Last week, I was preparing to post online the melody I composed in 2011 for the prayer we are about to recite. As I read it over in the prayerbook, something struck me about the translation and the Hebrew wording in Mishkan Hanefesh as opposed to the text in Gates of Repentance. Here is what we read in Gates of Repentance: “Our God, God of our mothers and fathers, grant that our prayers may reach You. Do not be deaf to our pleas, for we are not so arrogant and stiffnecked as to say before you, Lord our God and God of all ages, we are perfect and have not sinned; rather do we confess: we have gone astray.”
On page 296 in Mishkan Hanefesh, we will read the new translation of the prayer, which has a totally changed meaning because one word is gone. In Hebrew, that word is SHE-AYN. In English, the missing word is “NOT.” We now declare that “we are arrogant and stubborn, claiming to be blameless and free of sin, but in truth we have stumbled and strayed.” It is a stark admission.
So why did the word “NOT” disappear?
I contacted Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, the editor of Mishkan Hanefesh, to ask if he knew why the change was made. He told me that Rabbi Larry Hoffman, one of the foremost scholars in the world on Jewish prayer, explained at one of the Machzor revision meetings that he believes that the original prayer did not include the word NOT. The first version of this prayer likely read, “we are arrogant and stubborn.” Hoffman believed, that, somewhere along the line in Jewish history, someone felt that, in keeping with a well-known Jewish superstition, we would tempt the evil eye by openly proclaiming that we humans are arrogant. We might seal our fate and never be able to change.
The word NOT was added, and it has remained in most prayerbooks in order to remind us that we are capable of holding ourselves upon a higher moral ground,
This past Sunday, I attended the farewell event downtown for Bishop Oscar Cantu of the Roman Catholic diocese of Las Cruces. I was able to speak with him before the event began. He spoke to me of the cloud over the church due to the sexual abuse crisis that continues to cause him great concern. I told him that we in the Jewish community are in our season of repentance, and we both know that there have always been prominent people, and there still are, in the human community who have believed they are blameless, when they are actually guilty of wrongs that they were incapable of admitting and for which they felt no need to make amends. I told the Bishop that the Catholic Church can be a model of repentance at this time. In his homily at the Vesper service, Bishop Cantu addressed this challenge to the church before the assembled crowd with extreme humility, noting that the truth must be found, and that the church must approach multiple cases of abuse based on transparency and accountability. He knows that much work needs to be done to even begin to bring repair and healing to the brokenness that has affected many lives. Bishop Cantu prayed for the well-being of the victims and for their healing. His declaration was an important statement. In the past, those guilty of wrongdoing were led by arrogance to claim they were without blame. Now, the light of truth will hopefully lead to apology and atonement.
We human beings are always capable of making right what is wrong, of letting our past go in order to become someone new, at least in a small way.
I am currently participating in a discussion group with local clergy on Parker Palmer’s book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, In the preface to the book, Palmer wrote of a Civil rights bus trip he took in the southern United States about 15 years ago. He was sitting on the bus near Georgia Congressional Representative John Lewis, first known for his prominent leadership of the Civil Rights movement in 1960s. Palmer recounted a story that he heard Lewis tell as they traveled the roads of the south.
In 1961, John Lewis and a friend were at a bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, when several young white men attacked and beat them bloody with baseball bats. Lewis and his friend “did not fight back, and they declined to press charges.” They simply treated their wounds and went on with their Civil Rights work.
In 2009, forty-eight years after this event, a white man about John Lewis's age walked into his office on Capitol Hill, accompanied by his middle-aged son. “Mr. Lewis,” he said, “my name is Elwin Wilson. I'm one of the men who beat you in that bus station back in 1961. I want to atone for the terrible thing I did, so I've come to seek your forgiveness. Will you forgive me?” Lewis said, “I forgave him, we embraced, he and his son and I wept, and then we talked.”
As Lewis came to the end of this remarkable and moving story, he leaned back in his seat on the bus. He gazed out the window for a while as they passed through a countryside that was once a killing ground for the Ku Klux Klan, of which Elwin Wilson had been a member. Then, in a very soft voice—as if speaking to himself about the story he had just told and all of the memories that must have been moving in him—Lewis said, “People can change …People can change …”
This is our challenge today and every year on Yom Kippur, to recognize that some people may claim that we are hopelessly arrogant, but our answer is that we don’t have to be. We recount all of the sins that human beings commit so that we can move forward and courageously assert that we can and will do better. It is up to us to unlock the potential of these prayers to lead us to goodness and to hope for the future of the human family.
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