Choosing Better Over Bitter – Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur) 2020

Rabbi Stephen Weiss
Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur) 5781/2020

Judaism is clear on this. There are two separate obligations in Jewish law. One is to do teshuvah – to repent, say you are sorry, make amends and change your ways. The other obligation is to forgive. Neither obligation is dependent upon the other.

It was a most unusual performance. Forty members of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, maintaining social distance, accompanied the Haredi – ultra-orthodox – singer Ziv Yehezkel, who sang the national anthem of the UAE in Arabic.

That performance embodied the excitement in Israel over the Abraham Accords. The same exuberance can be felt on the other side. A new glatt kosher restaurant is opening this month in Dubai inside the world’s tallest building. Emiratis and Israelis have placed ads inviting each other to come visit. Business deals are being made at a furious pace. This is what real peace is supposed to feel like. Not the cold peace with Egypt or Jordan, but a genuine peace in which two peoples set aside their anger and bitterness, their hatred and fear, and choose instead to celebrate their common interests and to embrace each other as family.

Who gets the credit for bringing these two former enemies together? Jeremy Issacharoff.

In 1994, while Jeremy served as the number three diplomat at the Israeli embassy in Washington, he was approached by an American consultant who worked with the Gulf States. The consultant told him that the UAE wanted to purchase F-16s. They wanted to know, would Israel object?

If you were Jeremy, how would you have responded? I know what I would have said. Yes. Israel will most definitely object. The UAE is Israel’s enemy, sworn to its destruction. Why on earth would Israel allow them to acquire the most sophisticated fighter jets in the world?

That is how I would have responded. But I am not Jeremy Issacharoff. Instead, Jeremy told the consultant that Israel wanted to discuss the matter face to face with the Emiratis and find out exactly how they intended to use the aircraft.

A first meeting of sworn enemies could have been tense. But at this meeting, the conversation just flowed. The two quickly realized that their countries had a lot of common interests: Iran for one, but also a host of other areas including renewable energy, water management, medical technology and a shared interest in entrepreneurship and innovation as drivers of economic transformation.

Not long after that first encounter, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in a meeting at the Pentagon and was asked about the Emirate’s desire to purchase F-16s. Rabin replied, “We won’t object.”

That was a pivotal moment. Through Jeremy Issacharoff’s meetings and Rabin’s consent, a trust was established between the two countries that made sustained dialogue possible. The two nations started cooperating on intelligence. That same year, the UAE stopped enforcing the secondary and tertiary Arab boycotts that had forbid doing business with companies that dealt with Israel.

The Emiratis even began engaging in direct, clandestine trade with Israel in violation of their own primary boycott, a trade that this year reached one billion dollars. Israeli products were being packed in unmarked boxes and shipped to the UAE over land via Jordan. Many Israeli businessmen were now traveling regularly to the UAE, allowed into the country with their Israeli passports, all with the Emirates’ tacit consent.

By the time MBZ was joined by the leader of Bahrain at the White House, many Emiratis in the streets had already begun to see the commonalities and embraced the announcement of peace.

There is a powerful lesson to be learned from this story. It is a lesson that applies not only to nations but to our personal lives as well. When we have a bad experience with someone, rather than dwelling on the negatives that push us away from them, we should pay more attention to the things that we love and even need from that person. We should think about the blessing that relationship might bring us, if only we could learn to set aside past hurts and anger, and to overcome our fears.

We learn this very lesson from Moses. In parshat B’ha’alotekha, we read that the people of Israel rebelled against Moses. They were tired of having only manna to eat, and they longed for the fish and leeks they ate in their former lives. “If only,” they cried out, “we could go back to Egypt!”

Moses must have been so hurt and demoralized by the people’s rebellion. He surely felt like a failure. Then, in that very moment of vulnerability, Aaron and Miriam gossip behind his back and challenge his leadership. They say, “the Lord spoke to us as well, not just to him. Why should he be the leader?”

Can you imagine! His own brother and sister kicking him when he is down! Moses must have been stunned. In that moment, God condemns Aaron and Miriam for what they said and afflicts Miriam with leprosy as a punishment.

How would you feel if your brother or sister let you down or betrayed you, and then something terrible suddenly happened to them? For many people, the response might be “Serves you right! After what you did, you deserve to be punished!”

But that is not the way that Moses responds. Instead, he makes up with Aaron, accepting his brother’s apology. Then, he prays to God on behalf of his sister Miriam: Ana Hashem r’fah na lah. “Please God, please! Heal her!”

In that moment, Moses is not nursing his wounds. He is not thinking of how his sister hurt him. Nor is he thinking that Miriam got what she deserves.

