On Repentance and Repair

Our Unitarian Universalist Association has a Common Read program. Each year a book is selected for UUs all over to read, to discuss, to have as a shared reference point. The program started in 2010, when the first UUA Common Read was Margaret Regan, The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands.
2011-12: Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith, which makes the case for interfaith dialog to promote pluralism and facilitate justice.
2012-13: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
2013-14: Saru Jayaraman, Behind the Kitchen Door, which exposed the plight of restaurant workers.
2014-15: Paul Rasor, Reclaiming Prophetic Witness, in which Rasor, a leading UU theologian, makes the case for bring our liberal religion into the public square.
2015-16: Bryan Stephenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, addressed the injustice and racism of our criminal justice system.
2017-18: Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear.
For 2017-2018, for the first and only time we had two Common Reads: the Mitra Rahnema edited anthology, Centering: Navigating Race, Authenticity and Power in Ministry, and Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, Daring Democracy.
2018-19: The Manish Mishra-Marzetti and Jennifer Nordstrom edited anthology, Justice on Earth: People of Faith Working at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Environment.
2019-20: Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States.
2020-21: Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons.
The 2021-22 selection was Zach Norris, We Keep Us Safe: Building Secure, Just, and Inclusive Communities – which was re-titled for paperback release as Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment.
2022-23: Nancy Palmer-Jones and Karin Lin, Mistakes and Miracles: Congregations on the Road to Multiculturalism.

And that brings us to the 2023-24 selection, Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World. Fifteen books over 14 years. Eight of them, just over half, were published by our own Beacon Press, a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association that was founded back in 1854. Another four of them were published by Skinner House, an imprint of the UUA.

I caught on to the Common Read in its second year, back in 2011, when I was then serving our congregation in Gainesville, Florida, and I've read every one since then. I wanted to go through the full list today, out loud and before the community, because the exercise of saying its name brings back the memories of those memorable reads. Part of those memories is the group gatherings I was a part of in Gainesville, and in White Plains, New York, to grapple with other UUs about what we learned in the pages of those common reads.

Each book changed me. Each book brought a perspective and insights and passion that keeps coming back up for me. And to be a Unitarian Universalist means that we are connected with all other Unitarian Universalists, in a thousand UUA congregations across the US, and with sibling organizations in Canada and around the world. We share the principles and purposes and sources declared in the UUA bylaws; we sing out of the same hymnal -- and, since 2010, we’ve had these Common Reads to give Unitarian Universalists everywhere a shared experience.

The religious task, the spiritual project, is to be more fully alive, and more fully connected, to all of reality – all of the beauty and all of the tragedy. Our aim is to not be oblivious to the wonder, the awe, and beauty – nor to turn our backs on, to forget for a moment, the heartbreak, the loss, the grief, the pain. Our task is to hold vividly and simultaneously in our minds and hearts the full poignance and the interconnection of the beauty and the tragedy. Reality, I have said before, is never depressing. It sometimes hurts, but the more of reality we hold in consciousness, the more alive we are – and aliveness is not depression.

Many of our Common Reads have helped readers awaken their compassion, and that means being more fully alive. The 2023-24 Common Read – Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair – addresses many different ways that we humans wound one another. I’ll talk some this morning about the book, but you must read it. We will have a forum about this book on November 17, which gives you 7 weeks to beg, borrow, or buy the book and read it. Then come to the November 17 forum to share and hear each others’ thoughts. It’s important. For though Ruttenberg has some hard stories to tell, I don’t know if I have ever read a more hopeful book. We can repent. We can repair. We can apologize and forgive and be accountable and atone and make amends and heal and reconcile – and life can flourish. Sometimes we can even do so completely – make full amends and entirely reconcile. Often we cannot, but some sort of step in that direction can always be made.

It isn’t easy. It can’t be easy. If your gestures toward repentance and repair are easy, they won’t be transformative and won’t engage real accountability. As John Kennedy said of going to the moon, we do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Here we’re not talking about a moonshot, but about spiritual work, but still, being hard makes it worth doing. Wendell Berry’s poem “A Vision” is about repentance and repair of our relationship with the Earth, and it concludes describing the world we yet can make: “The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibilities.” It’s the hardship that makes it real.

