One day many, many years ago, when I lived in Montreal as a child of 5 or 6 years old, I bailed water out of the bathtub and poured it directly on the floor. One, two, three pitchers’ full and more.
The water hit the black-and-white tile floor and spread everywhere, an inch or two deep. This was no minor spill. I poured it on and was having a blast.
The problem was that we were in a rented second floor walk-up and the water leaked through the floor into the downstairs apartment—the landlady’s.
Esti Pfeifer, the landlady (and my mother’s friend) bounded up the stairs. “There’s water leaking downstairs,” she shouted. My mother burst into the bathroom. She saw me in the tub and the flooded floor. My young mother took me out of the bath and dried me off and then threw thick towels on the floor to soak up the water and contain the damage. But it was too late.
She went downstairs to inspect what I had wrought. Water damage to Esti’s kitchen. She’d need a new paint job, and more. It would cost money. When my mother came back, she said in the key of sweet-scold, “What a mess you made! You did pour the water out, didn’t you?”
Still unclothed, I shook my head side to side. “Not me.”
“Come on, Yisrael. You did it.”
“Nope.”
“Admit what you did,” she said gently, “and you will be forgiven.”
I was horrified by my behavior. Yet I wouldn’t “break.” I was confused and frightened that I had done all that damage—but still, I would not confess. What type of human being was I?
I never did confess to my childhood “crime” even as it was obvious I was guilty as sin. Nor have I really confessed to many other sins: times when I acted out of greed or arrogance, times when I was cruel.
Did I mumble some regrets to God or myself about my fair-weather frumkayt, my occasional feigned piety, or even downright messy sins throughout my life? For sure, but not a full confession. Just the high-fructose corn syrup of an elementary school relationship with the creator of the universe. Never a full-on meeting with my many monsters. (Conveniently, I’ve always written off my “abominable” self as an aberration.)
After 50 years, my guilty cowardice in having refused to own up and my double-down “defiance” against my mother’s orderly and pious world—the force of this whole childish interaction—remains with me. And I have suffered the pleasure and pain of it ever since.
Admit what you did and you will be forgiven. It’s a simple formula.
Why didn’t I take the offer?
This memory comes to me as we approach Yom Kippur because this would seem to be exactly God’s offer on the Day of Atonement as well. Confess (with a modicum of contrition) and you will be forgiven.
Easier said than done.
Why is genuine confession and repentance so hard for some people?
To be sure, any adult who goes to services on Yom Kippur will perforce confess. It’s part of the formula, the liturgy. But there’s confession and there’s real confession. Sure, I confess to the King of Kings on the Day of Atonement, but it’s formulaic, a relic of youth, an elementary school relationship with the creator of the universe. In fact, silly as it may sound, I confess, but only to get rid of the commandment to confess.
Of course, it’s not that I don’t mean the words I say in synagogue. For goodness’ sake, it’s Yom Kippur. There’s a forgiveness sale on. I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I want forgiveness, absolution, but at the same time I “arrange” Yom Kippur to go by without me knowing my own monster. I repent a mere “synagogue repentance” in order to avoid actual repenting, actually knowing the dog in me.
We all have known since grade school that an insincere or rote confession isn’t worth much. In fact, tradition has it that for Yom Kippur to work you’ve really got to be broken—you’ve got to mean it—and we aren’t broken so easily.
What does it take for us to be broken? Why is it so difficult for us to “break”? We are so fragile, but something perverse in us is strong as Kevlar; we don’t break. So we confess because we are supposed to confess, but we don’t really confess.
At the same time, we can’t seem to shake off an ancient connection to the God who rebuked Adam and Eve in Paradise, the God who already knows exactly who we are and what we did.
In the Eden of my youth, I knew I was up to something: Would the water leak down into the first floor? I can’t say I knew exactly, but I wasn’t surprised when I found out.
Perhaps somewhere inside me I knew that the “light of forgiveness” that my mother offered me was not an absolute good. As the psychoanalyst/thinker Michael Eigen writes, “the ‘Light’ is nourishing, but so is, surprisingly, the stain of life.” Sitting with the stain—the stain of your sins is also nourishing. Perhaps it was “sin” I needed—not light, not forgiveness.
We may want to be good, but the trouble is that sin often nourishes more than piety and virtue do—these are the wages of sin. Even sin itself is sometimes “necessary” for the soul—to grow. If we can reflect, we can grow by making room for wrong, we even grow ourselves sometimes by doing wrong.
In my work as a psychotherapist, I often ask patients why they came, what they came for, why they came to me. I’m in pain, I want to find a mate, fix my marriage. These are the usual answers.
