By Rabbi Eliyahu Safran
A fisherman living near the banks of a river was making his way home one evening, exhausted from his long labors. As he trudged along the path, he dreamed of what his life might be like if he were suddenly rich. Just then, his foot brushed against a leather pouch on the path. He picked it up only to discover it filled with small stones. Falling back into his reverie, he absent-mindedly began throwing the pebbles into the water.
“When I am rich,” he told himself, “I will live in a large house. I will have one servant to serve me food and another to serve me wine…”
He dreamed of a carriage lined with gold! Of fine clothes! Of herds of goats and sheep! On and on, a glorious image per stone until there was only a single stone remaining. As the fisherman held the final stone in his hand, the last of the sun’s rays caught it and burst into a brilliant rainbow. His eyes widened as he realized that he held in in his hand a valuable gem – and that he had been tossing away genuine wealth while dreaming of illusory riches that would never be his.
He fell to his knees in astonishment and despair. Meanwhile, a philosopher observing the fisherman would have recognized in his behavior and subsequent agony nothing more than an example of the human condition.
Each of us is made up of the real and the illusory, of the obtainable and the fanciful. More fundamentally, at our core there exists duality. Perhaps even contradiction. Whether at war with ourselves or in uneasy compromise, our essential duality is a constant source of anxiety and dis-ease in our lives.
How can it be otherwise? The duality is woven into the very nature of our being. We are both corporal, like every other creature that walks the face of the earth, and spiritual, uniquely imbued with the dignity and divinity of our Creator. At each step of our lives, we teeter and totter, seeking balance between these dual, often competing, facets of our nature. At our best, we seek to imbue the natural with the spiritual, lending grace to the most basic of tasks, and to lend humanity to the divine, bringing holiness to our everyday lives. At our worst, we give in wholly to our most base instincts, seemingly powerless to find any balance with our better natures.
No moment in our lives is more rife with the tension of our duality than our confession on Yom Kippur. The process of repentance and its accompanying recitation of the confession – Viddui – shines a bright light on this essential contradiction of our nature. On the one hand, Viddui is a singular manifestation of courage, creativity and spiritual and psychological strength. On the other, it is a powerful statement of self-defeat, a clear eyed recognition of the pathetic nature of human frailty, inferiority and unworthiness.
The ability to repent then, is not only at the core of our nature, but it is the singular endeavor by which we can yoke the two aspects of our nature in an enduring balance. Sincere and authentic repentance cannot exist but for the strength, ability and insight to accuse oneself not only of doing wrong but of possessing a nature that makes such failure inevitable. Viddui is an acknowledgement that our intentions and deeds are unworthy and tarnished, a shameful cry to Heaven that, “I have sinned.”
Repentance is a merciless and boundless expression of self-accusation. However, the irony – and beauty – of this admission of necessary failure is wholly dependent on our man’s unique spiritual capacity. Without our inherent holiness, self-accusation would not only be impossible, it would be a futile and frustrating expression. It is only when we are cognizant of freedom, that we can recognize guilt, fragility and temptation and then – and only then – contemplate genuine repentance.
Even if it were possible, the Viddui experience would be meaningless without both aspects of our duality. Praise and shame in equal parts. Regret and recognition. All useless. All futile. Unless… unless we simultaneously have faith in our sacredness; in our creativity and goodness; the aspects of our being which allow us to repent, to be renewed and reinvigorated.
It is irony. It is contradiction. It is an impossibility. It is the nexus of our being. It is what defines our humanity. And it causes us to wallow in our sin at the exact moment that it allows us to genuinely confess and embrace holiness. To live with this duality is to be human. To have one without the other is to live a life bereft of meaning.
Rav Soloveitchik Z’L derived these two inseparable elements of the repentance experience from the Viddui recitation of the Jew who apportions his Ma’ssrot during the fourth and seventh years of the Sh’mitta cycle. Such a Jew boasts that he has not violated not even one iota of the commandments; he has fulfilled the Mitzvah of Ma’ssrot to the letter.
“According to all your Commandments which You have commanded me: I have not transgressed any of Your commandments, neither have I forgotten. I have harkened to the voice of the Lord my God, I have done according to all that You have commanded me.”
Such statement in praise of a man extolling his virtues as a God-fearing and obedient servant is categorized by the Sages as a ‘confession?!’ How is it possible to ascribe ‘confession’ – a word which conjures up images of weakness and helplessness – to to a man elevated to the point of not having ‘transgressed any of Your commandments?’ the Rav Z’L asked. But, that is precisely the point. Only a person proud enough to announce that he has done “all that You have commanded,” is also to be expected to humbly submit and admit that he has “not done according to all that You have commanded.”
The one who possesses the insight and strength to do right likewise has the capability to know – and do – that which is not right. The ability to recognize success is a prerequisite to admission of failure. Both emanate from the same source; both lead to mutually exclusive conclusions, that is, the nullity of being and the greatness of being.
It is the nullity of being that leads directly to the Yom Kippur confession. The greatness of being leads to the Ma’ssrot confession. Both are rooted in our humanity, our humanness, created from earth’s dust in the image of God. There are moments, glimpses of holiness, when the two forms of confession can be integrated. The grace of human experience is that the greatness of being can, for fleeting moments of experience, for wisps of time, indeed overshadow the nullity of being.
