Yom Kippur Erev –
26 September 2006
During
my summer break I read a wonderful, heart-breaking book: A Tale
of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz – arguably the greatest
contemporary Israeli writer. Amos Oz is known best for his novels,
but A Tale of Love and Darkness is a work of autobiography.
It’s a big book – 517 pages long – but contrary
to what one might think when one begins reading, it does not
tell a story of his whole life from 1939 to December 2001, when
he completed it. Instead, it centres on his first twelve years
and a half years, with a brief glimpse forwards to his move
to Kibbutz Hulda at the age of fifteen, when he changed his
last name from Klausner, to Oz. While the book centres on the
author’s personal experience in the most profound way,
it also tells the tale of the emergence of the State of Israel.
On another occasion, I will return to that larger story, but
this evening I want to focus on a journey that is at the heart
of A Tale of Love and Darkness, although it is not explicitly
explored – a journey that brings us all here this evening,
on Erev Yom Kippur: the journey of Forgiveness and Atonement.
It emerges slowly, as this extraordinary, complex book weaves
back and forth in time, between the recent generations of the
author’s family – the Klausners on his father’s
side and the Mussmans on his mother’s side – that
the parents of Amos Oz, not only came from radically different
backgrounds – the Klausners were right wing Zionist Revisionists
and the Mussmans were Socialist Zionists – but that Yehuda
Arieh Klausner, and his wife, Fania, were utterly different
personalities and quite unsuited: He the brilliant scholar and,
somewhat pedantic etymologist and librarian; she, equally intelligent,
but a great story-teller, with a sensitive, romantic soul. The
young Amos grew up as an only child in a one-bedroom ‘tiny
low-ceilinged ground-floor flat’ (p.1) in Jerusalem, and
as the story unfolds it becomes clearer and clearer, that this
cramped home crammed full of books, was his mother’s prison:
A fragile creature, overwhelmed with the loss of her past life
in Poland and alienated from this strange new country, where
she now lived, Fania Klausner was prone to deep bouts of depression.
She eventually committed suicide, at the age of thirty-eight,
when on a rare visit on her own to her sister Haya in Tel Aviv,
during Saturday night and Sunday, 6th January 1952. Her son,
Amos, who was with his father in Jerusalem at the time, was
twelve and a half years old.
A Tale of Love and Darkness is exactly that – and deeply
moving and shattering to read. Of course, Amos Oz had to write
this book – to tell the tale that shattered his young
life. In the midst of the very last paragraph, having painstakingly
re-traced his mother’s last hours, Amos Oz, the son, tells
us what the young twelve year old would have done to stop his
mother taking her own life (pp.516-7):
If I had been there with her in that room overlooking the back
yard in Haya and Tsvi’s flat at that moment, at half past
eight or a quarter to nine on that Saturday evening, I would
certainly have tried my hardest to explain to her why she mustn’t.
And if I did not succeed I would have done everything possible
to stir her compassion, to make her take pity on her only child.
I would have cried and I would have pleaded without any shame
and I would have hugged her knees, I might even have pretended
to faint or I might have hit and scratched myself till the blood
flowed as I had seen her do in moments of despair. Or I would
have attacked her like a murderer, I would have smashed a vase
over her head without hesitation. Or hit her with the iron that
stood on a shelf in a corner of the room. Or taken advantage
of her weakness to lie on top of her and tie her hands behind
her back, and taken away all those pills and tablets and sachets
and solutions and potions and syrups of hers and destroyed the
lot of them. But I was not allowed to be there. I was not even
allowed to go to her funeral.
Grief. Rage. Guilt. There are no words – and yet, Amos
Oz finds them. What did he do with his overwhelming feelings?
Seventy pages earlier, Amos Oz opens chapter 55 with the words:
‘I killed him particularly by changing my name.’
(p.446). Of course, the young Amos was angry with his father,
too – and his move to a kibbutz at the age of fifteen
was a direct challenge, not only to Yehudah Arieh Klausner’s
complete immersion in the life of the mind, but also to his
right-wing political convictions. Amos Oz doesn’t explain
why he chose the name Oz. Like so many Hebrew words, Oz may
be translated by several English ones: strength, power, might
and violence, as well as vigour – and also courage, valour
and heroism – as well as fortress and refuge; and: splendour,
glory and praise. Perhaps for the young teenager, Amos Klausner,
the word Oz, above all denoted ‘strength’ –
the strength he needed to endure his loss – and to struggle
with his powerful, tumultuous feelings.
Somehow, Amos Oz found the strength. Yehuda Arieh Klausner
died in October 1970, fifteen years after his son left home.
Meanwhile Amos Oz had met and married his wife, Nily, on Kibbutz
Hulda and had two daughters and a son. He called his eldest
daughter, Fania. In recent years he moved from the kibbutz to
the desert town of Arad, where he now lives.
Why did Amos Oz, the brilliant novelist and passionate advocate
for peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples write
his ‘Tale of Love and Darkness’? Amos Oz is not
an observant Jew – in fact, he is as vehemently critical
of what he see as the extreme nationalism of the ultra-Orthodox
groups in Israel as he is of Israeli government policy. And
yet, it seems to me that this intensely personal story is an
act of atonement, or, rather as the Hebrew word kippur suggests,
an act of ‘covering’ – a journey into the
searing heartland of the ‘love and darkness’ that
enveloped him as a child in an attempt to find a way of binding
the deep wound within him and covering it over.
From the perspective of Jewish teaching, kippur, atonement
is a process – a process that involves forgiveness: As
we say in the oft-repeated litany of this unique day: s’lach
lanu, m’chal lanu, kapper lanu – forgive us, pardon
us and grant us atonement. On Yom Kippur we seek forgiveness
from God. But this day holds another possibility for us: the
opportunity to grant forgiveness to those who have wronged us.
