by Rabbi Mark Glickman

On Apology

Yom Kippur Morning Sermon
Temple B’nai Tikvah
5780/2019

Rabbi Mark Glickman

Today, on this holy occasion, and in this holy place, I’d like for us to spend some time thinking about Jerry Springer. 

For those of you not blessed to be acquainted with this man’s oeuvre, from 1991 to 2018, Jerry Springer was the host of a syndicated tabloid talk show on TV, featuring episodes with such memorable titles as “I Faked My Pregnancy,” “Out of Control Catfights,” “Twin Brother Betrayal,” and about 4,000 others that would be inappropriate for me to mention from the bimah.

Jerry Springer will long be known and remembered for his TV show, but that’s not all he was ever known for. He was born in England in 1944 to two Holocaust refugees, and at the age of four, he moved to the United States. He grew up in New York, went to Law School at Northwestern University, and as a young man, he worked as a political advisor to Robert Kennedy. After Kennedy was assassinated, he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he began working as a lawyer. Soon, Jerry Springer got involved in politics, and in 1971, he was elected to the Cincinnati City Council. His career went well until, in 1974, Springer chose to spend some time with a woman he shouldn’t have spent any time with…and he paid her with a check. (Watch 1981 Jerry Springer Mayor of Cincinnati Interview.)

He got caught, he publicly confessed to what he had done, he apologized, he resigned from the city council, and by all accounts, his political career was over. 

Except, it wasn’t. Because then a remarkable thing happened. Springer kept on talking about his misstep. He fully was open about it; he acknowledged that what he had done was wrong, and he owned up to the pain he had caused. The following year, in 1975, he ran for election to reclaim his council seat, and he won. And then, two years after that, Jerry Springer became the mayor of Cincinnati. Politics are usually complicated of course, and there were many factors that contributed to Springer’s comeback. But at some profound level, his redemption was rooted in the fact that the Cincinnati community appreciated Jerry Springer’s honesty and what was, by all accounts, the sincerity of his apology. By the time I moved to Cincinnati for rabbinical school in the mid-80s, Jerry Springer was doing a nightly news commentary – liberally minded, thoughtful, and a far cry from his later TV show. 

Say what you will about his dumb and often offensive TV show, the political biography of Jerry Springer in the 70s and 80s is, at least in part, the story of the power of genuine apology. And genuine apology is particularly important these days because there’s so little of it. Some people try to apologize – at least ostensibly – but so often their attempts to apologize are, shall we say, sorry affairs. 

A famous actress explains a racist tweet by saying she posted it because she was on Ambien at the time. A major Hollywood producer responds to hundreds of harassment charges with “I so respect all women and regret what happened.” One of the most powerful leaders in the world brags of assaulting women, and, when called to task, says, “I’m not proud of it, but this is locker room talk.” The list of half-hearted, disingenuous statements passed off as apologies could keep us here all day. 

Part of the problem with apologies is that the English language doesn’t always serve us very well here. In English, you see, the term “I’m sorry,” can mean one of at least two things – it can refer to regret, or apology. If, for example, I were to say, “I’m sorry your grandmother died,” I probably wouldn’t have intended that statement to be an apology for your grandmother’s death (unless I killed her, I suppose) – no, it would have been a statement of regret. It means that I’m unhappy that grandma died, that I feel for you, that my heart is with you. It’s a statement of sympathy rather than apology. And conversely, if I were to say “I’m sorry for bashing up your car,” that’s a statement of apology. It’s not that I sympathize with you because your car is damaged. No, here, I’m owning up to my own responsibility for the harm I inflicted on you.

This duality of meaning – the fact that “I’m sorry” can mean either “I sympathize” or “I apologize” – provides a huge opportunity for people who want to weasel out of genuine apology. For someone who has done something wrong, and who wants people to think that they’re truly repentant when they’re actually not, this is pure gold. It allows them to make a statement of regret and dress it up to look like a heartfelt apology. 

