On
Yom Kippur, Jews all over the world go through a process of atoning for their
hurtful actions and sins. Just before
Yom Kippur, I went to a talk on the holiday by Rabbi Yehoshua Karsh, a
well-known Jewish educator in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Rabbi Karsh was of the opinion that God
purposely made humans prone to the errors of hurtful actions and sins rather
than being perfectly moral. And this is
because it’s only through atoning for our hurtful actions and sins – in effect,
transcending above them – that God’s creation is truly made perfect.
I
would like to explore this notion from a different angle in order to give an
explanation as to why this may be so. If
Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned in the Garden of Eden and had remained there forever
along with their descendants, there would have been no meaningful narrative for
humans, no meaningful life history.
Paradise has a stultifying effect on human initiative. Everything is basically taken care of. A person is protected against feeling fragile
and vulnerable in his life. And with
this protection, a person doesn’t feel a strong need to make and preserve
organic imprints on other people as a foundation for a personal surrogate
immortality, and thus, a preparation for death.
But now that people have been permanently expelled from this paradise,
they do feel impelled to do things that will have a lasting meaningful effect
on other people.
One
category of such actions is moral deeds.
Doing good things for other people that, if the actions are significant
enough, will be remembered by these other people. And one category of moral deeds is atoning
for actions that, purposefully or even accidentally, have hurt another person. True atonement for hurtful actions and sins
can be a very meaningful way of making and preserving imprints on another person.
At the same time, in true atonement, one is baring oneself to receiving the
imprint of forgiveness from the person who has been hurt or sinned against.
This, in turn, can lay the foundation for a deeper bonding between the two
people.
And
it is not only humans that are concerned about lasting imprints. When humans ask for God’s forgiveness, they
are leaving a much more lasting imprint on God than if they had a perfectly
innocent moral life. And when God
pardons human transgression, He is experiencing the products of his creation in
the strongest way possible.
It is
thus a two-way exchange of imprints made and preserved that makes the process
of atonement on Yom Kippur so important both to Jews and to God. Human atonement and God’s forgiveness create
a transcendental bond that would not exist between God and a people living in
paradise. And these two actions create
an elevated moral state for the Jewish people that lays the foundation for
God’s special pride in his chosen people.
With
all of this being said, there is a problem with the process of atonement for
all people that occurs as a result of being immersed in modern technological
society. To the extent that one becomes
numb from being surrounded by modern technology, one is going to become less
conscious of all the hurtful actions and sins one commits either against God or
against other humans. Or maybe even if
one is conscious of the hurtful actions and sins, one will ascribe less
importance to them, give them less weight.
For a modern Jew on Yom Kippur, he then may go through the motions of a
generic perfunctory atonement without being very focused on or very concerned
about his hurtful actions or sins and therefore without being very focused on
or very concerned about asking forgiveness for what he has done or making
positive changes in his behavior. This
is the problem of committing hurtful actions or sins in a state of
numbness. One is too numb to truly
understand what one has done.
It
sounds strange to say this, but the hurtful actions and sins that are
susceptible to being mitigated by the sinner through atonement have to be first
fully experience by the sinner both in terms of their commission and in terms
of retrospective awareness. The anguish
of real remorse comes as a result of a passionate awareness of having committed
a hurtful action or sin. This passionate remorse and awareness are what makes
Greek tragedies and Elizabethan tragedies so painful to watch. We identify with the heroes and vicariously
cleanse our own souls for our more minor hurtful actions and sins. And we derive comfort from the knowledge that
unlike many of these heroes, our atonement for our more minor hurtful actions
and sins will allow us to be successfully reintegrated into our communities.
In
truth, the religious service of Yom Kippur does not deal directly with
individual hurtful actions or sins of individual people. And no one can be aware of all the bad things
he has done and this is even acknowledged in the service. But as we slide through life today in our
frictionless mediated life narratives, we become too numb to feel most of the
time when we hurt or sin against other people.
As we gradually start to model ourselves after robots, we become so numb
that we don’t feel a need to really atone for actions that we feel incapable of
actually doing in the first place. Even
though we have done them. This is
unfortunate, because the aggrieved party does not have the comfort that comes
from receiving the organic imprint of an apology. And the person who committed the hurtful
action or sin does not receive the benefit that comes from making and possibly
preserving the organic imprint of atonement.
Atonement is a very important imprint in the bundle of imprints that a
person can make as a way of preparing for death with a personal surrogate
immortality. But modern technology is
gradually taking this away from us.
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