi ambassador to the Palestinians, traveled through Israel to the West Bank to meet with officials of the Palestinian Authority. And that double-headed piece of unexpected news, combined with the endless speculation that I see all across the press and the internet that the Saudis may soon join the Abraham Accords, which decision would almost inevitably bring along other Muslim-majority countries as well, has filled me with an uncustomary sense of cautious optimism as this new year dawns.

What concessions Israel would be called upon to make as their part of the bargain, I have no idea. Where the Palestinians would fit into all of this, if they would part of it at all, I also have no idea. (On the other hand, I can assure you that that is precisely what Ambassador al-Sudairi is discussing with the Palestinian leadership this week.) But the announcement at the G20 that the world’s leaders can already imagine flying to Istanbul and then traveling easily through Israel, Jordan, and Saudia Arabia to India has truly caught my imagination. The Hijaz Railroad is probably gone for good—I don’t see the Syrians establishing a rail link between Damascus and Tel Aviv anytime soon. But the idea of taking the train from Haifa to Medina, or north to Beirut (which was also a public train line not that long ago) is thrilling.

So that’s my dream. A Middle East united not by political theory or by treaties, but by actual travel, by the interaction of people eager to live together and to prosper as neighbors and, even, as friends. To buy each other’s tchotchkes in the shuk. To attend each other’s universities. To learn each other’s language. Coincidentally, and while I was daydreaming about taking the train to Medina, one of our Shelter Rockers sent me a link to a blog published by the Times of Israel in which a Syrian woman named Rawan Osman wrote very movingly about her first encounters with Jewish people and with Israelis. (To read her piece, click here.) And her point was the same as mine: that the way barriers between peoples are broken down is not by politicians talking at each other, but by people actually meeting, drinking coffee in each other’s café’s, window-shopping on each other’s streets, etc. But most of all, connections are created through free, unfettered, affordable travel. And railroad travel could be the key to it all.

This last summer, Joan and I took the train for the first time from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was a great experience for us: on time, clean, comfortable…and incredibly fast: we were in Tel Aviv less than 45 minutes after leaving Jerusalem. So that was great. Maybe next summer we’ll take the train to Amman. Or to Medina. A new year is dawning. Who knows what it might not bring?

 

Reading Jonah

I’ve always felt a special connection to the Book of Jonah, which is read in its entirety during the Afternoon Service on Yom Kippur. Partially, that must have to do with the fact that I have been honored every single year of my service to Shelter Rock by being asked to chant the book aloud to the congregation. And partially it has to do with my life-long affinity for the books of Herman Melville, and particularly Moby Dick, the greatest of all whale stories in all literature. (I’m even a fan of Ron Howard’s underrated 2015 movie about the incident that Melville fictionalized in his novel, In the Heart of the Sea. Underrated in my personal opinion, that is.) But it’s not just about the honor, which I have always accepted gratefully—it’s also about the story itself, which is surely one of the most misunderstood of all biblical tales. And it’s specifically the whale’s role that’s the least often gotten right.

First of all, it’s not exactly a whale that swallows Jonah down alive. The text does indeed reference Jonah being swallowed down and then puked out by a sea creature, but the swallower-down or the puker-out is referenced merely as “a fish” or, once, as a “big fish.” Far more interesting, although ultimately inexplicable to me, is that the (big) fish appears to be a gender-fluid creature, called a dag (that is, a male fish) three times and a dagah (that is, a female fish) once. What that’s all about, if it is about anything at all, I have no idea. But my point is that it’s always just a fish, never a whale. Plus, whales are mammals, not fish at all! Of course, it seems highly unlikely the ancients were sufficiently sophisticated ichthyologists to have seized the difference between sea creatures who are technically fish and those who aren’t. And there are denizens of the deep popularly called whales that actually are fish, for example, the so-called “whale shark” that has a mouth more than huge enough to swallow a normal size prophet.

But Jonah’s fish was definitely not a whale shark. For one thing, the esophagus of the whale shark is only a few inches in diameter—so even if Jonah somehow ended up in a whale shark’s mouth, he could never have made it all the way down to its stomach. And the book specifically says that Jonah was “in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”

The blue whale, which can weigh in at 200 tons and the adults of which species can grow to more than 100 feet in length, is a true behemoth. And it actually does have an esophagus that is wide enough, barely, for a man to slither down through. But there are no blue whales in the Mediterranean Sea and the author of Jonah was certainly not enough of a mariner to have explored the oceans and seas of the world other than the Mediterranean. The fin whale, on the other hand, actually does inhabit the Mediterranean and is a species with which people in ancient Israel could surely have been familiar. But they too have a narrow esophagus, too narrow to swallow someone down. And so we are left with the biggest, baddest whale of them all: the sperm whale, of which Moby Dick himself is the most famous literary example. To read a clever on-line essay by Christopher Eames, a New Zealander who blogs for the Times of Israel, that details all of these possibilities and ends up focused on the sperm whale as the most likely candidate to be Jonah’s “great fish,” click here.

