Sermon: Truth Enables Reconciliation- Kol Nidre 2009

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 1 October 2009

What I am about to tell you was the real experience of a member of Alyth, who is content that I share this with you.

Hilde is in her nineties now, living contentedly in Temple Fortune in a flat furnished in a style that identifies her immediately as a woman of German Jewish heritage.  It is full of heavy oak furniture, redolent of a settled Jewish community living in apartments in all the major towns and cities, certain that Germany was as much their country as that of any other German.  Indeed a good amount of the furniture of her flat was shipped over from Germany a couple of years before the outbreak of the Second World War, when she and her newly-wed husband fled Germany with her sister to the safety of London.

In the early 1930’s Hilde remembers being at school, in a classroom with a woman who was an admired and rather fearsome teacher.  Exercise books with some marked assignments in them were about to be handed back to the girls in the class.  Each of the girl’s books was handed back to them by the teacher – except for those of two girls.   These the teacher did not give back.  The teacher said “I don’t handle the work of Jews – you come here and get your books”.   Afraid they complied.

It was a small incident and only the beginning of the end of Hilde’s time in Germany – but seventy five years later it is fresh in her mind as if it happened yesterday.  A few years after the war ended – with most of her family having been murdered by the Nazis, Hilde and her husband went back to her former hometown in Germany.    While they were there they visited the weekday market.  As they shopped Hilde was approached by a woman she recognised.  Instinctively, and crazily now that she was a grown woman, Hilde curtsied to her former teacher – the woman who had refused to give her back her homework lest she touched the property of a Jew.

She asked Hilde where she was living now.  Hilde replied, “in London”.   For many years Hilde had wanted to speak to one of the people who had supported the Nazis in driving her out of Germany and murdering her family, to hear words of apology, of contrition.  But here she was with the opportunity to do so, tongue tied, curtsying to the teacher as if she were still a schoolgirl.  The teacher said:  “So living in England.  I am very proud that I taught you your first English lessons.”  Still Hilde could say nothing.  Only her husband could summon the presence of mind to say anything – “If it wasn’t for people like you Hilde would never had needed to learn English.”

It was not a satisfying encounter.  From the teacher there was no acknowledgment of the role that she had played in the destruction of German Jewry.  It was not possible for  Hilde to forgive her, and clearly with the vividness with which Hilde tells the story to this day, it was certainly not possible for Hilde to forget this woman’s casual cruelty.

It is well known that Yom Kippur is emphatically not about God forgiving us for the sins that we have committed against other people.   Selina Gellert in her sermon at Shul yesterday quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who told the story of the renowned Rabbi of Brisk, who could not forgive a man who had insulted him when he though that the great Rabbi was  just a regular Chasid saying to the man – “I cannot forgive you – only the common man can forgive you this insult for that was who you thought I was. You will have to seek the forgiveness of every common man in the street.”  According to Jewish tradition, even God Himself can only forgive sins committed against Himself, not against a person. (q in Simon Weisenthal, The Sunflower, Symposium Section)

But we too cannot forgive a sin committed against us, nor seek another’s forgiveness for what we have done unless we first acknowledge the sin that we have committed, the hurt that we caused, the insult or dishonour that we gave.

The Talmud (Yoma 87a) tells us how the Rabbis of old would ensure that a person who they were upset with could seek their forgiveness before Yom Kippur.    How can you do that if the person who has done wrong to you has not acknowledged what he has done?    The Rabbis suggested hinting:  Rabbi Isaac said if the problem is that someone owes you money and has withheld it from you then go to him and show him money in your hand and hope that he gets the hint.  Rabbi Hisda said send friends to the person to give him the opportunity to realise what he has done and then to apologise to you.  Repeat up to three times if he still does not get the hint.    Rabbi Zera would simply pass by the door of a person who had wronged him many times – doing that difficult thing which is to make contact with a person who has upset you – not avoiding them – so that they have the opportunity to acknowledge what they have done and make amends.

Sins which require us to make amends need not be severe or even our own fault.  Rabbi Louis Jacobs analysed three types of sin like this.  We will hear all of these words repeated many times on this night and day and especially when the choir sings Adonai Adonai el Rachum v Chanun from the Book of Exodus (Chapter 34) singing that God noseh avon vapesha v chata’ah, can, if we have first sought the forgiveness of the people whom we have hurt, forgive us too.  The most severe of these averot, the collective terms for the opposite of a Mitzvah is the pesha – the rebellion, the thing which we do which transgresses deliberately God’s and our nation’s law.  It is when we have acted in a way that is totally self centred.  Avon is the next most serious, it means to be twisted or crooked.  It is when we knew what the correct path should have been but we went another way with hurtful consequences for others or for God.  The weakest term is the most used: Chet – it means “to miss the mark”  – it is where we had no intention of doing wrong but yet wrong was done.  It could be the careless driver, the over-indulgent or neglectful parent, the thoughtless child committing the chet.  With greater care the Chet could have been avoided.  So when we say Al Chet Shechatanu l’fanecha we recognise where we could have done better, not necessarily where we deliberately did anything wrong.  Nothing though can be forgiven – no moving forward can happen unless we have actually acknowledged what we did.

