What if the injured party is dead? How, then, do you repent?
My grandmother was a take-charge Jewish woman, a business executive in the 1930s long before such things were common. She was a committed Jew with no patience for traditions she thought meaningless. She was a Zionist when Zionists were hard to find. Devoted to her family but also to her family business, she hired housekeepers to help with her children when Jewish mothers did not do such things.
In the last year of her life, I was a rabbinical student, overwhelmed with work, concerned with my own family and – inevitably – with myself. I kept telling myself: Call Bama (which is what her grandchildren called her). She had not been well, although none of her illnesses seemed life threatening. I didn’t call her, and she died suddenly. And I have been asking myself for 35 years: Why didn’t I call?
The challenge at the Holidays is sometimes not the big sins – violence, evil thoughts, and lewd associations – but the smaller ones: unwilling and unintentional sins.
How do I repent at this season for the sins against my grandmother? How do I move forward?
To some extent, I don’t because I can’t. The sin stays with me.
But I can do this: I set aside some time to reflect about her life and her accomplishments, about her love for her family, and about how much of what I have become derives from who she was.
And I think about those who are important in my life whom I have been neglecting. And I call them.
Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie is President of the Union for Reform Judaism. www.urj.org
