Atonement and its modern cousin, apology, are on my mind as Yom Kippur approaches and Jews, everywhere, hope to be inscribed in the book of life for another year. I grew up in a hybrid household -- my father came from an Orthodox, kosher household, while my mother's family only went to temple for the major holidays. His big rebellion was to eat a lobster; her big concession was to join a Conservative temple. Down the road we switched to an even more forgiving Reform temple, but on the High Holidays, on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, my dad still sat in the temple all day long, even when there were no scheduled services, one of a handful of men reading the prayers they'd grown up with.
Old habits die hard. As far as my dad was concerned, asking God for forgiveness was not something that could be dispatched before noon, not if one did a lot of genuine soul-searching. He and his Orthodox ex-pat buddies made themselves a virtual temple, and they prayed straight through to sunset.
I'm a different kind of hybrid, commonly written off with the epithet "cultural Jew," which means that I make a killer latke but lack the commitment to join a temple or attend services. I beg, on this day of forgiveness, to differ. My most vivid memory of the Conservative era is of the litany of sins we read aloud, as one -- and of the sense of disconnect I felt, asking forgiveness for things a 10-year-old had yet to contemplate, let alone execute. What about the sin of teasing my little sister or hurrying the dog through his morning walk? I felt the need to atone for my idiosyncratic sins more than for the communal ones, many of which didn't seem to fit my spiritual profile. I wanted atonement to be meaningful. For that it had to be specific -- and more important, it had to influence my actions in the future, had to involve at least an attempt at transformation. If I prayed for forgiveness for teasing my sister, and came home from shul and teased her again because I knew I could atone for it again next year, then I wasn't making any real progress.
Apologies are our day-to-day atonements, and lately it seems to me that they're tossed off reflexively, sometimes in the midst of the bad act itself; people seem to think they can leaven misbehavior with a shrug and a "sorry." You can tell they don't mean it; you can tell they're going to do exactly the same thing to someone else tomorrow, and shrug and apologize, and then do it again. Undoubtedly not what organized religion has in mind, which may be the reason my dad took refuge in temple even when there wasn't a formal service. The chanting and the singing and the silent reading changed the pace of his day and maybe, just maybe, brought him to moments of personal reflection. He had time not just to apologize but to think about how he might be a worthier guy down the line.
If his strategy didn't work for me, in the long run [thanks primarily to the soul-scorching tenure of an awfully self-righteous rabbi when I was a teen], I was still my father's daughter, still in need of some kind of spiritual frame. When our daughter was born, the need became an imperative, and so I distilled for Sarah the parts of my childhood that felt like faith. Our family became holiday central for dozens of people on Hannukah and Passover, the happy holidays, the ones where we eat and drink and give presents and celebrate that our ancestors had escaped yet again and we are all together. The High Holidays? Always a plate of apples and honey to welcome the new year, even though my husband and daughter love the former and aggressively dislike the latter. And always a conversation about what we might do better in the coming year, which is atonement flipped on its ear. I like having an active assignment. I like not just asking to be forgiven, but promising to learn from the trespasses of the past. I may not look for lessons alongside hundreds of other people dressed in good wool suits, like my dad did, but I look. We have that in common.
Friends were surprised to hear that our daughter, a college freshman, attended High Holiday services at school this year. I wasn't surprised at all. She is named for my father, a man she never met but whose stories I have told with a particular fervor, all these years, and she, like him, like me, like so many of us, has to figure out where on the continuum she comfortably sits. She has to find a way to ask for absolution, to be released into a new year with the opportunity to do better.
Old habits die hard, indeed. It's her turn to try them on, to see how she will navigate a world of mistakes made and forgiveness sincerely sought.
===
I'll tell you what's even funnier. Next time someone sneezes in your vicinity, say "I hope you die".
That's sort of what's happened to our public discourse, in case you didn't notice.