1

Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5773 Rabbi Rachel Grant Meyer Congregation Rodeph Sholom New York, NY

Anger: The Inner Teacher

On a spring evening in April of 2011, Milad Golmakani, a 22-year old young man from England, was enjoying a game of football outside with a friend. At the same time, in a neighborhood across town, another group of young men loaded themselves into a taxicab with a monstrous plan in mind. They traveled to the field where Milad was playing and carried out a deadly stabbing attack. While his friend was able to flee to a local shop to seek help, Milad was not as lucky and succumbed to his wounds more than a dozen stab wounds to the neck and back. The boys stabbed Milad so hard in the back that they punctured one of his lungs. At the trial of Milads killers, his mother, Fatemah Golmakani suffered a heart attack upon hearing the graphic details of her sons brutal murder.

Less than a year later, though, rather than harboring resentment and hatred in her heart for the young men who took her son away from her, Fatemah has chosen a different path. Fatemah has decided to start a charity for at-risk teens, giving them safe spaces, tutoring in school, and career advisors. Having immigrated from Iran to London when her son was just a little boy, though, Fatemah does not come from a wealthy background. And so what money will Fatemah use to start her charity? She will use the money from the proceeds she earns selling her diamond earrings, her watch, and a chandelier that has been in her family for more than 200 years. Why the sacrifice, why the generosity? Milads killing happened due to increased gang violence in the town where he lived, and Fatemah believes that her sons killers were just as vulnerable as he was. She believes that, with better supervision and a safe place to go, other teens in trouble may be prevented from committing crimes that will not only take the lives of others but also ruin their own lives. 1 But it is not just future killers that Fatemah wants to help; it is her own sons killers. Fatemah writes that she wants to be able to replace their knives and guns with flowers . . . to bring their humanity back even if [her] son is gone. And, yet, Fatemah does not condone the actions of her sons killers, she does not brush them under the rug. She just seeks to find the glimmer of humanity in these young men and, when she cannot see it, she hopes to bring it out. She wants to hug them and kiss them and hold their hands and tell them that someone loves them.2 Maybe if I hug or kiss [them], it will wake them up, Fatemah says. She describes this charity as a present to the killers. She hopes the charity will send her sons killers the message that, Hey, youve ruined your lives and mine and my sons, but, if nothing else, heres this to help others like you and to help you.3
1 2

See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/23/a-mothers-forgiveness_n_1540108.html?ref=good-news. See http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2012/may/mother-knife-victim-milad-golmakani-says-she-wantshug-and-kiss-my-son%E2%80%99s-killers-say-s. 3 See http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mum-of-knife-victim-plans-to-sell-844368.

Fatemahs is an incredible almost unbelievable story: a story of inconceivable bravery and self-sacrifice. It is a story that raises a question we find ourselves asking during this season of repentance and forgiveness: is there anything that is unforgiveable? Surely, Fatemahs story is exceptional both in the gravity of her loss and the depth of her ability to forgive. But what about situations that do not involve such atrocities as murder? What about the spouse who cheats? What about the parent who cuts us out of his or her will? What about the searing mean words lobbed at us by a loved one during a fight? What about the party we are not invited to, the hello never uttered, the snub in the elevator?

Take the story of Anne, a woman married to her husband, Brian, for 18 years. Anne considered herself happily married; she loved and adored her husband and considered him not only her great love but also her best friend. She saw no problems in her marriage, no warning signs that anything bad might happen in her relationship. Having shared years of memories and holidays, she assumed they would continue happily building their life together. And then one night her husband returned home and, with one sentence, he changed her life completely. In less than a minute with the utterance of this one sentence, he caused her unimaginable hurt. Anne, Ive been seeing someone else, he said. With those six words, Anne was overcome with pain so intense that words could not begin to describe it. Anne recalls that the pain was not only emotional but also physical her whole being responded with aching. After two weeks apart, Brian returned home having decided he would leave the other woman he had been seeing and stay with Anne. His apology was less than enthusiastic: I guess Im home, he said no apology on bent knee, no begging, no flowers, as Anne had expected. But it was an apology nonetheless, an apology that opened the door to forgiveness. From that incredibly broken place, Anne and Brian began to put their marriage back together. Though Anne describes her marriage as one in which she is happier than ever, she also acknowledges that she remembers the affair, remembers everything that happened in those days very clearly, even though she no longer attaches pain to the memory.4 Annes is a story we may be able to relate to a story of love betrayed and forgiveness asked for and granted. But what about the more common hurts in our lives, the stories of immense hurt in which there is no apology given and in which the offending party sometimes does not even acknowledge the pain he or she has caused? What about the times we are not even wrestling with whether or not to forgive when we are just left blindsided and angry? Take the story of Barbara,5 a loving mother and wife, who became estranged from her father as an adult and eventually disowned by her father altogether. During her lifetime, her father, who was famous in certain circles, would refer in interviews to his two children, denying Barbaras very existence. There were myriad other hurts that happened, but the worst came upon his death. At the same time that Barbara learned of her fathers death, she also learned that he had battled chronic Leukemia for three years. She never even knew because nobody had told her. More painful, though, was the fact that news of her fathers death had reached the radio, the TV, and
4 5

