By Rabbi Gidon Rothstein

One of the last gifts my father gave me was the insight that true maturity arrives when we can forgive our parents for the errors they made in raising us. We were in the middle of a passionate argument at the time—he was allowing my sister to return from a year abroad to celebrate Hanukkah with the family, and I could not convince him of the seriousness of the error in doing so—so his words did not penetrate. He unexpectedly and suddenly died during her trip home, clinching the argument in his favor, but also eliciting in me, much sooner than it might have otherwise, the forgiveness he had hoped I would learn to grant.
As I think back on that time, as I do every year around the anniversary of his death, I am still struck by how much his passing changed my view of him. While he was alive, and able to continue making mistakes that would, to my mind, repercuss to the detriment of myself and others whom we both loved, forgiveness was elusive; once he was gone, it flowed more easily than water.
The difference? True forgiveness depends on the person who acted wrongly recognizing that fact. Without an acknowledgement of sin or error (depending on whether the wrong is religious or not), repair is impossible. This is a central tenet of Jewish thought regarding repentance, and was so for centuries in Christian thought as well. The acts of penance that either religion adopted at various points in their histories were not meant as the way to expiate the sin, but as the final step—once acknowledgement and regret had been achieved—of demonstrating one’s resolve not to return to it, and/or as ways of substituting for the punishment the sin deserved.
That inability to honestly and forthrightly face one’s own failings recurs in public society so often as to suggest that it is a key challenge of our time. In what will at first seem non sequitur, let me mention that I did not vote for President Bush in the past election. For most of the campaign, I did not give the issue much thought since, as a resident of New York State, my vote would surely not count. In the final days leading up to the election, however, I came to realize that I could not in good conscience help re-elect a President whose administration had already shown a refusal to accept its errors and work sincerely to correct them, a tendency that has only increased in the time since.
This is certainly not only a Republican flaw, nor one that restricts itself to conservatives. President Clinton’s refusal to admit his wrongdoing, at points where he could have gotten away with settling Paula Jones’ original lawsuit or forthrightly apologizing for his relationship with Monica Lewinsky would have ended the issue completely, shows how hard it can be to own up to one’s flaws, even when the failure to do so itself brings further and worse punishments.
We should be repeatedly amazed by the numerous public figures who attempt to deny crimes or lapses in judgment when they are caught, despite the clear instruction of publicists that it is better to admit, apologize, and move on. The common insistence on being right, the willingness to go to the most extreme and often ridiculous lengths to avoid accepting one’s role in a mess, bears consideration.
Whether we speak in the religious terms of sin or the practical ones of misconduct, the situation is sure to arise; it’s a part of life that we will stray, maliciously or otherwise. Until we achieve perfection, we are sure to misstep, sometimes almost consciously—out of a preference for what we enjoy over what we know to be right — sometimes unwittingly and sometimes because we simply did not have the correct insight to know what to do. Acting inappropriately need not mean anything about our humanity, our sincerity, or our basic goodness.
Refusing to admit it, however, forces us to concoct sometimes elaborate explanations of how we are actually correct, leading often to situations where, as the saying goes, the cover-up is worse than the crime. I have no doubt that President Clinton would have left a much brighter legacy to history—which is not to judge that legacy, only to say that it would have been significantly greater—had he been able to confront his weakness around his sexuality.
I have no doubt—and I focus on Presidents from either side of the political aisle so as not to lose a point about life to the suspicion of political partisanship—that Americans are dying in Iraq because the current administration refuses to truly admit errors in the way the invasion/rebuilding was planned or handled. The President’s fairly cynical meeting with former Secretaries of State and Defense is a case in point, where these elder statesmen were not given any significant opportunity to voice an actual opinion.
We can recognize that regardless of what we think should currently happen in Iraq. Without promoting any particular course of action, I am confident that until we deal with the questions honestly and forthrightly, we will not be able to get to the best possible solution. Without the best possible solution, by definition more people are dying than need to.
