It’s Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, so I’m at my parents’ house for the weekend. I’m not particularly religious; I don’t think I really believe there’s an intelligent Creator out there. My philosophy is that life was probably an accident, that human beings are pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and that the only meaning in life is the meaning we create for ourselves. The best thing to do with your life is to be as happy as possible while harming other people as little as possible; and the best way to be happy is to recognize every happy moment in your life that you can, no matter how small — even if it’s eating a really tasty peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
For me, Judaism is important not as a system of religious beliefs, but as a connection to my family and to my heritage through a set of rituals. For that reason, sometimes synagogue services on the High Holidays are fulfilling for me, and sometimes they’re not. This year, I haven’t really felt connected to it.
But one theme I heard at services this morning was the idea of forgiveness. It made me think about recent events again. I want to forgive D — I truly do. Yet it would be easier to forgive him if I knew why he did what he did.
What I like about my family’s synagogue is that it’s Reconstructionist. Reconstructionism is one of the newest and smallest denominations of Judaism. It’s also one of the most liberal, with emphasis placed on equality for women as well as for gays and lesbians (the significance of which my parents couldn’t have realized when we joined this congregation almost 25 years ago). One of the tenets of Reconstructionism is that “the past has a vote, not a veto.” We take from the past what is relevant to modern life, and we toss out what is not. Reconstructionism has more respect for the rituals of the past than Reform Judaism does, but socially it’s more liberal than Conservative Judaism.
(And all of this makes me think of D again, because when I was a kid, my congregation had a beloved female rabbi, and it turned out that she later went to D’s synagogue. I learned this the first time I hung out with him.)
Anyway — here’s to a sweet new year. As someone e-mailed me yesterday, “May your best day of last year be the worst of your next.”
I like that.
Interesting comments about forgiveness. Within the past couple of years, my sister became very angry–to the point of refusing to see or speak with her–with a woman who was not only her best friend from childhood, but practically an adopted sibling of ours (her own parents were divorced, so she spent a lot of time with us and became very close to my parents; her daughter calls my parents Grandma and Granddaddy). The situation has been very distressing for the entire family, given the depth of the former relationship and the degree of the current animosity, and especially since it occurred at a time–and due to circumstances surrounding–my father’s very ill health and subsequent kidney transplant. My sister refuses to forgive her former friend because her friend won’t admit that she did anything wrong. I’ve tried to explain to my sister that true forgiveness (especially when one considers the etymology) is a gift from the forgiver, and has nothing to do with how the one forgiven feels or responds. But she insists that one can only forgive when the recipient of that forgiveness expresses remorse; in her case, even an explanation of why the events occurred wouldn’t suffice if there were no concurrent expression of humility.
Darn… I hit “Post it” before I remembered to add:
L`shana tova tikatevu.
Thanks Thom. I take to heart what both you and your sister say about forgiveness. It’s a complicated subject.