21 Elul 5784

Rabbi Moshe Givental

North Shore Temple Emanuel

Teshuvah is the Opposite of Shame

One of the first steps of Teshuvah is recognising that we’ve done something destructive and feeling regret and guilt over it. Vitally, it is useful to distinguish between this and shame. According to sociologist Dr. Brene Brown, shame is “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” That is why it can be so painful to admit mistakes, even to ourselves. We fear that acknowledging our “sins” will mean that we’re irredeemably flawed, that we’ll lose love and belonging.

These aren’t just psychological fears, they are biological.  If we scroll back far enough, to a period when humanity was just struggling to survive in the wilderness or the jungle, when the bonds of community were what made it possible to overcome the threats of the physical world, exile from community meant death. That is why shame is so extraordinarily painful; it triggers our very basic physiological fear or a kind of death.

Teshuvah beckons us into something that is the opposite. It invites us to consider our actions and their painful consequences, specifically in the context of our souls, which are ineffably and always completely whole and pure. As the morning prayer teaches “elohai neshamah shenata bi tehora hi – God the soul which you have given me, is [always] pure” [1]. Moreover, Teshuvah draws us specifically and directly into the arms of a loving community and God. In addition to the daily prayers of God’s love, the refrain for this month of repentance is “ani l’dodi v’dodi li – I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me” [2]. In our tradition, God is yearning for us to admit our mistakes and commit to change, from a place of love and towards the embrace of love. That is also why the confessional prayers are public, and in the plural. We normalise the reality that to err is simply to be human. To be a mensch only requires us to take responsibility for our mistakes and repair their harm.It is still painful, hard, and counter-cultural. We live in an atmosphere in which any admission of imperfection is often shamed. We live in a culture in which people are sometimes shamed for even just being themselves. This is why teshuvah is so radical. Teshuvah invites us beyond the shame-culture to where mistakes are just what make us human, where there is a part of us which always remains whole, and where all of this is embraced with love.

[1] Mishkan T’filah page 34
[2] Shir ha’Shirim Song of Songs 6:3