A Confession

 

A Confession

Sometimes I recall things I have said or done which I regret … which make me feel ashamed. This usually happens when I am avoiding work. What came to mind was a bad habit I developed in my formative years (before and after my bar mitzvah) … a practice I devised to gain favor in the eyes of my father, Rabbi Spector. I observed that he was especially pleased when being asked questions about the Torah … the Jewish Bible. So I often tried to please him by asking question … most often questions that meant nothing to me.

That is perhaps why much later in life I made a distinction being asking questions and having questions. Asking questions is all too easy and all too often not in the search of understanding. Having questions is hard and begins with admitting one’s ignorance and is followed by committing time and effort in search of understanding, being open to alternative explanations, questioning one's assumptions, and revisiting the question and alternative explanations. So I eventually came to believe that the job of a teacher was to get others to have questions.

Anyway, I would ask my father many questions to gain favor in his eyes. That is something I now regret … pretending to be interested in the things I knew interested him. But sometimes there is a small positive bit that emerges from one’s shame. Occasionally, I asked a question about something I did not understand, for example why it is written in the book of Exodus that the sins of the father will be visited upon the children. That passage struck me as unfair and not at all becoming of G-d. My father’s answer was my first lesson in psychology. As I recall, he said the passage was merely describing what typically happens … children can learn bad things from their parents and bad things often lead to some kind of punishment. My father claimed the passage was not describing G-d … it was describing people.

Another one of my rare genuine questions to my father concerned the Al Chet prayer asking for forgiveness repeated many time during the high holy days – the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) – see https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/6577/jewish/Text-of-Al-Chet.htm. This prayer is the Jewish confessional. My question to my father was why was the prayer said in the plural using ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ – asking forgiveness for each of the sins WE have committed. My father’s response was my first lesson in sociology. He said that if anyone in the community had committed that sin, that everyone in the community was responsible for not having taught that person better. Or something along those lines. My aging memory is not all that reliable.

And I can add one more confession to these notes about my past. I memorized the speech I was to give following the Torah reading at my Bar Mitzvah. My haftarah – a reading from the Prophets – paired with a reading from the Torah. The Torah portion the week of my Bar Mitzvah was from Devarim (the sayings of Moses or Deuteronomy) – the early chapters that contain two remarkable things repeated elsewhere in the Torah: (1) the Shema (Hear O Israel, the Lord our G-d is one), and (2) the ten commandments. The haftarah paired with that passage from the Torah is from the Book of Isiaih beginning with Chapter 40 – comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord.

The haftarah reading did not seem at all connected with the Torah passage, so I asked my father why they were paired together. I could not find any obvious connection.

Then, skipping ahead a bit, it was my bar mitzvah day and I read the haftarah portion in Hebrew and also the passage from the Torah in Hebrew (without vowels – mostly committed to memory from so much practice), and then it was time for me to deliver the Shabbat sermon based on what I had learned during my bar mitzvah training. Just before I started to deliver my memorized speech, I looked at my little sister sitting in the front row of the synagogue and she made a funny face at me that erased my memory … my speech was gone. I coughed hoping it would return to memory but it was really taking a long distance vacation. What to do? I coughed again and then decided to pretend to be my father. I recalled as best I could his answer to my question about the connection of the two passages. It went something like this as best I can recall just now. Imagine Moses having led the Jewish people out of bondage under Pharaoh in Egypt and having wandered in the desert for 40 years before reaching the promised land … imagine all of that and then imagine Moses being told by G-d that he would not be allowed to go into the promised land apparently for having broken the tablet containing the gift given to him by G-d atop Mount Sinai containing the ten commandments in his anger at the people for apparently worshipping the golden calf. For losing his temper and patience with the people and for breaking the tablet, he was denied entry to the promised land. So, how did Moses react to such severe punishment? He sings the praise of the Lord with the words of the Shema – “Hear O Israel, the Lord our G-d the Lord is one” - see https://bibleproject.com/learn/deuteronomy/ . Moses is not angry hearing his punishment. Rather, he urges his people on to the promised land. He comforts and consoles. Is that the connection? I asked at the end of my impromptu speech. 

When I recall that explanation of the connection of the two passages, it brings to mind something else I do not understand – the closing words of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus – namely, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus#:~:text=The%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus%20(French,his%20philosophy%20of%20the%20absurd.

The older I get the less I understand.