We learn from the Talmud, in the tractate dealing with the laws
for Yom Kippur, that if a person comes to us three times to
apologise for the wrong they have done, then the injured party
is obligated to forgive them (Yoma 87a)*. But, of course, so
often in life, the person who has hurt us does not come to us
seeking our pardon – in fact, they often don’t even
realise what they have done – and once they have died,
the possibility of reconciliation with them has gone. And this
is also the case the other way around: From a Jewish point of
view, forgiveness can never be vicarious: That is why it is
not possible for those who did not experience the Shoah, the
Holocaust, to forgive the Nazi perpetrators on behalf of those
who were killed. Only the injured party, themselves, can grant
forgiveness to the person or persons that have harmed them.
So much for Jewish teaching. Each one of us has the power within
us to forgive, but do we also always feel able to forgive? Has
Amos Oz, the abandoned child, been able to forgive his mother
– and his father, who did not know how to save her? Was
writing about the events of his young life an exercise in forgiveness?
Did the process of committing his story to paper enable him
to forgive her? How does a child forgive the mother who abandoned
him? These were some of the questions I was left with after
I finished reading that heart-wrenching ‘tale of love
and darkness’.
And as I asked those questions I realised that they were not
only evoked by the story of Amos Oz. My God-daughter, Olivia,
now three years old, is the adopted child of one of my oldest,
dearest friends. She was born in China, and found abandoned
at around three weeks old. Until her adoption, she was cared
for well at the Orphanage in China, and arrived in England,
a healthy almost-one year old. Olivia is a wonderful child –
bright, spirited, and full of fun. Being brought up as a Jew
by her adoptive Jewish mother, with the support of her non-Jewish
adoptive father, and well-acquainted with Jewish life, both
at home and at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s
Wood, now three, Olivia has just started attending a Sunday
‘Chinese School’, and is beginning to connect with
her Chinese inheritance, and become aware of her complex identity.
One day, the only parents she will ever know are going to tell
her how she came to be with them: How is Olivia going to come
to terms with the fact that her birth-mother abandoned her?
Will she be able to forgive her? Olivia couldn’t be more
loved and supported – but not even her loving adoptive
parents, can do anything more than accompany her on that painful
journey.
Fortunately, very, very few of us will have been abandoned
by our mothers – or our fathers – so completely.
But for all of us, for all children, however old we may be right
now, even for those who have enjoyed loving relationships with
their parents, at one time or another, all of us have felt wounded
by the people closest to us. And if we can honestly say that
we have never been hurt by our mother or father, than someone
else with whom we are closely connected – a brother or
a sister, a son or a daughter, a husband or wife or partner
– will have either, consciously or unconsciously, harmed
us in some way. What do we do with those painful feelings? And
when the person who has hurt us so deeply is no longer around,
so that, even if we felt able to bring our pain to them, that
option is not possible, what then? Are we able to forgive? Are
we able to cover up the wound we bear, ourselves?
Today, this special, long day we call Yom Kippur, carries with
it the promise that we will feel forgiven at the end of it,
if we seek forgiveness with our whole hearts. But most of us
don’t just need to feel forgiven; we also need to forgive,
which is much, much harder – or at least, to be able to
cover the wound within us and begin to heal. Of course, if someone
close to us has harmed us and has not acknowledged the damage
they’ve inflicted, or made amends to us in any way, we
may feel we cannot and will not forgive them. But, I know from
my own experience, that the burden of not forgiving is a very
hard one to bear – so heavy that it can crush the spirit,
and press painfully against our wounds, inflaming them almost
beyond repair. The choice not to forgive compounds the damage,
ensuring that we continue to live in the shadow of past experiences,
and are unable to fully inhabit the possibilities of the present
– or, indeed, to feel hopeful about the future.
And yet the questions still remain: How do we find a way of
forgiving others? What makes it possible for us to be able to
forgive? There are no certain answers. But I have a sense, from
my own experience, of what supports our ability to forgive;
The perspective of Time; our own endurance and survival despite
our suffering; our experience of true love; and where there
has been a deep relationship with the person who hurt us so
profoundly, the memory of the gifts that we have received from
them. Perhaps, in the case of Amos Oz: the gift of love, and
also, the gift of story-telling – which, alongside the
abandonment, is also part of his mother’s legacy to him.
These elements can help us to be able to forgive those who
have harmed us – and there is also something else that
makes forgiveness possible – our own acknowledgement that
we need to forgive. Yom Kippur, this unique day out of time,
outside the routine of our daily lives, provides us all with
the chance not only to pause amidst the hectic busy-ness of
our every day concerns and step off the treadmill for twenty-five
hours, but also to put down the burdens weighing us down for
a while – and to feel what it might be like to let them
go. Of course, it’s a struggle, and like our ancestor,
Jacob, emerging from his night of wrestling with a limp (Genesis
32:26; 32), we will still bear the scars of past hurts. But
if we can begin to acknowledge that we have the power of forgiveness
within us, then forgiveness can be a healing balm, not only
when we receive it, but also when we grant it – even posthumously.
May this special day of kippur, of ‘covering’, help
us to find a way to lay to rest the demons of the past and begin
again. And let us say: Amen.
Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom
Verei’ut
Erev Yom Kippur Shacharit – 10th Tishri 5766 – 12th
October 2005
*Rabbi Yose bar Hanina said: He who beseeches his injured fellow
to pardon him ought not to beseech him more than three times,
as it is said, I pray thee, forgive, I pray thee now, the transgression
of the servant of the God of thy father” (Gen. 50:17).
If his fellow has died, he shall bring ten men and stand them
at the grave, and say, “I have sinned to the Eternal One,
the God of Israel, and to this man [so and so] whom I have injured.”
(Yoma 87a)
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