Yom Kippur Meditation: For the Sin of Running Away

Last week was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. At the center of the day is when we confess our sins and try to make good in front of God.

The sin I kept coming back to this year is taking people for granted. I don’t spend enough time with my friends and family, and I don’t see them or call them enough. Someone crosses my mind, I realize how long it’s been, and I feel a small drop in my stomach. For years my move was to get rid of that feeling as fast as I could, either by promising myself I’d reach out soon or by feeling bad enough that the bad feeling counted as a kind of payment.

In the afternoon we read the Book of Jonah, which is about exactly that kind of running. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn the city to change its ways, and Jonah runs the other way, onto a ship headed for Tarshish. A storm comes up, the sailors throw him overboard, and a great fish swallows him. He spends three days in its belly, and then the fish spits him out onto dry land and the word of God comes to him a second time. There are three ways to read it that line up with three ways of thinking about sin and forgiveness.

Many people read the fish as the punishment. You run, you get eaten, and the lesson is that you shouldn’t have run. When I was a kid I understood the confession the same way, as apologizing, literally. You do things wrong, you say you’re sorry, you feel bad about it, and feeling bad is what makes you do better the next time. You’ve got to apologize, right? The confession is called the Vidui, and it’s alphabetical, a line for every letter. So I’d stand there going down the alphabet, and every word on the list would find something I had done, because who hasn’t mocked or quarreled or scoffed, and I’d leave the service feeling that I never did anything right.

Later I read it as a story of forgiveness and getting out. The fish spits Jonah onto dry land, and the point is that he’s delivered. Last year I wrote about forgiveness. You confess, the slate is wiped clean, and you walk into the new year purified and ready to be a better person. That’s a real improvement on wallowing in shame, and I still believe it’s important.

But Maimonides, the twelfth-century rabbi and philosopher, has an image for what happens when forgiveness is all we’re after. Confessing without letting go of the sin, he says, is like immersing yourself in a ritual bath while still holding the dead lizard that made you impure, so you come up out of the water exactly as you went in. I walked out lighter, and I still hadn’t called anybody.

This year I think the story is about the time Jonah spends in the belly of the fish. Now I read the fish as a consequence. Jonah got on a boat away from the thing he was supposed to do, and the belly is where that lands you, the same way the drop in my stomach is where putting people off lands me. It’s also the only place in the story where he stops. He’s in the literal belly of the beast, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but think about what he did, and that’s where he prays and works out what he’ll do differently. This is what it feels like during Yom Kippur.

Maimonides has four steps for repentance. First, you stop doing the thing. Second, you regret it, charatah in Hebrew. Third, you resolve not to do it again. Fourth, you confess it out loud, which is the Vidui, the part I always thought was the whole of Yom Kippur. The regret is the part I’d been trying to get rid of, and it turns out to be the part the whole thing runs on. When the fish finally spits Jonah out, the word of God comes to him a second time, same instruction, same city, and this time he goes.

Sitting with it is worth doing because there are two ways to think about regret, one that looks at the past and one that looks at the future. Regret about the past is the things I keep turning over in my head and wish I’d done differently, and it isn’t very productive, because I can’t change them. Regret that looks at the future treats the same moments as lessons for moving forward, which I can actually use. Most of what I do, I do over and over again. Family dinner, a favor I do or don’t do, a difficult situation with my spouse, these come around all the time. If I learn what I wish I’d done better, I can do it next time.

Viktor Frankl may have said it best when he wrote, “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.” The belly of the whale isn’t a horrible place to be. It’s where you get to work out how to do it better, and the good news is that there’s always a next time.

So if you’re reading this and you know the drop in the stomach, shoot me a note and we can stop running from each other.