See http://www.beyondaffairs.com/About_Us/my_personal_story.htm. Name made up the source of this story is an anonymous blog (see: http://www.disownedchild.com/disowned/)

the web before it had reached her. And perhaps most painful of all was his obituary: an obituary that did not list her as a survivor. Barbara later learned this was an intentional omission, an omission requested by her stepmother, but Barbara had questions. Was this really her fathers dying wish? Did he really never think of her again after he disowned her? Or could he simply not escape the cycle of how hed learned to deal with pain burying it deep inside himself? With her father gone, though, Barbara was left to sit with these unanswered questions. She never got the chance to address her immense pain with her father, and, with so many years of estrangement between them, still cannot bring herself to reach out to her brothers and sisters. For Barbara, the pain of being disowned continues to feel shocking and raw each day and without the hope of resolution in sight. So, what can Barbara do? Are her fathers actions or inactions forgivable? Should Barbara forgive her father? Can she forgive her father? Must she?

We know from our own experience and from following the headlines over the last couple of years that everyone has something to say about whether or not certain actions should be forgiven. On several occasions, when politicians have been unfaithful to their wives, the world has pointed a long, judgmental finger not just at the husbands, but also at the wives who have decided to remain married to their husbands, to forgive and work past the infidelity. Certainly, I could give an entire sermon about being judgmental of other peoples decisions. But, for today, that is not our question. And Ill spare you the double feature.

So, back to the question at hand: are there offenses that are simply unforgivable? Are there situations in which one person may be justified in refusing to forgive and another can be equally justified in granting forgiveness? When we have not even reached the point of thinking about forgiveness, what do we do with the hurt that others cause us with the anger that can consume us? Perhaps the answer to this question varies from person to person. Perhaps we have to accept that there may be a difference between what the rest of the world says we should do and what we feel we are capable of doing.

According to Christian tradition, the answer does not vary from person to person. Anyone who is wronged is encouraged to grant forgiveness in every situation in which he or she is hurt. This derives from the idea that, because everyone is a sinner, one should forgive the sins of others as an acknowledgement of ones own personal imperfection. In certain situations, a priest can grant a person absolution without requiring that the person actually apologize for the wrongdoing. Additionally, the one who forgives an offender who has not expressed remorse is considered particularly virtuous and the one who cannot grant forgiveness is considered a sinner.6

At first, our own High Holy Day liturgy seems to set a similarly stark requirement that we forgive. We read: I hereby forgive all who have hurt me, all who have wronged me, whether
6

Susan Lamb, Individual and Civic Notions of Forgiveness, http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/articles/lamb.html.

deliberately or inadvertently, whether by word or by deed. May no one be punished on my account.7 With these words, then, we grant forgiveness to all those who have done us wrong the liturgy does not specify the degree of egregiousness of the offense committed. The liturgy simply says that we forgive. WE say that we forgive. Is this realistic, though? Do we forgive anyone for anything? Isnt there a difference between a person who commits an offense and goes through a process of repentance and reparation and a person who never apologizes or, worse still, repeats the offense? The liturgy understands these complications and does add a caveat from the Mishnah: For transgressions against God, the Day of Atonement atones; but for transgressions of one human being against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they have made peace with one another, we read.8 Here, we come to understand that transgressions that happen between human beings can be forgiven completely only when the offending party comes to ask for forgiveness, and even then, we are only strongly encouraged to forgive, not categorically required. We do not have to pre-emptively forgive others. And, when we do not pre-emptively forgive others, we are not considered sinners, only human beings. Is our forgiveness really so important, though? Will anything really happen if we dont forgive or, conversely, if we do? Indeed, the rabbis suggest, our actions are so powerful that they have the ability to move God from the throne of justice to the throne of mercy. A midrash form Pesikhta de-Rav Kahana teaches that, though God ascends to the throne of strict justice with the New Year, when the shofar is sounded by the community of Israel, God rises from the throne of judgment and takes a seat on the throne of mercy. God is filled with mercy for the children of Israel and for them turns the measure of justice into the measure of mercy.9 From this we learn to emulate Gods ability to move from judgment to compassion. We see a picture of this merciful God painted in the Kol Nidrei liturgy when we read the verse from the Book of Numbers: Vayomer Adonai: salachti kidvarecha And God said: I have pardoned in response to your plea.10 This may lead us to ask ourselves: if God can forgive, cant we?