In that moment, all Moses sees is his big sister: his sister who stood on watch for Egyptian guards as their mother placed him in a basket in the Nile, saving his life. His sister, who persuaded the daughter of Pharaoh to allow his mother to be his nursemaid so that she could be with him day and night. His sister who had supported his efforts, telling the women to pack their timbrels for a celebration because she believed in him and in his crazy ideas about freedom. His sister – his only sister – who had been there for him time and again throughout his life. His sister whom he loved.

In that moment, Moses realized that there was nothing more important to him than his sister, not his honor, not his reputation, not his leadership.

So, what about you and me? What is more important to us?  Is our hurt so deep that we cannot let go of it? Is our fear of being hurt again so overpowering that we cannot risk rejection if we reach out? Are we so committed to our own opinions and perspectives that we would sacrifice the very relationships that have sustained us all these years? Or can we, like Moses, like Jeremy Issacharoff, see beyond the hurt and the risk to the promise held out by the chance for reconciliation?

In the kabbalistic work titled, The Palm Tree of Deborah, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero writes that we must forgive even when the other person has not done teshuvah. He goes even farther, teaching that we must forgive even while we are still experiencing hurt. After all, he says, that is what God does for each of us. God continues to bless us. God continues to send His divine spirit, His life force into our very being even as we are sinning, because God’s love is unconditional. It is God’s love and validation that enables us to rise up and to change.

Whenever I teach this, as happened recently, many of those present will inevitably raise strong objections: “Why should I forgive someone who has wronged me?” “Don’t they have to apologize first?” “They should have to prove that they’ve changed!” “How can I be expected to forgive someone who is still hurting me? “

My response is always the same:  Judaism is clear on this. There are two separate obligations in Jewish law. One is to do teshuvah – to repent, say you are sorry, make amends and change your ways. The other obligation is to forgive. Neither obligation is dependent upon the other.

There is no required sequence. Sometimes the apology comes first. Sometimes the forgiveness comes first. Sometimes our contrition enables the other person to forgive, but sometimes the act of forgiveness enables the other person to do teshuvah.

We are obligated to forgive because our forgiveness demonstrates our love for the other person. It demonstrates our belief that they have worth and that they can change. That belief in them may be just what they need to believe in themselves and become the person they could be.

But we are also obligated to forgive for our own sake. When we do not let go of past hurts, they simmer inside us becoming toxic and making us bitter. We also cut ourselves off from the blessings that could be ours if we reclaimed that relationship.

Let me tell you about Brian. Brian approached me after services one day to ask about a sermon I had given on forgiveness. He said: “I’m not sure that I like what you said about forgiveness. Are you sure that, as a Jew, I am obligated to forgive others?” I told Brian, Yes. Not only that, it is for our own benefit that we are obligated to forgive. It may not change the other person at all.” “Well,” he said, “I just got an invitation to my niece’s wedding. It came from the brother I haven’t spoken to in fifteen years. I suppose I should go, shouldn’t I?”

I encouraged him to go to the wedding Three weeks later, he met me after shul with a big smile. He said to me, “I met my brother at the wedding. We made up after fifteen years of silent resentment. If he hadn’t sent that invitation, I never would have known he was even willing to see me–let alone make up and be real brothers again. That sermon was a real gift.”

If Moses were here with us right now, what would he say to us? He would say, “Yes, you are right. Dad should not have remarried so soon after mom died. But now that it is done, so what? Yes, your son should have listened to you when you warned him that his business venture would not work out, but now that the business failed and he is in debt, so what? Yes, your daughter should not have up and moved all the way to California. She knew you wanted her to stay close. But now that she is there, so what? So, what if their spouse is not the one you would have chosen, or your child didn’t work hard enough to get the grades to earn a scholarship. So what? If we are talking about your child, your sibling, your parent, your spouse, your friend, then so what? Is that really more important than your relationship? Is that really a price that you want to pay?”

Do you want to be right at the cost of being bitter? Or do you want your life to be better? Will you be bitter… or better? Will you be bitter? or better?

There is a story about two friends who were walking through the desert. At one point in the journey, the two had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face. The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, he wrote in the sand: “Today, my best friend slapped my face.”

They kept on walking until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire beneath the water. He was pulled under and started to drown, but the friend saved him. and started drowning, but the friend saved him. After he recovered from nearly drowning, he wrote on a stone: “Today, my best friend saved my life.”

The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, “After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand. Now, you write on a stone. Why?”

The other friend replied: “When someone hurts us, we should write it down in sand where winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But, when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it.”

Learn to write your hurts in the sand, and to carve your benefits – your blessings – in stone.

I pray that the courage and insight of the Israelis and Emiratis leads to many more Islamic countries normalizing relations with Israel. May more of these countries decide they would rather make life better than be bitter.

May we in our own lives also choose better over bitter in our relationships. May we let go of hurts and take the risks to reclaim those relationships which mean so much more to us than – sometimes – we are willing to admit.

Shanah tovah.