Sparks of regret. It’s hard to imagine a span of a life not including many of these.
A life. How about a year, a month, a week?
There are some philosophies which suggest “no regrets.” Never have regrets, that we shouldn’t look back.
I think it’s fair to say that that is not a very Jewish perspective. The whole notion of teshuvah, of repentance, around which the Yamim Noraim, the High Holy Day experience is centered, is in a sense about forming a healing relationship to regret. A healing relationship and a growth relationship. Those pangs of regret become the invitations to explore what has gone wrong, where we’ve gone wrong, and how we can do better next time.
The word teshuvah doesn’t just mean repentance, it means return. We return to the moments about which we feel a sense of regret, seeking to understand what happened, course correcting, soothing ourselves into a new pathway of being.
The seminal medieval jewish thinker Maimonides, Rambam, believed that teshuvah was, in fact, not complete, until we found ourselves in a similar position to the initial error, and went in a different direction—chose a different path. The notion of no regrets is, in a sense, not conducive to this explicit desire for course correction, and, in a sense, not conducive to the hopeful belief that human beings have the capacity to change and evolve. We very much do, Judaism says.
This doesn’t mean we should dwell on our regrets—what eastern traditions apparently call “grasping,” which, as Rabbi Richard Hirsch says, “leads us to dwell on ‘being a bad person,’ rather than on accepting that ‘we have done a bad thing,’” at which point holding onto the regret becomes a source of suffering rather than an invitation to grow.
But we can, he continues, as the Hasidim do, see bad things that happen, to us or by us, as “hav[ing] within them a lingering if hidden spark of transformative holiness.”
One means of facilitating this transformation, Jewish tradition says, is to be edim, witnesses—witnesses to what is going on for us in the course of our making the choices that we regret.
The Shema, the central call of Jewish prayer that we chanted earlier tonight, as found in the Torah, has two letters that are written in larger script than the rest: Ayin-Dalet. Ed. Witness. A suggestion here is that the call to listen is correspondingly a call to witness: to listen, to witness, to what is happening inside of us during those moments we might regret.
A classic example of this is when we lose our patience, when we are short tempered. (Raising hand as someone for whom this can be an issue.) The Jewish tradition of Musar, which literally means correction, again signifying the importance of regret as a first step, and which refers to an ethical-spiritual approach to living an intentional life, has much to say about patience and bearing witness. As leading contemporary Musar thinker Alan Morinis writes, “Being able to call on patience… depends on having cultivated your awareness of the telltale signs of impatience so you can spot them right in the instant that they begin to stir. The practice is to witness and name the feelings just as they come up—which requires that you say to yourself, “I’m feeling impatient” or “There’s impatience.”” The same is true for anger, fear, anxiety. “Just by forming those words,” he continues, “you are holding open at least a tiny crack through which the light of consciousness can still shine, and if you can do that, then at that point what is going to happen to that impatience is suddenly no longer” an automatic reflex.
Bearing witness allows for you to be aware of the force that so often has control—not to squash it or eradicate it, but to be aware of its presence so that it does not blindly lead. Bearing witness, Jewish tradition says, before a reaction is made, can serve as an antidote to this inner blindness.
The goal, according to Jewish tradition, is not to have no reaction. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the father of the musar movement, once said, ““As long as one lives a life of calmness and tranquility in the service of God, it is clear that he is remote from true service.” In other words, the goal is not to be some monotonous bot, having no feelings or reactivity. Our reactions are genuine, forged in our souls and in the rhythms of our lives. But the goal may be to recognize the distinction between our reaction and our response. Our reaction is what happens within us—the lit spark, the burning flame; our response is how we channel that reaction—in partnership with our values, our reflections, our conversation with the divine—into the world around us.
So often regret, impatience, ill-temper, comes when we have no distinction between our reaction and response. We honor our reaction—our reaction to unfairness or injustice, the hair trigger alarm which says something not so good might be happening—and we bear witness to it, entering into conversation with it from all the other perspectives we bring to bear, harmonizing them into one, and then we respond, tradition seems to suggest.
Easier said than done, right. Musar practice believes you’ve got to train for this. That’s where the word discipline comes from—spiritual discipline. And might I add you’re participating in that discipline right now. The practice of Shabbat, the practice of tefilah, of prayer—both practices that involve slowing ourselves down, holding space for reflection, opening ourselves up to shema, to listen, to the oneness flowing through us, connecting us all—bearing witness to what is going on inside of is, in tune with it so that it does not drive us but so that we are in conversation with it.
Regret can sometimes be the invitation we need to explore these dimensions. Regret shouldn’t lead us to try to opt out of the vicissitudes of human experience altogether. As Morinis writes, “Mussar doesn’t point us toward a complete transcendence of who we are, as if the goal is to become something other than human, like an angel.” It points us to the rhythm, the day-in-day-out knowledge that each day we will be confronted by the usual trying moments, that we may ride our internal roller coaster, but through witnessing, we forge a response imbued with holiness.
Shabbat Shalom.