The New Moon begins on Wednesday -- October 2nd -- and on the Jewish lunar calendar, this new moon signals the Jewish New Year: Rosh Hashanah. In Jewish tradition, the first 10 days of the New Year are Days of Repentance, culminating in Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement. That is, the tradition calls for starting each year by reflecting on the moral transgressions of the past year and sincerely repenting of that harm.

Jewish tradition distinguishes sins against God from sins against others. Sins against God would be things like idolatry, blasphemy, desecration of Shabbat, violating kosher laws, disregarding Jewish holidays, failure of gratitude for providence, and general neglect of reverence. Sins against others would be anything that hurt them or damaged the relationship. During this period of repentance, the sins against God are atoned for through confession, regret, promising not to repeat the error. Sins against others, though, can only be atoned for once the wrong has been made right, such as by paying restitution or receiving forgiveness from the victim and repairing the relationship insofar as possible before embarking on a new year. It's not enough to feel privately sorry and resolved to do better – you have to engage with the victim – except where engagement would only worsen the harm – and make things right insofar as that may be possible.

These are the High Holy days, the holiest days on the Jewish calendar – and they days dedicated to repentance. What a great idea. So with the 2024 high holy days beginning in three days, it’s a particularly apt time to be reading On Repentance and Repair – written by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, and drawing on the work of 12th-century Rabbi and philosopher, Moses Maimonides.

At various times in our life, we all cause harm, we’ve all been harmed, and we’ve been bystanders to harm. As Ruttenberg writes:

“We all cause harm sometimes. Maybe its intentional, a result of a calculated attempt to gain power, or from a place of anger or spit. Maybe it’s out of carelessness, or ignorance, a reaction to fear, or because we were overwhelmed and dropped some balls. May it’s because we were acting out of our own broken places or trauma, or because, in our attempt to protect some interests, we ran roughshod over others. Maybe it’s because our smaller role in a larger system puts us in the position of perpetuating hurt or injustice. Maybe it’s for one of a myriad of other reasons, or a combination of them. We have all been harmed. We all nurse stories about the tender places where we have been bumped, cut, battered by others – by people, institutions, or systems. Sometimes, maybe, we have managed to heal completely; sometimes a scar is left behind. Other places still ache now and again. Some injuries may hinder us from being able to do things that we once could, or even cause immeasurable, even irreparable damage – to ourselves, our families, our communities, or our heritage. We also are all bystanders to harm. We read about it in the news, debate it on social media, decide when to speak up about it at work or to a family member, and witness social structures that do not deliver on ideals of equity, respect, and justice.”

Causing harm, and being a bystander witness to harm imposes some moral obligations, argues Ruttenberg. Being harmed doesn’t so much impose an obligation, but the work of healing is to see how open you can be to what the prospect of healing might entail, even if the answer is not very much. It’s often hard to hear the message that we have caused harm. There’s a tendency for the one charged with causing a harm to claim, “but I didn’t mean any harm.” In response, the slogan has emerged, “it’s not the intent, it’s the impact that matters.” The phrase goes back at least to Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 paper, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” The phrase started catching on among leaders of feminist and race relations discourse, emphasizing the importance of considering the effects of actions on marginalized groups. For instance, works by bell hooks in the 1990s were regularly framed in terms of intention vs. impact. In the early 2000s, the phrase gained traction in social justice and anti-oppression movements, particularly in academic and activist circles. In the 2010s, with the rise of social media, declarations that it’s the impact, not the intent, that matters became more widespread, especially in discussions about what, for many of us, were then new concepts: microaggressions, cultural appropriation, call-out culture.

There is, in fact, a much older concept in law and morality that captures what this is all about, and that is negligence. If you have a swimming pool in your back yard, and you don’t put a fence around it, and the neighbor kid drowns in your pool, you have been negligent, and you are at fault. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to harm the child. Similarly, if you say something misogynist or racist, though you may not be in any legal trouble, you are morally negligent. You may not have intended any harm – indeed, you may not have known that what you were saying was misogynist or racist -- but you should have known. We all have an obligation to learn about what is harmful, to know what will give offense, and you’re negligent if you fail to do so.

In any case, whether we talk in terms of negligence, or in terms of impact vs. intent, the point is: you are not off the hook just because you didn’t mean any harm. Actual malice, as the lawyers say, may increase your liability, but absence of malice doesn’t mean you aren’t culpable – and that’s a moral principle as well as a legal one. We are obligated to not do harm – not merely to not intend harm – and that means we have a responsibility to stay current on the public discourse that brings to light what sorts of words and actions are likely to hurt someone.