The sacrificial system of the Temple included a system to enable people to publicly acknowledge what they had done wrong in the past, which together with compensating people whom they had hurt or whose property they had damaged, gave a ritual to acknowledging sin – the guilt or asham offering and the chatat or sin offering.  In each case in acknowledgment of what a person had done to hurt others or God, whether or not they had done the offense wittingly, they brought an sacrificial offering which was publicly sacrificed and so the whole community witnessing this act would know that the person had acknowledged their sin and wanted to move on having put it behind them.

When we said “the sin which we have committed against you”, Al Chet shechatanu l’fanech, we did so in the first person plural – we all said it together so that none of us would be singled out as a person who had committed one of the named sins – betraying trust, denying our religious duty, gossiping, hurting others.

Yet for today to have its full meaning in each of our lives we have to do the work of acknowledging individually what we have done to miss the mark, to be twisted from a path that makes life better for all of us or to rebel against necessary laws.  Many a parent knows that a child will do things wrong – it’s part of how they learn.  We are willing to let them learn from their mistakes – but first we know they will get nowhere in this learning if they do not first acknowledge the mistake.  The football went through the neighbours window?  A child may not know the power of their own kick, they may not realise how much damage they have caused by their irresponsibility – and they can learn from this experience – but only if they first acknowledge that they did it, that it was wrong and always will be wrong, and as we say so often “sorry means that I will not do it again”.

The acknowledgement of wrong having been done is the basis of the power of a trend which has picked up in politics over the past couple of decades.  Some considerable healing was achieved in South Africa after the abandonment of apartheid by the truth and reconciliation commission chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  It did not punish, and so has been criticised by some, yet the model has been repeated in many other countries trying to recover from conflict, from Sierra Leone to Chile.  What it does is to bring out acknowledgment of wrongdoing – especially acknowledgment of wrongdoing that was at the time it was committed, sanctioned by the society around.  With acknowledgment we can move forward, forgive, if not forget and we then have the record that can enable us to do what Jews know you must do in order to keep the world on a path to improvement – zachor – remember.

We have also seen this in recent apologies for national sins of the past.  Again many do not see the meaning in, for example, Prime Minister apologising for the treatment of Alan Turing, persecuted under the anti Homosexual legislation pre 1967, when Gordon Brown was still at school doing his O levels!   Similarly Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology this year for the treatment of Aborigines in the first half of the 20th Century and before when he too was not even alive has been criticised for lacking full meaning.    But yet what these apologies do is to acknowledge that a wrong has been done in the past and the time has come to make recompense or to start anew in our attitudes.

Our aim on Yom Kippur is to come out meriting this clothing of purity.  If we hold within us a knowledge that we have missed the mark or worse, this day is an opportunity to think carefully, to acknowledge the wrong that may be in ourselves, which we could reverse by speaking to the people who we may have wronged, to offer to make amends and to move on together.  In this way Yom Kippur will, in the words of introduction of Yom Kippur in Torah make us “cleansed from our sins before the Eternal one” (Lev 16:30)

In the Kaddish during the High Holidays we repeat the word L’elah, so that we say l’elah, l’elah min col min col birchata v shiratah – that God is exponentially higher than any blessings we can utter.  Why do we do this?  Because of the concept that on this day God rises from his throne to his higher seat of Judgement.  The judgement is inevitably less severe if each of us searches ourselves and acknowledges what we have done.

I heard another story like that of Hilde which began this sermon.  This time it was from a later period in Germany’s recent history.  The story was told by a recently ordained pastor who had come to the Jewish Christian Muslim Conference in Germany from his town in the former East Germany.  He and his family had been badly oppressed by the Stasi secret police in in communist East Germany, probably because of his outspoken sermons and other work in his parish which was not favoured by the state.  He knew exactly who the chief had been of the Stasi operation against him and others in the town like him.  Post re-unification this ex secret policeman ended up with a market stall in the town.  Not long after re-unification, well aware that this now market trader had been his persecutor the pastor went to see him at his stall at a quiet time in the market.   The pastor asked him to have a frank talk about what had happened in the past so that they could both get over it.  The ex-secret policeman’s reply?  “I don’t know who you are – never met you before.”

May the world be improved this year because we will acknowledge who we are and what we have done.