I accidentally parked partially over someone’s drive this morning. I came back to my car to find a nasty note. My initial response was that this person was overreacting and it wasn’t such a big deal. I was going to throw the note away and get on with life, not letting an unreasonable person mess up my day. However, once I’d calmed down a little and was feeling less frustrated, it all looked quite different. The note wasn’t as nasty as it had first appeared. I was the one clearly in the wrong and actually, the person had been very polite, given the fact that his drive had been blocked all morning! I resolved that tomorrow (I figured I would do better to wait until the person might be feeling more relaxed about it) I must go and apologise. And I look forward to the opportunity.
Now is the time in the Jewish year, prior to Rosh Hashana, when we say sorry. We say sorry to God, we say sorry to others and we say sorry to ourselves. So I want to take a moment to extol the incredible pleasure of saying sorry.
Nothing in life that is good is easy. If you can think of an exception, it’s either not all that good, or it just hasn’t started being difficult yet. This is because it’s the struggle involved in something that makes it good for us. There is no comparison between the love of a non biological parent, who brought up a child, and the love of a parent who passed the responsibility on to someone else. The love of the former is deeper because the love stemmed from an active engagement. That love has developed and deepened over time; it’s not just a feeling thrown at him by nature. Similarly, there is no comparison between the person who sweats to earn money and the one who inherits it. And you can’t compare a relationship that has struggled through and overcome hard times, to one that is still on the crest of a wave. Challenges give us ownership of our pleasures.
And saying sorry is one of life’s great challenges. It involves humility; it involves a taking of responsibility; it involves an acceptance of blame. And all of these are wonderful. We are small people when we blame others, when we avoid responsibly and when we slink away from our mistakes. King Solomon tells us that ‘a righteous man falls down seven times but gets up, an evil man falls but once’. Our ability to accept where we have made mistakes, take responsibility for them, genuinely apologise and then move on, gives us a heaviness, a realness, a commitment to truth, that is much more pleasurable than running away and pretending nothing ever happened.
Yes, it’s hard to apologise; it’s uncomfortable; you don’t know how the other person will react. But always afterwards you will feel deeply satisfied that you were brave enough to accept your own shortcomings. It’s much easier to forget what happened and move on, but there is a part of you that will always feel small and weak.
Like I said, this is the time of year when Jews examine their shortcomings, accept them and try to change. There are always people in our lives to whom we should apologise. Now might be a good time to think of doing so. And if you do, make sure that you enjoy it!