They say, “I’m sorry if I insulted you,” which might sound like an apology, but it really says “It’s too bad that you’re so thin-skinned as to be hurt by my innocuous comment.” They say, “I’m sorry, but when you said you like disco, I couldn’t help but call you an idiot,” when they really mean, “Don’t blame me – you’re the one who likes disco.” They say, “I’m sorry you were hurt when I said that dress looked a little tight,” when they really mean “My, my…we’re getting a little sensitive about our weight, aren’t we?”

Let’s be clear, the world “if” has no place in apologies. When someone says, “I’m sorry if…,” then they’ve made their statement conditional, and subtly put the blame of the conflict on you. Chances are that it’s not a sincere apology. Similarly, the word “but” rarely belongs in apologies, either. When a person says “I’m sorry, but…” then they’re probably trying to excuse their behavior, and chances are that it’s not a sincere apology. The same is the case with the word “you.” When someone says, “I’m sorry you…” then in all likelihood, they’re passing the blame for what they did from them to you, and chances are that it’s not a sincere apology. 

There are a lot of bad apologies out there, but what makes for a good apology? Well, rabbis throughout the ages have struggled with this question, and they’ve taught us a great deal of insight and wisdom as to how to say I’m sorry in a way that really counts. I’ve studied these lists, and I’ve been able to distill much of their teaching down to three requirements – three traits that an apology must have if it’s to be a good one. Conveniently, each of them begins with an R. 

The first R that a good apology demands is responsibility – you have to take responsibility for what it is that you did wrong. You have to not only own up to the fact that you fell short, but you also need to acknowledge exactly what it is that you did. That’s why every good apology needs to begin with the apologizer saying something to the effect of “I’m sorry that I _____.” Not “I’m sorry if…”; not “I’m sorry but…”; not “I’m sorry you…,” but “I’m sorry that I…” and then fill in the blank.  In other words, you need to own up to your own responsibility for your misdeed. You need to be concrete about what you did wrong, you need to be specific, and you need do so without making any excuses. 

Don’t say, “I’m sorry if what I said about that dress making you look fat hurt you.” Say instead, “I’m sorry I made that comment. It was insensitive and wrong, and I shouldn’t have said it.” Don’t say, “I’m sorry I betrayed your confidence, but I just got a little carried away.” Say instead, “I’m sorry I betrayed your confidence. Period. You trusted me, and I should have honored your trust.” Don’t say, “I’m sorry you were offended at my off-color joke.” Say instead, “I’m sorry I told an inappropriate joke.” 

Own up specifically to your misdeeds, and your apologies can really count.

At this time of year on social media, I see a lot of posts – sometimes even from rabbinic colleagues of mine – saying things like “To anyone I’ve knowingly or unknowingly wronged during the past year, I apologize.” Let me be clear – I’m not going to say that or anything like it to you. Instead what I’ll say is this: “If I’ve done anything hurtful to you during the past year – or even before that, I suppose – please tell me about it. It might be that you misinterpreted something I did, or that we had some sort of a communication glitch, or that you’re simply being a ridiculous kvetcher, in which case you’re not going to get any kind of an apology from me at all. But it could be that I really did do something wrong, and in that case, I’ll do everything I can to offer you the genuine apology that you deserve. But I can’t apologize for something I don’t know I did, and for me to offer you a blanket apology for something I might have done, without acknowledging the specific wrongdoing for which I’m offering it would be worthless and meaningless.” 

Apologies need to take responsibility for specific wrongdoings, and they need to do so without excuses.

The second R of a good apology is recognition – recognition of the harm that your misdeed caused. What’s wrong with responding to the release of recordings in which you brag of assaulting women by saying “I’m sorry, it was just locker room talk”? Yes, at one level you apologized, I suppose, but the way you did so was dismissive of the harm that your behavior caused. The fact is that countless women have been victimized by such groping and unwelcome advances, and that each such act has a way of creating horrible pain, some of it irreparable. To apologize for such acts – to really apologize – demands that you recognize and acknowledge this harm. You need to give voice to it, to show that you understand the depth of the injury you caused. And to refrain from doing so is to invalidate your apology.