But how many times do those who hurt us really come to ask for an apology? How many times do the hurts in our lives remain unresolved like Barbaras hurt? Asked differently, what does the process of teshuvah of repentance and forgiveness entail? Does it always involve an apology asked for and pardon granted? It is easy during these Days of Awe, as we sit in worship and hear words like sin and forgiveness and repentance, to feel that it does not apply to us and to our lives. But we all experience feelings of resentment and anger towards others sometimes anger that sits immediately at the surface, consuming our every moment and, other times, anger that becomes deeply buried, anger we are not even conscious of from moment to moment and, yet, that still causes us emotional harm in the long run. Do we really need to hold on to these
7 8

See Gates of Repentance, 324. ibid AND Mishnah Yoma 8:9. 9 Jacob Neusner, A Theological Commentary to the Midrash: Pesiqta deRab Kahana (Lanham, MD: University of America Press, 2001), 221. 10 See Gates of Repentance, 253.

feelings of anger until someone comes to us? Why not spend this season trying to identify where our feelings of anger, resentment, or hurt towards others come from and what we need to do to release ourselves from their bonds?

Rabbi Harold Kushner tells the story of his interaction with a congregant in need of emotional release. He writes: A woman in my congregation comes to see me. She is a single mother, divorced, working to support herself and three young children. She says to me, Since my husband walked out on us, every month is a struggle to pay our bills. I have to tell my kids we have no money to go to the movies, while hes living it up with his new wife in another state. How can you tell me to forgive him? I answer her, Im not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable. It wasnt; it was mean and selfish. Im asking you to forgive him because he doesnt deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter, angry [person]. Id like to see him out of your life emotionally as completely as he is out of it physically, but you keep holding on to him. Youre not hurting him by holding on to that resentment, but you are hurting yourself.11 Like Anne, this congregant has suffered the hurt of infidelity, but, like Barbara, she has not been given an apology and cannot see past her understandable and intense anger. But Rabbi Kushner encourages her to find a way to reconcile herself to her present situation, to give up the hope that the past could have been any different than it was and to move forward by trying to release herself from the burden of her anger. Rabbi Kushner explains the reasoning behind his advice clearly: Forgiving is not something we do for another person. . . . It represents a letting go of the sense of grievance, and perhaps most importantly a letting go of the role of victim.12

Rabbi Kushner speaks truth to the idea that we have to find a way to reconcile ourselves to the hurts that have happened in our lives because, if we do not, our anger will destroy us. We have to find a way to release ourselves from the bonds of resentment and sadness because these emotions have the power to destroy, to consume our whole being, to take us down completely. This does not mean that life snaps back to normal. This does not mean that we condone the actions of the offender or that the person is someone we want to have in our life. This only means that we address what holding on to the hurt is doing to us and figure out a way to release ourselves before we can no longer do so before the chasms between us and those we have loved become so deep and long-standing that we can barely remember the source of the hurt at all and all we are left with is inexplicable pain and suffering. These ten days the days that begin now and culminate with Yom Kippur can be a period of transformation for us. Rabbi Alan Lew teaches that:

11 12

See Harold Kushner in Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 186. ibid.

