There has been a lot swirling through my head lately. Convergences, synchronicities, meanings across time and culture. I am always consuming a truly massive amount of information through a variety of channels and voices, and I notice when things ping off one another.
The winding path of the past year has led me to learning more about the ancient, land-based traditions of the Jewish wheel of the year. I am currently taking a course with Elana June Margolis about the final weeks of the Jewish year: a time of exhale, release, consolidation. We take stock of the past year, we listen deeply to ourselves—to the deathbed regrets and wishes of the dying self. We seek to make right what is wrong, we make ourselves vulnerable to accountability, we see what is ready to die and shepherd it kindly to rest. At the same moment, we are serving as midwives for the world to come—Olam ha Ba: the world that is coming, that is always coming, that never stops coming.
In Jewish Currents’ Shabbat reading last week, Aron Wander interprets the parshah (Torah reading for the week) talking about the obligation “to hate the sinner until they change their ways.” I think many of us get an immediate warning flag when we hear anything about hating sinners or sin or what have you—particularly those of us who are queer and suffering under religious dogma made law. Stay with me through the knee-jerk reaction of how those words have been weaponized by the religious right, because I think Wander has an interesting holistic interpretation of how accountability functions:
“Hatred should not be punitive; following God’s example, we are meant to keep alive the memory of wrongdoing not so we can punish those who sin but rather so we can encourage them to change their ways. This mandated care for those we hate demonstrates that we must still see them as worthy of love, and reveals that what we should really despise is their actions and the ways in which they’ve allowed themselves to be distorted, rather than their core being. But it also serves a function for those doing the hating: Absent such care, the medieval Talmudic commentators known as the Tosafot warn, our hatred is liable to become harmful.”
This idea of accountability eschews the simplicity of either exile or forgiveness. Retaining the memory of harm done asks someone to acknowledge it, and make repair. It also represents the idea that when an individual in our community (however large or small you’d like to apply that word) does harm, we are all held (at least somewhat) responsible. It is our duty to hold them in our care, to help them return to themselves, and also to understand that people are products of their culture. How do we perform that same repair on the systems we inhabit? How do we create spaces where harm has less of a chance to occur in the first place?
This interpretation struck me as harmonizing with one of the tasks of the closing of the year, teshuvah: a return to the land of the soul, a return to one’s self. This is sometimes translated as “repentance,” but that rings hollow when you consider what it really means to return to one’s self. Who is our true self? What are our values? Have we been acting in accordance to them? How have we wandered away from the land of our soul?
In a recent article by Hala Alyan, she says, “Accountability is the ultimate act of hope.” As with all change work, it must first begin with us getting right with ourselves. With the help of loving community, we find our way back. Not through punishment, or meaningless apologies, or self-flagellation, or even seeking forgiveness. But taking stock of what is, what is not, and what we would like to be. Holding ourselves and each other with compassion and love as we allow ourselves to acknowledge our missteps and find ways to leave them in the year that has passed.
It’s very much the work of a late-season garden: take up the dying plants to put on the compost pile, renew the earth, spread seeds, and let it rest and rejuvenate, in order to set ourselves up for a successful new year of spring planting. By this time in the year, we’ve seen what mistakes we’ve made in the garden (I planted everything WAY too close together for instance!) and can make plans for how to correct these for a better new year.
Most simply: it is bringing things back into balance.