Imagine a person saying, “Yes, it was me who pushed your husband off the bridge into the raging waters below. [Shrug] Sorry.” Or “By the way, honey, I’ve been having an affair with your best friend for the past two years, and I apologize. Wanna out to dinner?” Or “Yes, I’ll admit it, I embezzled the money and persuaded the boss it was you. Now can we be done with this?”  None of those apologies works, because apology demands empathy. It demands that we show ourselves to be sensitive, and aware of the damage our misdeeds do. Only when accompanied by such a recognition can our apology work.

Finally comes the third R of a genuine apology – restitution.  Once you’ve owned up to your responsibility for what you’ve done, and once you’ve shown that you recognized the harm you’ve caused, then you need to offer to make the victim of your misdeed whole again – you need to compensate them for the damage. Sometimes, such compensation is easy. If I spill wine on your clothes, I need to get those garments cleaned or replace them. If I drive my car into your garage door, I need to get the door fixed. If I sell you a faulty object, I need to replace it.

But of course, sometimes it’s not so easy. What if I break a confidence with you? What if we’re joking around, and, without thinking, I say something really hurtful to you? What if I do something so horrible to you that I couldn’t ever adequately compensate you for what I’ve done?

In these cases, it’s never easy to calculate fair compensation. But even when it’s complicated, the wrongdoer needs to try to figure out how to do right by the victim of his or her offense.  There are couples, for example, whose relationships successfully recover from horrible infidelities, and while the recipe for the recovery of those relationships always has many ingredients, one of the most important is a willingness on the part of the adulterer to make things right. Can you ever heal a relationship after you’ve said something hurtful to the other person? Yes, you can. It’s not always easy, and sometimes it takes time, but when you’re willing to do right by that person, the healing is always possible; redemption can happen.

Remember, compensating our victims – paying them for the damage we cause – is one of the most important steps in teshuvah, repentance. And Judaism says that teshuvah is possible for just about every sin we commit, even for some of the really bad ones. 

Think about the awesome nature of what Jerry Springer was able to do. He took a career in shambles, and, with the heartfelt recitation of what was effectively two words – I’m sorry – he recovered it, becoming (for better or for worse) a very successful person as a result. Redemption is possible; healing can happen; repair is achievable – even amidst the wreckage we often make of our lives. 

All we need to do is apologize and apologize well. Doing so isn’t always easy, but when we succeed, then just think of all the great things we can accomplish.

 

Shanah Tovah

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 by Rabbi Mark Glickman

The Real Real Thing: Judaism and the Messiah

Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon
September 20, 2017 – 1 Tishri, 5778

If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember it well. Or to be more precise, if you are old enough to have been watching television by 1971, you’ll remember it like it was just yesterday. Your TV screen fills with an image of a beautiful, fresh-faced young woman with blonde hair and dreamy blue eyes. She sings,

I’d like to buy the world a home,
And furnish it with love.
Grow apple trees and honey bees
And snow white turtledoves.

The camera pulls back, and we see that there are other good-looking young people standing there, too. They’re from all over the world. There are Asians, and Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Europeans. Each is dressed in native garb, each is holding a bottle of Coca Cola, and each joins in as the song continues.

I’d like to teach the world to sing,
In perfect harmony.
I’d like to buy the world a Coke,
And keep it company.

“Coke is the real thing,” the song tells us, and we now see an aerial shot of hundreds of young people standing in formation on a hillside in Italy, singing to us about love and harmony, honey bees, turtledoves, and Coca Cola. [Watch the original video remastered.]

The ad caught on like crazy. The song – without the reference to Coke – soon hit the charts on its own in both the United States and Canada. A Christmas version of the commercial came out a few years after the original, and a Disney version starring Mickey Mouse was released soon after that. In 1991, there was a 20-year reunion featuring the original cast and their children. In 2006, the rapper G. Love recorded an ad for Coke Zero starting with the words, “I’d like to teach the world to chill, take time to stop and smile….” There was a NASCAR version that came out in 2010, and the year before last, it was featured in the series finale of the TV show “Mad Men.” Critics consistently rate this ad as one of the greatest commercials of all time.