But the whale isn’t the point, not really. For one thing, when Jonah composes his great psalm that is the 2^nd chapter of the Book of Jonah, the prophet perceives his near-death experience as one of nearly drowning in the sea, not of being eaten by a monster: “You cast me into the depths, / Into the heart of the sea, / The floods engulfed me; / All Your breakers and billows / Swept over me.” And a few lines later, he says even more clearly that he almost drowned: “The waters closed in over me, / The deep engulfed me. / Weeds twined around my head.”

And now we get to the point: God didn’t send the great fish to terrify the prophet, let alone to eat him, but to save him. And specifically to save him from death by drowning, which he/she did by swallowing Jonah down, then, upon divine command, by puking him up onto the dry land. The whole point, therefore, was the experience of nearly drowning and then of being saved at the very last moment and in the least expected way possible (which in this case is really to say the very least). That is the salvation that inspires the prophet actually to do what he was supposed to do in the first place: to fulfill his personal destiny by going to Nineveh to proclaim God’s message to the people there.  And that trope of coming to know God first by almost drowning and then by being miraculously and unexpectedly saved, that trope appears in lots of different places in the Hebrew Bible.

Does Scripture skip over Moses’s adolescence and almost all of his first eighty years of life because it wants to move quickly enough from his experience of almost drowning in the river as a baby to his experience of hearing God speak at the Burning Bush? For that matter, does the Torah move the Israelites from the Sea of Reeds to Mount Sinai with just a few details provided about the journey because it wishes in that too to stress the connection between the nation risking death by drowning (i.e., by crossing on the seabed without knowing if or when the walls of water on either side of their path would collapse) and its arrival at Sinai where God spoke to them directly and personally from atop the mountain?

Any number of psalms feature the same progression: yearning for communion with God, the sense of drowning in that sea of overwhelming desire, then salvation.

The sixty-ninth psalm, a favorite, would be an excellent example: the poet feels himself to be drowning (“Save me, O God, for the water level is rising to the point of mortal danger. / I am drowning in mud so deep I cannot stand up in it / I am in the deepest water and a strong current is threatening to wash me away”) and feels death to be almost upon him (“Save me from the mud that I not drown / that I be saved both from those who hate me and from the depths of the waters. Let not the swift currents wash me away nor let the depths swallow me up. / Let not the well close up its mouth over me”).  But then the poet has a remarkable insight—that what he is really experiencing is not imminent death but the presence of God.

Other examples would include the eighteenth psalm (which also appears in the Bible as the twenty-second chapter of 2 Samuel) and the sixty-ninth. There are others too. But Jonah’s story is the famous one, the one everybody knows.

Let me tell the story when reading through the lens of the larger biblical narrative. The prophet is too terrified to accept the mission thrust upon him by God. Does he lack self-confidence? Is he worried that he is just another crazy person who hears voices in his head? Or is he just afraid of what might happen if he dares to proclaim God’s word in Nineveh?  We can’t know, but then we see him fleeing from God by jumping on a boat heading north. Things do not go well. A storm terrifies the sailors on the ship, who soon realize that Jonah is fleeing from God (and that it is therefore he who is the source of their misfortune) and so they pitch him overboard, expecting him to drown in the sea. That is not what happens, however and, instead, a gigantic sea creature is summoned by God—the same God who was trying to get Jonah’s attention in the first place—and instructed to swallow the prophet down whole so he can gather his wits and catch his breath in a safe underwater refuge. And that is when his eyes are opened and he composes the famous psalm that we know as the second chapter of the Book of Jonah. He realizes that he has survived, that he was rescued from death by drowning—and in the most unexpected, miraculous way imaginable. And then, chastened and ready, God speaks to him directly and, instead of fleeing or dying, he listens and obeys.