For ten days, the gates are open and the world is fluid. We are finally awake, if only in fits and starts, if only to toss and turn. For ten days, transformation is within our grasp. For ten days, we can imagine ourselves not as fixed and immutable beings, but rather as a limitless field upon which qualities and impulses rise up and fall away again like waves on the sea. Some of these impulses rise up with particular intensity. We may even experience them as afflictions, but they can be the keys to our transformation. Their intensity points to the disequilibrium . . . in us that is in need of transformation.13 Thus, we have the ability to rise up out of our anger, to let that anger be transformative, rather than inhibiting. We have the ability to wrestle with our anger and ultimately to free ourselves from the affliction it causes to our soul. My most favorite piece of our liturgy, which comes from the Book of Lamentations and which we recite as we return to the Torah to the ark, suggests that we can reclaim a sense of calm, that we can return to a place of equilibrium. As we place the Torah in the ark, we sing: Hashiveinu Adonai elecha vnashuva Help us to return to You, O God, then truly shall we return.14 When the road out of our pain seems long and without a clear path, we can trust in our ability to become renewed and refreshed. When we develop our relationship with God, we can shed the base feelings that hold us back from spiritual fulfillment and peace. This does not have to happen in an instant, though this month of teshuvah is not the only month we have to engage in this sacred work of repairing and nourishing our souls, but it does have to happen before we become tortured by the negative feelings we carry around. To be sure, this is not easy work; it can be excruciatingly difficult. For many of us, letting go is the absolute hardest thing we will have to do. It is much easier to sit in our anger. Sometimes it is easier to feel and act on our pain. Sometimes the pain even starts to feel good. But, when we start to think its more important that we be right and no longer truly feel the sadness, we run the risk of becoming angry to the point of self-righteousness. We fail to acknowledge that there is another side to every story. This is a particular risk in situations where we have not confronted the person we feel has wronged us to find out whether he or she even knows what happened, and, if so, knows how much it hurt us. Think of the person who bemoans his out-of-town siblings for not having come to visit enough when their mom was sick, while those same siblings sit at home thinking their brother takes up too much of their mothers time when they do come and feeling excluded from decisions about her care. Think of the person who refuses to talk to her sister because, when their mom passed away, her sister got the brooch she had been coveting for years. Does it really matter who got the brooch? How much does it ultimately matter who is right and who is wrong when sticking to our guns leads to a lifetime of animosity or, worse still, estrangement? We are the ones who ultimately have control over our pain and what we do with it.

Taking a step back, we may even be able to attach ourselves to a feeling of awe and wonder that we are able to make judgments and grant forgiveness at all. We are, after all, the only creatures
13 14

Rabbi Alan Lew, This Is Real and You are Totally Unprepared (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 151. See Mishkan Tefilah for Shabbat, 256.

on earth aside from God with such tremendous control. God imbued humanity with the power to create, making us Gods partners in creation. We are essential partners. In a midrash in Genesis Rabbah on the creation story, we learn that, when God announced the plan to create human beings, the angels argued with God. While some supported the decision, others explicitly asked God NOT to create human beings. The angels of Truth said, Let humans not be created because they are compounded of falsehood. The angels of Peace said, Let humans not be created, because they are full of strife. Then, as the angels bickered, God created the first human being and pronounced him good. When God finished, God turned to the angels and said, Why do you bicker? I have already created a human being.15 In this midrash, we see that God chooses the earthly realm over the heavenly realm; God categorically rejects the advice of the ministering angels. God feels that humanitys existence is more important than pleasing the Divine servants. Why does God overrule even the angels? Because God needs us. God put Divine trust in us to take control over our lives for our sake, for Gods sake, and for the sake of the world. We are the only creatures who can decide whether the actions of another will destroy us or impel us to another place. Perhaps that is the real message of these High Holy Days: that, though we are not immortal or all-powerful, we have the chance to emulate the Divine in the way we relate to other people. In particular, during this season, we have the opportunity to concentrate on emulating a merciful God by being merciful towards others and merciful towards ourselves as we release ourselves from the damaging effects of our negative feelings. The rabbis taught: Adam nikar bshlosha devarim: a man is judged by three things : bkiso, bkoso, uvkaso by his pocket, by his cup, and by his anger.16 In other words, we are judged by the extent of our generosity, by that which nourishes our soul, and by how easily and how much we anger.17 When we become indignant and self-righteous, we fail to live up to our greatest potential, to be as upstanding a citizen as we can be. As we celebrate the New Year and move towards the Day of Judgment, let us not be judged poorly because we were unable to see past our anger, unable to let go. When we say the words, May the new year be a good year for us, may we truly seek to embrace the good in our lives over the bad. May we forgive in others what we forgive in ourselves. May we value our relationships over our need to be right. May we fill the spaces in our soul that anger has occupied with abundant and sincere love. And may we walk unburdened towards the Gates of Repentance, free from that which holds us back. Shanah tova. Happy New Year.

15 16

H. Freedman, Midrash Rabbah Genesis: Volume I (New York: Soncino Press, 1983), 58. Midrash Tanhuma, Korach 12. 17 Translation from Rabbi Joshua Davidson (http://www.bethelnw.org/uploadedFiles/5767_A%20Person%20is%20Known%20by%20Three%20Things%20%20Rosh%20Hashanah%20Morning.pdf).