It was, of course, an attempt to get TV viewers to purchase sugary brown soda water. But there was something about the way it was made that captured people’s minds and hearts. What was that something? What was the secret to the great appeal of this minute-long TV commercial?

To answer that question, it is important to remember that when the commercial originally aired, the Cold War was still raging, and the specter of nuclear destruction hung darkly over everything. The US was mired in an increasingly bloody conflict in Vietnam, people were killing each other in the Middle East, and everywhere violence seemed to flourish. Yet there on TV, we saw hundreds of young people dreaming about peace and love and harmony. The vision was as simple as it was silly: If we could all just sit down and have a Coke together, things would be great. From our perspective today, it sounds kind of foolish, but in 1971, the image of people all over the world connecting in love and harmony was downright inspirational

Of course, the folks at Coca Cola weren’t the first to provide the world with glowing visions of the future. In fact, we Jews beat Coke to the punch by centuries! “On that day, God shall be one, and God’s name shall be one,” we sing in our services – it’s a vision of the world coming together in unity under the umbrella of God’s oneness. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they study war any more,” proclaimed Isaiah, and we’re still singing the words today – “Lo yisa goy el goy cherev, lo yilm’du od milchamah.” “Each shall sit under his vine and fig, with none to make them afraid,” said the prophet, Micah.

Yes, for centuries, Jews have dreamt of the coming of the messiah, and the visions put apple trees and honeybees to shame. In fact, the English word messiah actually comes from the Hebrew word, mashiach. Other religions might talk about the messiah a lot more than we do, but we had the idea first!

Our tradition’s descriptions of the Messiah are both vivid and voluminous. I don’t have time to share all of them here, but I can highlight a few. The messiah, Jewish tradition says, is going to be a descendant of King David. The messiah, many texts predict, will reunite all Jews. And when they say “all” Jews, some of these texts really mean it, for many suggest that the messiah will reunite in the land of Israel all Jews who have ever lived. They suggest that there will be a physical resurrection of the dead – that the bodies and souls of deceased Jews will reunite, and that they’ll rise to live together in the newly rebuilt Jewish commonwealth. This, by the way, is the reason that traditional Judaism forbids cremation and embalming. Since our bodies will be resurrected, we want to keep them in a condition as pristine as possible so that they’ll be good to go when the messiah comes.

The vision continues. According to Judaism, the messiah will enable Jews to observe all the laws of the Torah, just like in the old days. Now remember, there are a lot of commandments in the Torah – fully 613 of them, to be precise. However, of those 613 commandments, 244 of them are impossible for us to keep these days because they’re about sacrifices, and sacrifices in Judaism are only to be practiced in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Temple was last destroyed in the year 70 CE. When the messiah comes, our tradition tells us, one of the things that will happen is that the Temple will be rebuilt, and we’ll be able to practice sacrifices once again.

Most important, Judaism says that the Messiah will usher in an era of universal peace and justice and righteousness – a time during which, as Maimonides says, “there will be no hunger or war, no jealousy or rivalry.” It will be a time when, as Isaiah taught us, the lion will lie down with the lamb, even though, as Woody Allen added, the lamb won’t get much sleep.

The point is that when the messiah comes, according to our tradition, things will become really good – even better than apple trees and honeybees and Coca Cola, if that’s possible to imagine. When the messiah comes, then, for us Jews, things will become like they were in the good ol’ days, when we had a beloved king, and when the Temple stood and we could do Judaism the way we were really supposed to. More universally, when the messiah comes, the world will become the kind of place we know it can be – a place of peace, and justice, and kindness among all people.

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate was a terrific guy named DJ, from a little town in Eastern Kentucky – hillbilly country. I think I was the first Jew DJ had ever met. One day when we were talking in our room, our conversation turned to religion. At one point, DJ paused and said, “I don’t understand why you Jews don’t accept Jesus as the messiah.” DJ wasn’t trying to convert me; he wasn’t being hostile or adversarial at all. He was really just curious why we Jews didn’t accept something he’d been taught as a fundamental religious truth.