One such moment was when the Klausenberg Rebbe Z’L addressed survivors from Hungary, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia in the Feldafin DP Camp on Kol Nidre night in 1945. In that moment, the greatness of being overpowered the nullity of being, despite the dire circumstances and the horror of the historical context, which might have led a “rational” thinker to see only the nullity of existence. Lieutenant Birnbaum reported that he “had never heard so powerful a speech and never will again. When he finished, more than two hours later, I was both emotionally drained and inspired for the best davening of my life.”
What did this great Rebbe, who himself had lost his wife and eleven children to the Nazis, say to those beaten and degraded humans still damned with the stench of the crematoria in their nostrils? What could he say in the presence of the millions of lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives and children?
The Rebbe stood with his Machzor in hand, calmly flipping through its pages. Periodically he would ask rhetorically, “Wher haht das geshriben – who wrote this? Does this apply to us? Are we guilty of the sin enumerated here?”
One by one, he went through each of the sins listed in the Ashamnu (we have become guilty) prayer and then the Al Chait and concluded, reasonably, that those transgressions had little to do with the experience of those who had managed to survive the camps.
Ashamnu. “Have we sinned against Hashem or man?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Dibarnu dofi. “We spoke no slander. Indeed, we didn’t speak at all. If we had any strength to speak, we saved it for the SS guards so that we could avoid punishment.”
Latznu. “But we were so serious in the camps. There was no scoffing; no such thing as smiling or making a joke.”
Moradnu. “Rebelled? Against whom should we have rebelled? The Nazis? If we had tried, it would have been our last rebellion. Who then? Hashem?”
And so, one by one, the Klausenberger dismissed each transgression and concluded with the Ashamnu prayer and turned his attention to the more detailed Al Chait. Once again, he concluded with the pride of one whose greatness of being supersedes the nullity of being; that the recitation of sins enumerated in Al Chait hardly applied to the minyan of Feldafig Block 5A.
Al Chait she’chatanu lifanecha b’ones uvreratzon – for the sins that we have sinned before You under duress and willingly – “We certainly did not observe the mitzvot in the camps because we were forced to.”
Bevili daas – for the sins that we have sinned without knowledge – “Our minds were in such a state that we did not have knowledge of anything.”
B’tipushus peh – for the sins that we have sinned with foolish speech – “That’s a gelechter (funny). Who spoke foolishly or lightheartedly in the situation we were in?”
B’yetzher hara – for the sin that we have sinned with the evil urge – “To sin with the yetzer hara you must first have possessions of your physical sense of touch. We were barely skin and bones, incapable of the delight of touching. The only thing we could feel were the corpses we carried out every morning. We heard only the commands of our guards. Our eyes looked only to see whether our guards were watching when we chanced to take a rest. Smell – yes, we had a sense of smell. Would that we didn’t! The stench of death filled our nostrils, making us sick. Taste – the only taste we knew was the thin soup they gave us so we could have enough strength for another day’s work. On these, I forget, we did have the yetzer hara for food, for the slop that we saw thrown to the pigs. What the SS officers would not eat they threw to the pigs.” He sighed. “How we envied the pigs.”
And so the Rebbe Z’L eliminated the Al Chaits one by one, emphasizing how not a single one of these transgressions applied to his broken and sad congregation.
In conclusion, he quietly brought the cover of the Machzor to a close.
Seeing the Rebbe close the Machzor, Lieutenant Birnbaum was certain the Rebbe was finished. But then the Rebbe asked once again his original question, “Who wrote this Machzor? I don’t see anywhere the sins that apply to us, the sins of losing emunah and bitachon (faith and trust in G-d)!
“Where is the proof that we have sinned in this fashion? How many times did we recite Krias Shema on our wood slats at night and think to ourselves: Ribbono shel Olam, please take my neshama, so that I do not have to repeat once again in the morning. ‘I’m thankful before You who has returned my soul to me.’ I do not need my soul. You can keep it. How many of us went to sleep thinking that we could not exist another day, with all bitachon lost? And yet when the dawn broke in the morning, we once again said Modeh Ani and thanked Hashem for having returned our souls.”
“None of us expected to survive. Every morning, we saw this one didn’t move and that one didn’t move, and as we carried the dead out we gazed upon them with envy. Is that emunah in Hashem? Is that bitachon in Hashem?
“So, yes, we have sinned. We have sinned and now we must klop al Chait. We must pray to get back the emunah and bitachon that lay dormant these years in the camps. Now that we are free, Ribbono shel Olam, we beg You to forgive us. Forgive everyone here. Forgive every Jew in the world.”
Rav Soloveitchik Z’L taught that every confession expresses itself in the outcry: “I am black, and I am beautiful, Oh daughter of Jerusalem.” For, when we fail to see the “beauty” we cannot hope to discern the “blackness.”
Genuine repentance demands that the sinner view himself from the seemingly two antithetical viewpoints, the two fundamental truths of his being – from the nullity of being and the greatness of being.
The Klausenberger Rebbe Z’L clearly saw both.
May He grant us the strength, courage, humility and wisdom to see both as well.
Shanah Tovah.
{Matzav.com}
