QUESTION:
I guess because of everything happening in Israel and the world in general, I got more into the High Holidays this time around…
I tried reflecting on my mistakes over this past year, which led me to actually take stock of my whole life. I imagine most people just avoid doing this because it can be so painful to confront ourselves and what could have been had we made different decisions.
As I let myself go down this rabbit hole, I got to a point where I just felt really terrible. I had to ask myself, “is this the point??” Am I just supposed to feel like I messed things up? How does this make things any better? I suppose I can learn lessons for the future, but I can’t change the past. Why would this blunt pain of remorse go away unless I suppress it all over again?
ADVICE FROM THE SAGES:
First of all, you should feel good for having the courage and strength to go to that dark place inside yourself that most of us keep locked and buried for most of our lives.
What you did is a critical step in the process of change — but as you noted, it’s not enough — and moreover, it can be dangerous to go there without having direction as to where to go from there.
There is a practical answer to your question, which is true but incomplete. It is the approach of the philosophical school of the stoics, which asks us to accept what we cannot change because we cannot change it, and improve that which we can improve because we can improve it. As you noted, the past cannot be changed. That ship has sailed. The only thing we can do is accept it, stop wasting energy regretting it, and learn from it in order to have a better future.
As true as this is, I feel from your question that you’re looking for something deeper.
The approach of stoicism is psychologically sound and a healthy way to come to terms with past mistakes, and grow from them. The problem is that it ignores the profound question that will keep nagging at the soul of a seeker:
What about God? Why didn’t He stop me? How could He let me do something so stupid? My life could have been so different. So much better. So much happier. And now it won’t be because I can’t turn back the clock! How is this possible???
To feel regret for what you could have done and should have done is very real. To truly come to terms with the sober reality that your bad decision irrevocably changed the course of history for your and others is really hard.
And to philosophically appreciate that your free will choices are so powerful that they can derail even God’s plans is brilliant, and brutally honest.
But it’s also heretical.
If a person believes that his bad decision led to a world that God didn’t want, then he is essentially saying that he is God because according to him, his will can override God’s will, which is, of course, absurd.
If God is (a) All-Good and (b) All-Powerful, then whatever unfolds for any one person on the micro-scale, and for the whole world on the macro-scale, must be, by definition, the best possible scenario. Saying that a given scenario could actually be better than it is, would imply either that (a) God didn’t care about us enough to make it better, or (b) He somehow couldn’t make it better even if He wanted to.
Neither of these options are acceptable (See Ramchal, 138 Openings of Wisdom §2). Such a God is no God at all.
The challenge is that life can get very tough, most often due to bad decisions people have made. How can we wrap our heads around this?
If I make a bad decision and have to live with the consequences, this is God acting as judge. When He gives me time, before I suffer the consequences of my own making, to get my act together, and when He gives me a chance to rebuild having grown from the experience of my failures — this is Him showing His love for me. If He were truly out to get me, He wouldn’t give me second chances, or even the luxury to contemplate my mistakes.
One of the refrains that runs through the Selichot prayers that lead up to Yom Kippur for 40 days, and also marks the culmination of Yom Kippur in its last minutes — recited with great intensity seven times by the chazzan (leader) and then the congregation — is deceptively simple:
It seems like a pretty innocuous statement because we know that Hashem is God. What are you trying to say?
Here’s what it means:
God has many names. Each one connotes a particular relationship through which He relate to us. For example, the name “Elohim” means “Judge” (as it does here). On the other hand, Hashem’s proper Name i.e. Hashem (י–ה–ו–ה) refers to He Himself — in His unconditional love for us.
When we make the statement that “Hashem is Elohim,” we’re not saying something trivial at all, we are driving into ourselves that the One Whose judgment has been challenging for us, loves us unconditionally. If we’ve suffered in the “school of hard knocks” as the result of mistakes we’ve made, it’s because we weren’t learning those lessons in the ivory tower of abstract studies. Apparently, we had to enroll for a semester in the “school of hard knocks” to earn those credits.
The Talmud teaches somewhat shockingly that:
Ideas we read in books or hear from teachers are often too abstract for us to be able to set our feet upon them, and lead our lives according to them. Isn’t this is the goal, ultimately? That what we know to be true becomes the ground we stand on?
One year ago, on October 7th, the State of Israel and Jews around the world were left in shock by mistakes made, observations overlooked, and an overconfidence that left us vulnerable beyond our imaginations. In retrospect, it’s clear that we had to learn the hard way. The proof is that we had to learn the hard way. Although more people in the military and government still have to take responsibility for their mistakes and oversights, the fact that Israel is now acting with a decisiveness and resolve that we haven’t seen in decades, and is using the knowledge gleaned from Hamas in Gaza to destroy the even greater capabilities of Hezbollah in Lebanon — we learned all of this the hard way, but the point is: we learned it. We should have regrets, but they should be subsumed in a larger gratitude that Hashem ultimately got us to learn what we had to learn and take further steps to become who we have to become.
Although remorse is a critical step in teshuva and personal change, it must be couched within a much larger sense of feeling loved and supported. Part of this is appreciating that God has given us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes, and perhaps an even deeper appreciation for God allowing us to make the mistake in the first place. Apparently, without making that mistake, we would have never learned the lesson, and never become the people we are today.1
With this sense, we can already perceive, even before Yom Kippur has begun, why Sukkot, the time of our joy, is right after it.
הָפַכְתָּ מִסְפְּדִי לְמָחוֹל לִי פִּתַּחְתָּ שַׂקִּי וַתְּאַזְּרֵנִי שִׂמְחָה׃
You turned my lament into dancing,
you undid my sackcloth and girded me with joy,לְמַעַן יְזַמֶּרְךָ כָבוֹד וְלֹא יִדֹּם ה׳ אֱלֹקי לְעוֹלָם אוֹדֶךָּ׃
Note: this mindset only works retrospectively: because I failed to make the right decision, I apparently needed to acquire more clarity in order to not repeat this mistake again.
But this mindset won’t work into the future as a license to throw caution into the wind: insofar as I do know enough to do the right thing now, I don’t need to learn the hard way in the school of hard knocks.
(Without getting into it, herein lies the error of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.)