My initial inclination was to respond by saying “Duh! Of course Jesus wasn’t the messiah. Why would we believe that?!” But this wouldn’t have been a very constructive response to a perfectly legitimate question. To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember how I answered DJ that day…I just remember hemming and hawing a lot. At the time, I didn’t have the tools to give him a clear answer. Why don’t we believe that Jesus was the messiah? Because we don’t believe that anyone has been the messiah – at least not yet. And why don’t we believe that anyone has been the messiah? Because we read the papers; and we watch the news; and we look at the world around us; and whenever we do, we see that, although the world has a lot of good in it, there’s a lot that’s not so good there, as well. There’s war, and there’s hunger, and there’s nasty gossip, and there are all kinds of other evils both large and small – so many, in fact, that we can’t help but notice that our world is a fundamentally broken place. And these times in which we live are most definitely pre-messianic in nature.

Now, a few additional comments about the messiah in Judaism are in order. First, the idea of the messiah – particularly as it’s been understood in Judaism – is profoundly dangerous. For one thing, in Judaism, the messiah, as I said, will rebuild the Temple. Actually, to be more specific, some texts say that the messiah will rebuild the Temple, whereas others say that Jews will need to rebuild the Temple in order for the Messiah to come. But remember, that Temple can only be built in one place, and that’s on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, right behind the Western Wall. The problem, of course, is that these days there are some very important Islamic shrines that sit on the Temple Mount – the beautiful gold-domed Mosque of Omar (or the Dome of the Rock), and beside it the silver-domed Al Aqsa Mosque. In order for the Temple to be built, it would have to be at the very spot where those buildings now sit, so those Islamic shrines would have to go away, and to date there is no movement that I know of within Islam to destroy those shrines. In the mid-eighties, the Israeli police caught a Jewish religious extremist on his way to the Temple Mount carrying a backpack full of explosives – he was planning to blow up those Islamic shrines so that the Temple could be rebuilt. Can you imagine what would have happened if he had succeeded? If he had, Israel would have had about a billion quite understandably ticked-off Muslims on its hands, and the results would have been utterly catastrophic. But to this terrorist, everything was OK, because he was about to bring the messiah, so even if he was caught in the process – even if he was killed in the process, the messiah would soon come and make it all right.

In fact, more generally, if I can make you believe that I’m the messiah, or if I can make you believe that I truly speak on the messiah’s behalf, then I can get you to do practically anything. Like Jim Jones did in the 1970s, I could get you to drink poisoned Kool-Aid for me. I could get you to fight for me, and live for me, and die for me, and to do all kinds of horrible things in my name. And because you would see me as the saviour of the world, you would do it, and you’d be willing to tolerate any adverse effects from those deeds, because since I’m the messiah, and you were on my side, you wouldn’t have anything to lose.

Perhaps this is why our tradition has long been a little leery of too much messiah-talk. To be sure, the Talmud expresses this leeriness quite explicitly. If you’re planting a tree, the Talmud says, and someone comes up to you and excitedly tells you that the messiah has just come, what are you supposed to do? First, finish planting the tree, then go see what all this messiah stuff is all about.

In fact, Reform Judaism shares this leeriness about traditional messianic views. That’s why our movement since its inception has rejected the notion of a personal messiah. We Reform Jews have long looked forward not to a person coming along who can save the world, but rather to the coming of the Messianic Age. We see ourselves as working as God’s partners on behalf of Tikkun Olam, repairing our broken world, so that our people’s dreams of peace and justice can somehow come to fruition.

But even though this messiah idea is so dangerous, and even though many of us are so leery about it, the other thing that’s true is that it lies at the very heart of what it means to be Jewish. That’s because the possibility that the messiah will come along and perfect the world someday is what has long given meaning to Jewish existence.