What makes that first step of repentance so difficult, and what can we do to ease the path to achieving it? I do not generally turn to the power of love and improved self-image as cure-alls, but here it seems to provide a crucial part of the puzzle. The ability to look oneself in the mirror, admit sometimes even intensely serious wrongdoing, and to still love oneself, to feel confident that others’ love will not be withdrawn because of this act, to feel that one still has the ability to contribute to the world, can be promoted by a foundation of self-respect, of unshakeable belief in one’s worth.
While in the end that self- confidence must come from inside, there is much we as people and as a society can do to foster it. Too often, we send our leaders, cultural, religious, and political, the exact opposite message. Politicians and celebrities are taught, through bitter experience, that their hold on public opinion and attention is intensely fragile. Having mortgaged themselves to the god of public opinion—sometimes out of a desire for adulation, sometimes out of a desire to contribute positively to the world—they can never be sure that owning up to their wrong will not be the crucial misstep that will end their public career.
Baseball players who took and take steroids cannot feel confident that admitting their problem will work out for the best. Mark McGwire’s refusal to discuss his possible steroid use, Barry Bonds’ patently problematic stories about how he got steroids in his system, both bespeak a fear that their baseball life will be completely discounted should the truth of their situation come out. Had Jason Giambi not had the rebound season of this past year, it seemed clear the Yankees would have sought to use his steroid use to sever their contractual obligations to him. When Kate Moss was recently forced to face her problems with cocaine, it was not clear to anyone that her career could survive. When we make the price of failure so great, we maneuver people into situations where admission of sin becomes next to impossible.
Interestingly, the Talmud faced a similar situation completely differently. By Talmudic law, when a person steals an object, they are obligated to return the item itself as long as it exists. If, however, the thief built the item—say a large piece of wood, used as a beam—into another structure, the Rabbis instituted a rule, called takkanat hashavim, an ordinance for the benefit of penitents, allowing the thief to pay the value of the wood instead of the wood itself.
This country’s laws have similar provisions, so that a guilty plea incurs a lighter punishment than a failed not-guilty one, so that corporations who acted in concert to restrain fair trade can avoid punishment if they are the first to admit their crime, and so on. What is somewhat true in a court of law, has not filtered into society in general, where we often send a different message.
Aside from our fear of consequences, another factor may be psychology and psychiatry’s ability to explain the roots of our negative behavior. Itself valuable, since understanding the roots of our flaws can and does help us find a more effective escape from them, the endeavor can go a step too far into justification. I once read a story of a priest who was listening to a woman’s confession, in which she spent most of the time connecting her current sins to her childhood; after some time of this, the priest interrupted and asked, “My dear, do you want forgiveness or an explanation?”
Perhaps along the same lines, we may often feel that forgiveness too quickly given fosters a cynical misuse of the system by its players. Many, I suspect, currently believe that Jack Abramoff is in the process of cutting his deal with prosecutors so as to avoid the most serious consequences of his actions rather than out of any sincere desire to atone for what he did.
As a society, we need to rebuild a sense of how to deal with circumstances gone wrong. We need to help the members of our society, whether public or not, find a sense of self-confidence that is strong enough to withstand confronting their deepest failings, and that readies them to admit those forthrightly when they impinge on the public sphere. As we do so, we need to help them feel that they are not throwing their life or public position away by admitting these wrongs, and that they will benefit by a sincere admission and rejection of their past actions.
At the same time, we need to insure that we not become patsies for false confessions, alligator tears, and a skin-deep remorse. Understanding and acceptance cannot turn into a diminution of standards not only for its own sake, but precisely because that complicates reacting properly to the next miscreant who has a sincere change of heart. It is a complex mix, but one that we must undertake to foster a healthier social dynamic when our celebrities come up short.
In one sentence, my father made clear to me that he recognized that he could not only be wrong, but might even be wrong in ways he was not yet able to fathom. In the instance, perhaps sensing his impending demise, he was right; on other occasions, he agreed that he had erred, and laid for me the foundation of seeing the importance of self-honesty, even when it is painful and makes us afraid of its ramifications. And, finally, he left me a legacy of striving always to take a step that eludes many if not most of us, showing me a way that all of us, regardless of race, sex, religious affiliation, or political perspective, can immediately and easily improve our world.

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