It's almost Elul, the month before the High Holy Days, a time for deep introspection & the work of tshuvah/repentance.

This year has been esp. hard. How can we do this work given that we're all in the midst of an ongoing mass trauma? On repentance and gentleness.

1/x thread

So this is a time for Jews to begin asking (we should be asking every day, but this is esp. our season):

Who have I been this year? What do I need to repair? We must face the gap between who we have been & who we want to be.

The steps of repentance, to review, are, maybe the initial pre-step is this introspection time (accounting of the soul/cheshbon ha-nefesh), who have I been? How have I handled things? What are the ways my choices have hurt others? How have I not lived as the person I want to be?

Then- 1) Confession/owning the harm caused, maybe publicly (depends on the harm--at least proportional to who saw it). 2) begin to do the work to change--therapy, educate yourself, other supports & processes dep on the thing. (cot'd)

3) amends--what do you owe those you harmed? Can you pay for the thing you broke? Do they want you to make a donation to an appropriate org? Donate time? Use your influence in some way? You can't un-do, but what could be a just amends in this situation?

4) THEN apology, after you've been doing the work. This apology centers the victim and their needs ("you must appease" is the language in Maimonides). And I would add that if it would harm the victim to hear from you, that's not centering them and you need a different plan.

You don't apologize AT someone. The apology is FOR them, not FOR you, so conduct yourself appropriately. and then 5) Next time you have an opportunity to repeat the harm, you make a different choice, organically, because you have done the work and are a different person.

So, OK, where does that land us in the midst of profound mass trauma(s) that most of us haven't even begun to process? What about harm we've caused because we were reacting from that place?

The work of repentance is often described in terms that are v. demanding of the perpetrator of harm (which is all of us, all of us cause harm and also are harmed). And this is a year, in particular, in which I think more gentleness is needed.

I don't think we need to change the work. The steps are fine, are good. (I believe in them so much I'm writing a book about applying them to American public life & institutions.) But maybe we need to change how we think about them, talk about them.

We have all caused harm, and we have all harmed. The reason to do repentance work is not because you are BAD BAD BAD until you DO THESE THINGS but because we should care about each other, about taking care of each other, about making sure we're all OK.

Because taking seriously that I might have hurt you--even inadvertently! Even because I wasn't at my best, this is such a hard time!--is an act of love and care.

It is an opportunity to open our hearts wider than they have been, to let in more empathy, more curiosity about how my choices or knee-jerk reactions have impacted you, have impacted others. To care about others' perspective. To let your experience matter, deeply, to me.

To look at another person--or a community, or a team of people or whatever--and to say, where are you? (Ayeka?) What are you feeling and experiencing now, and how might I have (even unwittingly) brought you pain, or difficulty? And to care about making that as right as we can.

It's an act of love, gentleness, care. And for you to face the harm you caused is an act of profound optimism--it is a choice to grow, to learn, to become someone who is more open and empathetic, who learns better how to help, who offers caring.

All too often (and this is more a secular/Christian American culture thing that I believe comes from Christianity, not a Jewish thing, but Jewish Americans sometimes breathe this cultural air too) people confuse I DID a harmful thing with I AM A BAD PERSON.

Again: We all harm and are harmed. To different degrees and in different ways, but it's so easy to conflate, eg, facing, "I said something racist" with "I am a bad bad racist person." The latter is so damning that we might refuse to acknowledge that what we said was harmful.

More on that here: https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1265295892632031232?s=20

We are all always learning, always growing, in all of the ways. And when we think of the work of repentance--even now, here, in this difficult year--maybe we can think of it as an act of caring, of extending ourselves to care for others, as giving ourselves the time and +

attention we deserve, investing in our own learning and capacity to heal. Because repentance is, I believe, an act of self-care as well. When I do the work (and I, a human, screw up constantly, so I'm trying to do repentance work... a lot) we give attention to our own +

broken places, our own reactionary impulses, our own careless ignorance. And it's a way of saying, hey, self, you need some attention. Let's give you some help getting over to the kind of person you want to be.

What do you need? To do some learning on this issue? Therapy? Time to call your sponsor? To talk this through with a trusted friend? Other supports? Who and what else can help you cross the bridge between who you are now and where you want to be?

And it reminds us that the person or people we hurt matter, matter profoundly, and that we need to give them all the attention and care and love and concern that we hope the people who hurt us will offer to us. (But we can't wait on them for us to do our own work.)

If it helps to imagine a scenario in which the people who have hurt us come to us in exactly the way that will appease us best, make us feel most loved and cared for and seen--as we consider the people we hurt and what they need, do that.

Which is not to say that what we need and what the other person needs are the same--remember, this work demands we ask where they are, center them, not to impose our ideas about where they are on them--but it can open our heart a little more. Help us find the concerned empathy.

And yes, we all may feel totally tapped out now, exhausted, like we have done everything we can the best we can and we don't have any more to give. I feel this! I really do.

AND. And.

I really believe that love & caring are things that we can always grow more of, even when we think we're used up. What we need are the will to do the work, and the time and space for it.

Ahhahaa! You laugh at me. Time? Space? Now?? (Parents of young children especially, I see you, I am one of you.)

Yeah.

I don't know when you take that time, but the invitation is to take a little time each day of Elul to do this thinking, this considering.

Maybe it's in the shower. Maybe this is your shower practice for the next six or so weeks. (Maybe you'll find it sticks even after that.) Maybe it's the thing you'll think about as you do the dishes.

Maybe it's an alarm you set to take 5-10 mins out of that thing you do in the evenings where you just kind of go into the "decompress in front of screens" mode. Give yourself the gift of a little meditation, prayer, journal writing, art making, going for a walk, whatever.

But I would like to invite you to dedicate a tiny corner of time each day to thinking about who you have been this year. The ways in which you're proud of yourself, what you've survived, how you've grown, how you've coped. And also to see the places where there feels +

like there might be dissonance, disharmony, feelings of embarrassment or guilt because of choices you made, things you said and did. No need to self-flagellate, just notice them. Hi. They're there. It's OK. You are not bad, you are just a fallible human, like the rest of us.

And over the process of the six weeks, let yourself look with deeper curiosity at those places of dissonance--what happened? Why? What's that about? Maybe: who can help you unpack what was going on? Start first just with curiosity.

And then, after you've spent some time there, begin thinking about how your choices might have impacted other people. Don't assume you know or can arrive at the answer, but extend your empathetic curiosity to wonder how it might have felt from their perspective.

THEN have a look back at the steps of repentance above. (Or here, some more threads on all this starting here, with bonus Elul practice from my rabbi, Rabbi Alan Lew (z'l), above this tweet.) https://mobile.twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1029032053088632833

This work is meant to be real, serious, to be sure, but it's not supposed to be impossible. You can do it. Even now, just extending your empathetic curiosity, your love and care, out a little more.

And you will find that you will be growing in the process, crossing that bridge from who you have been to who you want to be, becoming transformed in ways that you hope to transform, developing ever-greater capacity for love and care. Leveling up.

And honestly, I'm not gonna lie, I think this autumn and maybe winter is going to be hard. Really hard. Having you as leveled up as you can be, giving you a super-boost of your caring and healing capacity is good for you, and good for all of us.

And think of how many more broken places can be made whole by your work. https://mobile.twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1087029004522135552?s=20

As Rebbe Nahman of Breslov put it, “If you believe that you can damage, believe that you can fix. If you believe that you can harm, believe that you can heal.”