Guilt and Shame- Rosh HaShana Day 1 Sermon

I remember watching a Sunday morning news show once that ran a piece about women and guilt. It mentioned that Catholic women feel guilty when they don’t go to confession on Sunday morning. Protestant women feel guilty when they get up in the morning because they were born with original sin. Jewish women feel guilty when they invite 10 friends to dinner but do not have enough food on the table to serve 20! In this day and age there is much emphasis on ridding oneself of feelings of guilt. Yet here we are entering the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, in which we will begin an intensive 10 day period of self-reflection. We will try to think about the acts we committed in the past year that have fallen short of our personal targets and short of our communal targets. We will take the time to say we are sorry for the wrongs we have done to others and ask their forgiveness. We will talk about wanting G-d to forgive us for our shortcomings as well. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “Should we despair of our being unable to retain perfect purity? We should, if perfection were our goal. However, we are not obliged to be perfect once and for all, but only to rise again and again beyond the level of the self. Perfection is divine, and to make it a goal of humans is to call on humans to be divine. All we can do is try to wring our hearts clean in contrition. Contrition begins with a feeling of shame at our being incapable of disentanglement from the self. To be contrite at our failures is holier than to be complacent in perfection.” I agree with most of what Heschel wrote, but I believe there is a difference between guilt and shame. Personally, I don’t believe that Judaism is concerned about shame. Shame is a painful feeling that is a result of one’s consciousness that he/she is unworthy. Judaism does not believe that human beings are unworthy. We are told that we are born in a neutral state and have freedom of choice to determine the paths that will express our moral decision making. Guilt, on the other hand, is a feeling of moral impurity caused by a wrong action of violating a rule, law, or commandment. Guilt is based in the understanding that the world has a moral framework in which it needs to function. Judaism takes guilt one step further by acknowledging that we all do some things wrong, but that does not make us unlovable. We can change our ways while still understanding that our wrong-doings do not lead us to being rejected by G-d. In fact if you look at the machzor, we are constantly asking G-d who is a forgiving G-d, to forgive us, pardon us, and grant us atonement. V’al kulam elo-ah slichot, s’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kahper lanu. We acknowledge that true repentance occurs when we counteract evil by doing right and we state that we believe in the constancy of G-d’s compassion. We repeat the words found in Exodus chapter 34: 6-7, “The Lord, the Lord G-d is gracious and compassionate, patient, abounding in kindness, and faithfulness, assuring love for a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and granting pardon.” So if we believe in a loving G-d who forgives our wrong-doings when we do true teshuvah and if we believe that human beings are not perfect but that healthy guilt can encourage us to correct our actions…we might ask ourselves how good do we have to be? In his book by that very same title, Rabbi Harold Kushner tells the story of The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein. It goes like this: Once there was a circle that was missing a piece. A large triangular wedge had been cut out of it. The circle wanted to be whole, with nothing missing so it went around looking for its missing piece. But because it was incomplete, it could only roll very slowly as it rolled through the world. And as it rolled slowly, it admired the flowers along the way. It chatted with butterflies. It enjoyed the sunshine. It found lots of pieces, but none of them fit. Some were too big and some were too small. Some were too square and some too pointy. So it left them all by the side of the road and kept on searching. Then one day it found a piece that fit perfectly. It was so happy. Now it could be whole, with nothing missing. It incorporated the missing piece into itself and began to roll. Now that it was a perfect circle, it could roll very fast, too fast to notice the flowers, too fast to talk to the butterflies. When it realized how different the world seemed when it rolled through it so quickly, it stopped, left its missing piece by the side of the road, and rolled slowly away looking for its missing piece. Was the circle perfect? No ! Was it constantly looking to improve itself? Yes. More importantly, it was more whole than had it been perfect. It had hopes and dreams, but it also experienced life fully as it went along its path. Judaism recognizes that we are not perfect, but that we can be whole. As Kushner points out, “we can stand before G-d with all of our faults as well as all of our virtues, and hear the message of our acceptability.” We can recognize that we need not feel shame for being imperfect, because part of being human is not acting correctly all the time. Our goal should be to be consistent about trying to know what is good and what is evil and to realize that when we do wrong, we can change our ways because we are not inherently evil. We can only try to live with integrity and not let ourselves be defined by our moments of weakness. We can survive difficult times, recognize our limitations, and still feel lovable. That I believe is part of the message of these very special days. L’Shanah Tovah Tikateyvu.