The lesson the Book of Jonah teaches, then, is that is natural, even normal, to fear the word of God and to flee when we feel ourselves called to action in God’s name or on God’s behalf. None of us wants to be told what to do, where to go, how to behave! And even less do we wish to risk anything, let alone everything, to submit to God’s will…and least of all when that will expresses itself not vaguely but specifically by sending us off in a specific direction to accomplish some specific thing. So Jonah is an everyperson, a regular guy who hates risk and avoids danger. But he is also a figure of growth who finds the courage to submit to do God’s will once he learns to face his own mortality. And in so doing he steps into history as one of the dozen or so best known personalities from Jewish antiquity.

The moral for latter-day readers such as ourselves should be clear. The first step to knowing God, to feeling God’s presence in the context of daily life, is facing our own mortality, in accepting that we have no way of knowing what the very next moment might bring. The next has to do with coming to terms with our fragility, with our brittleness, with our innate tenuousness: we can pretend otherwise to be the case, but sailors we’ve never met and whose language we don’t speak and whose names we don’t know could show up at any moment to pitch us overboard into the sea. And then we come to the real point: until we feel ourselves fully in God’s care, we cannot expect to hear God speak. And that is what the Book of Jonah means to me and why I feel so honored year after year when I am asked to chant it aloud to the congregation.

Rosh Hashanah 5784

It’s been a complex, difficult year, this one that now finally draws to its close. Tension in Israel between those either side of the PM’s efforts dramatically to diminish the power of the Supreme Court made some wonder if Israel would in the future the same place it was in the past. Tension on the West Bank rose and continues to rise precipitously—both the kind related to violence directed against Jewish settlers in the heartland of ancient Eretz Yisrael and the kind directed against Palestinian Arabs who too live in that place and have for centuries. On the home front, anti-Semitic incidents reached a new peak in our nation’s history. A full quarter of our nation’s Jewish college students reported having witnessed or been the victims of anti-Semitic assaults on our nation’s campuses. And both of our nation’s major political parties have made room in their ranks for overt anti-Semites, both the kind who hide their bigotry behind a thin veil of anti-Israelism and those who don’t bother hiding it at all. So it would be easy to look back and say, basically, good riddance to a year filled with worry, anxiety, and violence.

Nor does the future feel particularly inviting these days. The year to come could well be the year that Iran finally becomes a full-fledged nuclear power, an eventuality both President Obama and President Trump promised explicitly (and on multiple occasions) that our country would prevent from ever happening and yet which seems to be about to happen nonetheless. The United Nations, once a true force for good in the world, continues apparently to have nothing to do with its time (and its gigantic budget) other than to work to support the enemies of Israel. In our own nation, gun violence will surely continue to increase—and we are already at the point at which a mass shooting in which no record is set with respect to the killed and wounded is not considered front-page news. The political turmoil in Israel will surely continue until there are new elections—and then only if Bibi is sent on his way and coalition representing a large majority of voters (and not a razon-thin majority of them) is put in place. And there is no reason at all to expect the dramatic changes in weather—the extreme heat, the rising seas, the shrinking ice caps, the unprecedented wave of forest fires and smoke pollution—there is no reason at all to expect that all just to go away on its own now that we’ve all had more than enough of it.

It would be easy—more than just easy—to throw up our hands and declare defeat. I feel that way all the time! And yet I also feel—and truly believe—in the power of the few to alter the course of the many. And I believe as well the power of the individual—and not just the famous ones like Rosa Parks or Malala Yousafzai, but regular, garden-variety individuals like ourselves—to alter the course of history, one good deed at a time.

I was reading a terrible story in the paper the other day, the story of the Ulma family, people of whom I had never heard and probably would never have heard of had the Pope not beatified them as potential saints of the Church last week. But their story has to do with Jews, not with other Catholics: Josef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children were murdered by the Nazis on March 24, 1944, for the crime of having hidden two Jewish families who would otherwise have been deported to their deaths in the camps. (The eight Jews they hid, seven adults and a child, were murdered the same day and by the same execution squad.) Also, Wiktoria Ulma was pregnant at the time and her unborn child too was beatified. (There is something both strange and very stirring in that detail as well: because the unborn child was obviously not baptized, it should theoretically not have been a candidate for beatification. But because the thought that the family would be honored but not its soon-to-be born youngest member was unacceptable, the Pope determined that the child had indeed been baptized…in the blood of its murdered mother, a woman whose sole crime was refusing to be party to the murder of Jews. Whether that decision can be justified with respect to canon law, I have no idea. But the thought of the Church recognizing the concept of an infant being baptized in the blood of a woman paying with her life for having hidden Jewish people from their more than willing executioners is particularly moving to me.)