They tell me the story of their lives—sometimes with regret. Often they seek expiation, atonement, but not yet. Something was wrong then and may “need” to be wrong—even now.
Both religion and psychoanalysis possess a genius for making room for “wrong.” We begin by acknowledging that everything at its core, may be “wrong.” We are all wrong. Sometimes simply by doing so, “wrong” can become right.
A male patient once told me of his various “sins”—with one particular woman with whom he had “irrevocably” fallen in love: “Though it was with her permission and even encouragement, I took what I shouldn’t have taken, what I was not allowed to take.” He talked this way for years, on and off. He would spend sessions considering his misdeeds, his regrets, trying to understand what devils or angels drove him in life: money and love.
He would go to synagogue on Yom Kippur year to year by force of tradition, habit, and also genuine devotion, but after the confession he felt unchanged, unmoved. He wondered why. After all, he had repented in the sense that he would not repeat his transgressions, but something of his sin remained or he seemed to want it to remain.
One time he told me that he would not erase the number of his so-called paramour from his phone. He wouldn’t call her, of course—he knew it was wrong—but sometimes he just wanted her number there.
“Why,” I asked him. “Was it some kind of accomplishment, this sin, a monument to your abilities?”
“Yes,” he said. “I first wanted to conquer my sin, but then I realized I couldn’t. Then I realized I could, but I wouldn’t. There was too much of me in there. I wanted to have something about me that couldn’t be conquered. Instead, I confessed it, but wanted it to remain.”
This seemed quite right to me. Maybe that is what makes confessing so hard and so important. One may want (and need) both sin and forgiveness and it is precisely this anomaly, this human quirk, this braid of opposites that we are confessing.
When I was younger, I used to feel that Yom Kippur was a cleanse. We would say, feel, and do the right things and we are given a clean slate. Of course, that is still true, but after many Yom Kippurs over a lifetime, I know it is more complicated.
Modern man faces a Yom Kippur dilemma: To confess in some sense would be all too easy, but not to confess, not to repent? That would be plain stupid.
Instead, a certain kind of person might come to confess and refuse to confess—to repent and refuse to repent at the same time. And just maybe that is exactly the complex work of Yom Kippur.
One might say, to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, we are condemned to having a God and l’havdil, we are condemned to having a self. Perhaps one might even say that we are condemned to a partnership with God. Maybe that is what we are working out on Yom Kippur and the days leading up to it: to bring self and God together somehow—in shul.
Like my patient, and so many of us, I am at shul on Yom Kippur. I am here both against my will and strangely, also with my full consent. I, too, confess, but I don’t confess.
In the synagogue where I prayed last year in Jerusalem, right before Neila, I felt physically strong, but emotionally fatigued. It was right before the final confession of the day. Would this be another year of playacting?
In the break just before the service I bonded with a man next to me who confided in Yiddish, “I came here 20 years ago from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I have not gotten up from this chair. Twenty Yom Kippurs later and I am the same man. This is where I will be until I am taken.”
Another man to the left of us put his head in his hand, gesticulated wildly, his tallis moving back and forth like a washing machine spin cycle. I thought of the Baal Shem Tov, who said that those in shul who toss and turn are men trying to save themselves from drowning—in sin. But there was something affected about it to me. Which is to say, he seemed to be trying too hard. I thought: Why is he working so hard? Let him confess and let’s get done with it.
Of course I could not really know what was on their minds, but my thought was that perhaps these were confessions of a sort—perhaps they were admitting to something—to themselves or about themselves, maybe a limitation. There is a struggle with sin that is beyond sin, confession, and forgiveness. Not to be proud of sin, but rather mystified by our propensity for mischief of the sinful sort that resides in us that we cannot know, are not even allowed to know.
Both sin and forgiveness do not break out like an ocean. They live in streams and rivulets, creeks and lakes of the soul. Maybe in a sense all water runs out to the sea in the end. Maybe if we get a little bit of the drift, God takes us there, somehow. We men in that Jerusalem shul, each lost somewhere in his own heart, an ocean of black and white, white on black flowing into the blackness of the heart.
After shofar, on the evening following the Day of Atonement, I stood outside in the alleyways of the old Jerusalem neighborhood, in the strongholds of the faithful. From dozens of different houses of worship, small groups milled about and blessed the new moon. Still in tallis and kittel, each man, each group to their own houses of prayer and study, though we were not at all familiar, we held on to the other, and to ourselves, the repentant and the quasi-repentant and the unrepentant—under a splendid moon.
Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman, a psychotherapist in New Jersey, is director of The New Center for Advanced Psychotherapy Studies. He is also author of the Yiddish novel Yankel and Leah.