Why be Jewish? Why bother with Shabbat, and keeping kosher, and Temple dues and all of the other obligations of Jewish life? And why tolerate the expulsions and pogroms and mass murder that always looms as one of the risks of being Jewish? It’s because we have the hope that all of these Jewish things we do will help bring about the fulfillment of our people’s great messianic dreams for the future.

Think of the world as a big wheel slowly rolling along the track of history. It began way down there with creation, and one day it will get way over there to messianic times, and in the meantime, we’re somewhere here in the middle. According to Judaism, whenever a Jew fulfills a mitzvah – whenever we light candles, or study Torah, or give to tzedakah, or keep any of the other six-hundred-and-some-odd commandments of Jewish life, we roll the world one click – one tiny step closer – to the fulfillment of our great messianic dream of the future. And, conversely, whenever we transgress one of those commandments, we move the world away from the fulfillment of that dream.

Our mitzvot bring the messiah, our rabbis taught, and our transgressions delay it. Each moment, we should imagine that the world is in balance, they continued – that collectively our deeds and misdeeds perfectly outweigh each other, so that what you do right now will determine whether the messiah comes. Right now, at this very moment, the destiny of the world is on your shoulders. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to do something good and sacred that will transform the universe into something good? Or are you going to do something petty or evil and ruin it for us all? You get to choose.

In this sense, Judaism is messianism. The very reason that we do anything Jewish is to bring the messiah. That’s why being Jewish matters.

Finally, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings here, but this great dream of ours – of universal peace and justice and brotherhood and all the rest? It’s probably not going to be fulfilled anytime soon…and to tell you the truth, it might not ever be fulfilled. Maimonides taught that a good Jew is supposed to say, “I believe in the coming of the messiah, and even though the messiah tarries, I still believe.” The wording there is important – we’re supposed to say that we believe in the coming of the messiah, not in the “caming” of the messiah. In other words, a Jew is supposed to believe that the world holds enormous possibility, that it can and will become better. And never – at least not for the foreseeable future – are we supposed to believe that the world is already a perfect place. As the scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz taught, in Judaism, the false messiah is the one who has arrived.

There’s an old Jewish story about a man named Mendel who lived in a small shtetl. There in the shtetl, Mendel’s job was to sit at the gates of the city and wait for the messiah to arrive, and for this work, Mendel was paid one ruble a week. At one point, a friend of his said to him, “Mendel, how could you do such a boring job, and for such horrible pay?” “Well,” Mendel replied, “the pay might not be great, but the work is steady.”

Even during the darkest of times, we Jews have always maintained the hope that things can and will get better. It’s that hope, that dream, that has given us the strength to endure our greatest challenges and our greatest difficulties.

My friends, in many ways, this is one of those dark periods. The smoke shrouding our city in recent weeks is in many ways an apt metaphor for the tenor of these times. These days, there are earthquakes, and hurricanes, and floods. The spectre of nuclear conflict is growing once again, and everywhere fear seems to be overtaking compassion as the primary motivating factor of humanity. Now more than ever, we need our people’s vision of a better world, and the realities of contemporary life call upon us to work for it’s fulfillment. Now more than ever, God needs us as a partner, to bring a better day for humanity.

The psalmist taught that when the messiah comes, hayyinu k’cholmim, we’ll be like dreamers. The great messianic dream of the Jewish people, you see, in in part the dream of being able to dream. That’s why that commercial was so popular. At a time when the very existence of the world seemed to be in peril, it helped thousands of people dream of a better time. It’s a lesson for us all. When people despair, we can’t always give them happiness, but what we often can give them is a dream of a better time. This is the great gift of Judaism’s messianic vision.

It is now Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish New Year. Will this be the year that the messiah finally comes and makes things better for us all? Maybe, but probably not. Still, we can dream of a better world, and we can take steps to make that dream real. Picture a time of apple trees and honeybees, and lions and lambs together, and of peace, justice, and righteousness pervading the world. Dream it. Work to make it happen. You might not finish the job, but working together with the rest of us who share that dream, maybe – just maybe – we can make at least part of it come true.

Shanah Tovah.

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