I have read a thousand stories like this—each tree on the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem represents a similar story about regular, everyday people risking everything so as not to be party to evil—but I never fail to be moved by them. Would I have had that courage, that moral stamina? I’d like to think so. But which of us really knows what he or she would do in such a situation, one in which acting bravely and nobly requires putting your own children’s lives on the line as well as your own?

And so I return to the power of the individual. The Nazis had the guns and the ammunition, as well as the depraved indifference to the value of human life necessary to murder children. The Ulmas had no weapons at all and were armed solely by their faith and their absolute refusal to be party to evil. Yet which of us would say that that Ulmas did not alter the course of the world with their actions? And, yes, I say that fully aware of the fact that the people they protected did not survive, as did they also not. Nor am I troubled in this by the fact that until this week I hadn’t ever heard of them. Instead, I find myself certain that the world itself exists in our day because of their willingness to do good in theirs. And, no, I can’t prove that. But it’s still what I think.

Single acts by decent people possessed solely of the will to do good in the world—that is something we are all capable of…if we find the courage to act. The world is awash in violence, but I truly do believe that the Jewish woman who lights her Shabbat candles in the privacy of her own home, consciously ushering light into the world and bearing witness to the presence of God in that space—that that single person has the capacity to alter history far more profoundly than masses intent on doing evil.  And communities of faith exist precisely to foster that kind of behavior. And that worldview as well.

And so, as 5784 dawns with all that it will bring us, I invite you all to join me in stepping into that picture. The world is awash with haters, bigots, racists, and anti-Semites. We can throw up our hands and declare defeat in advance. Or we can address evil in the world by lighting a candle, by putting a coin in the pushkeh, by coming to shul, by saying a chapter of the Psalms, by reciting the Shema…and so forth. We belong to a community dedicated to the finest Jewish values, to tradition, and to the foundational belief that the redemption of the world will be triggered not by demagogues haranguing their audience and not by generals leading their armies into battle, but by children reciting the Shema, by women lighting their candles, by people willing to stand up and be counted on the side of righteousness, justice, and decency. And that, in a nutshell, is what these High Holidays soon to be upon us are about.

 

 

Elul 2023

 I came across an interesting article in the paper the other day. Written by Jancee Dunn, a NY Times columnist who writes for the “Well” newsletter available to Times subscribers, the article was about the concept of regret and specifically what two authorities in the field had to recommend as ways to deal with it. So that was a surprise: who even knew there were experts in the study of regret? I couldn’t have named any, but Jancee Dunn knows at least two: Robin Kowalski, a professor of psychology at Clemson University in South Carolina who studies the topic scientifically, and Daniel H. Pink, once a speechwriter for Al Gore but now the author of a series of a specific kind of bestselling book including Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (2009),When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018), and now The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward.

So that got my attention. Elul, the month preceding the High Holiday season, is all about regret. Or maybe not about regret per se, but about introspection, self-analysis, and the honest consideration of the year about to conclude with an eye towards resolving how to live better and/or finer lives in the year about to begin.  And I suppose it is probably inevitable that that kind of self-scrutiny will lead to at least some version of regret: which of us has never spoken a word in haste that we regretting immediately having uttered or made a decision that felt reasonable at the time but that we subsequently saw as a huge error of judgment? So, yes, regret is part of Elul. Other than for true tzaddikim, how could it not be? And even the truly righteous in our midst speak the occasional word in haste: the difference between the tzaddik and the rest of everybody is not that the former is perfect and the latter, imperfect, but that the truly righteous have the inner courage to own up to their errors and miscalculations, to make them right as best they can without blaming the victims of their own poor judgment, and to learn from them. Therefore, regret is the perfect topic for Elul.

Pink, a graduate of Yale Law School, conducted an interesting survey to provide the data that he then interpreted in his book and the results of that survey are available on line (click here). And the results, featuring the responses of almost 4500 American respondents, are fascinating. Fascinating, but also a bit contradictory.

More than half (53.7%) of the people polled, for example, responded that it was either extremely, somewhat, or slightly harmful to think about one’s regrets at all!  And yet, when asked if they ever look back on their lives and wish they had done something differently either rarely, occasionally, frequently, or constantly, a full 98.9% responded that they had done just that and a mere 1.1% reported never having done so. So that’s interesting: only about half of the people who admitted to looking back on their lives and wishing they had done something differently considered that to be a salutary, positive exercise!