Yes, it’s true that even if one is as current as possible, one may still blunder. When that happens, apologize. Learn from the mistake. Make amends if you can, and try sincerely not to do it again. Ruttenberg urges us to take up the work of finding our way back from harm we have done. She writes,

“I want, more than anything, to show you, to show everyone, that this work is not impossible to do, but it is work, and it can be done (though we must not be too generous with participation trophies or cookies for people doing the bare minimum).”

She then turns to Maimonides for the basic 5-step scheme of how the work needs to go.

Step One: naming and owning the harm.

In other words, fess up. A sentence or two suffices. Rutterberg’s examples:

“It wasn’t OK that I told that joke in the staff meeting. I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I understand it was pretty transphobic.”
“I have a confession to make. I know everybody’s been trying to figure out who ran over Simon’s cat. I feel horrible. It was me.”
“I need to admit that I overcharged customers and pocketed the difference. Four have come forward, but the truth is, there are more.”
“I know I told you all I was sick last weekend and that’s why I couldn’t come help out. But actually I went away with my girlfriend.”
“Our organization continued to solicit the donor even after we found out that his money was obtained through criminal means and the donor hasn’t been held accountable for that.”
“Our state has, for centuries, and is even now continuing to violate treaties with the Sioux Nation. Our possession of this land and our development of it constitute theft.”

There is much in our culture that teaches us to protect ourselves, be defensive, shift blame, minimize the problem, focus on how good our intentions were, or just put off an uncomfortable conversation to another day. A direct confession – naming and owning the harm that was done – sweeps away all of that obfuscation, so that is step one.

Step Two: Starting to Change – making yourself into a person that can to be relied upon to not again commit that sort of harm.

Ruttenberg says,

“The work of transformation might include tearful grappling with one’s behavior in prayer, meditation, or some other practice; making financial sacrifices that have meaningful impact both on one’s own wallet and the world; changing one’s self-conception and self-identity in appropriate ways; putting oneself in new situations both to consciously avoid the opportunity to cause harm and perhaps to experience what it’s like to not have control or power – someplace where one might get some practice in the virtue of humility. These days this process of change might also involve therapy, or rehab, or educating oneself rigorous on an issue..... The goal here isn’t merely making amends. It’s transformation.” (33-4)

Step Three: Restitution and Accepting Consequences.

Because: “Repair work isn’t really repair if the only thing that’s changed is the perpetrator.” Yet, “a person who caused harm (even unwittingly! Even with the best of intentions!) will be better positioned to truly make amends after they have gone off to do some of the work” of steps 1 and 2. (37)

Step Four: Apology.

Sometimes the steps may take a while, and you don’t have to have fully completed one step before beginning another. At some point when you’re well into step two, transforming yourself, and have begun the process of restitution and amends and accepting the just consequences of what you’ve done, it matters that you say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness. If nothing else, you’re showing that it matters to you what ongoing feelings the person you hurt is having -- letting them know that, whether or not you ever return to their good graces, you do want to.

An apology “demands a sincere offering of regret and sorrow for one’s actions. It requires understanding when approaching a victim might harm them further and navigating that with sensitivity.” (41-2) It certainly is NOT “I’m sorry that you were hurt by this perfectly reasonable thing that I did.”

The victim’s needs are at the center, and that might be complicated. If it’s not possible to approach the victim without inflicting more hurt, then don’t approach. The victim may have died, or be unable to forgive. The specific context will indicate the most that can be done by way of apology. The main thing is that we understand it’s not about checking off necessary boxes or seeking an outcome that benefits us, but is a natural outgrowth of repentance work we’ve been doing all along.

Finally, step five, making different choices.

When faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm in the future, we make a better choice. That choice should happen naturally because the person making it is a changed person in the ways that matter.

There’s a lot more to understand about forgiveness and its role in healing, about atonement, about repentance in personal relationships versus harm in the public square, about how institutions and nations can repent, about how the needs of healing are and are not served by our justice system. I look forward to your taking in what Ruttenberg has to offer about that, and the riveting stories she shares by way of illustration. And I’ll see you on November 17 to talk about that.

In the meantime, Shana Tova – happy new year.