In another interesting disconnect, when asked if they thought that things in life happen “for a reason,” a full 78.7% responded positively (i.e., that they do think that) and another 10.5% answered that they considered that to constitute a distinct possibility. So that would be almost 90% of the respondents who considered it at least possible that things happen for a reason—which is to say that human beings are not fully autonomous beings, but rather, at least to some extent, the victims (or the beneficiaries) of fate, of kismet, of predetermined destiny. And yet when asked if they believed in free will (that is to say, if they believe people to be completely free to chart their courses forward in life and to live with the consequences of their own decisions), an amazing 93.8% of the respondents considered that to be a self-evident truth or at least possibly to be the case.

Taking both these sets of contradictory data into account, then, I conclude that people do regret things in life—but they are not sure they are acting in their own best interests by doing so…and they are more than ready to entertain the possibility that they weren’t fully responsible for the things they regret. Neither of these thoughts could possibly be less in sync with the lessons of Elul.

And then there’s the question of what to do about the things one regrets in life? That was the question Jancee Dunn posed and asked Robin Kowalski and Daniel Pink to answer. It’s a good question! And they came up with three specific answers to it.  All were resonant with me, yet something crucial seemed to be lacking. First, their three suggestions.

The first is to be forgiving of yourself, and no less so than you would be of a friend who came to you bearing the same burden and asking for your counsel. This, at least to me, sounds a bit self-serving: you’re regretful and unhappy, and the solution they offer is to tell yourself that your regrets and your unhappiness don’t make you a bad person. That does not sound especially consoling, or at least to me it doesn’t. And, besides, why would anything think in the first place that only bad people harbor regrets about this or that incident or decision in their past?

The second suggestion is to address the issue from a practical standpoint by asking if there is some way you can undo what you have done, if you can defang your regrets by actually undoing the decision you have come to rue. Sometimes, this will be quite possible. (You can transfer schools, change jobs, switch banks, etc.) But there are surely times when it isn’t that simple to undo an earlier decision or even impossible to do so. But neither author has a clear plan for such instances.

And the third is to reframe the issue under consideration by undertaking what Pink calls “at-leasting,” the technique in which you make yourself feel less regretful by focusing your thoughts on the matter through the “at-least” portal: I wish I had followed my heart and become a teacher, but at least I’ve made a lot of money as a brain surgeon. This one also strikes me as at least slightly cowardly: dealing with regret by convincing yourself that you could have made an even worse decision than the one you did make—that does not seem to me at all like a courageous path to take or a very satisfying one.

Missing from all the above, however, is anything approximating the rabbinic concept of t’shuvah, of repentance as opposed to remorse or mere regret. In the section of his masterwork devoted to the laws of repentance, for example, Maimonides devotes several chapters to outlining the specific ways in which one can sacralize regret—if one can say such a thing—by transforming regret from mere remorse into a channel for spiritual growth.

First, he writes, you need to focus your thoughts so fully on the specific thing you now regret that you feel transformed or even ennobled by the experience of honest self-scrutiny rather than merely wracked with guilt in its regard. In other words, regret can be elevating rather than devastating when it serves as a marker on the road towards spiritual elevation and growth. The scientists quoted in the article suggested that this could (and maybe even should) be an internal process, but that is not how Jewish tradition sees it at all: for t’shuvah to be meaningful, it has to be undertaken in public. You need formally to give voice to your regrets. And then you need to act on them.

And acting on them means taking conscious steps to undo them. Sometimes, this is simple: if you regret stealing something, you can obviously just return it. But other times this is impossible or almost impossible. If, for example, the person to whom you must make amends has died, Rambam instructs you to gather a minyan at that person’s grave and there explain aloud what specifically you regret. If you owe the deceased person money, you should return it to his or her heirs. If you can’t locate any heirs, you should deposit the full sum with the local beit-din and leave it there until an heir materializes. The point here is not who gets to keep the money, or not solely that, but whether you can harness the regret you know feel about having done something wrong that cannot be undone simply (or at all) and allow it to draw you forward into a better version of yourself.

The scholars cited in the paper seemed to assume that regret was somehow toxic—or at the very least unhealthy—and is therefore something to work through and get rid of.   The Jewish approach—the Elul option—is to harness the energy generated by regret and to allow it to draw you forward into becoming a finer version of yourself. To regret things is part of human life; surely, no one manages to get through life without making at least some poor decisions! The question is whether you see regret as something to be identified so that it can be jettisoned as quickly and completely as possible…or as something to be embraced and nurtured as a worthy engine for internal growth. Facing regret square on and allowing it to mold your character positively—that is what Elul is all about.