Tag: Forgiveness

We are near the finish line of the עשרת ימי תשובה  (Aseret Yemei Teshuvah) —the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Each year, I look forward to choosing a personal growth goal, something general enough to guide my interactions with students, teachers, parents, colleagues, and the broader community. By sharing this publicly, I hope it inspires others to reflect on their own growth and adds a layer of public accountability to keep me honest.

At least once a week, I compose the perfect social media post in my head. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s biting. Sometimes it’s provocative. It’s always about a topic I care deeply about, something with real-world impact and significance. But each time, after writing it, I delete it.

I am jealous of people who live in outward philosophical purity. These people tend to fall into two categories. Some are rabbis serving in pulpits who have managed to align their personal beliefs with their communal roles so seamlessly that they are able to be their truest selves, both personally and professionally, without compromise.

Jealous.

Then, there are those who prioritize their philosophical purity above all else. They either carve out professional spaces that align with their values, or they are unafraid of facing the consequences when their values conflict with their roles.

Jealous.

This may seem like an odd choice for teshuvah—repentance for not being more provocative or polarizing. But I worry that in trying to balance discretion and authenticity, I end up standing for nothing. Silence is not neutrality. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” Remaining silent, especially when something needs to be said, isn’t neutrality—it’s complicity.

Here’s an example:

In 2016, we were living in Florida during the election, and my older daughter wanted us to put out a lawn sign for our preferred candidate. (Notice how I’m still hedging?) I had to consider carefully whether it was wise, as someone running a school in a divided community, to do something so public. In the end, we put out the sign. But even then, I said nothing in person or online. Why? I didn’t want to create unnecessary tension in a divided workplace and culture. And yet, I’m 99% sure that anyone who’s ever met me, or spent five minutes researching me, could easily guess my political views. And still, I said nothing.

There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to insert personal politics into a professional setting where it’s not welcome. The question I wrestle with is whether, as a private individual who holds a communal role, it’s wrong to express personal views. Is there a meaningful distinction between what I espouse as “head of school” and what I espouse as “Jon Mitzmacher”? My heart says there should be; my head says that’s wishful thinking.

Pirkei Avot reminds us, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Pirkei Avot 1:14). I cannot reconcile the way I am raising my daughters with my own silence. I cannot advocate for students to be civically active while avoiding the same. I cannot run a school based on deeply held principles and then be afraid to live those values beyond the school walls.

So, my goal for this year is to take a step—to dip a toe into the waters of personal expression. Nothing dramatic is on the horizon, and it’s possible that whatever I do say will yield no ripple or echo. But I’ll take a whistle in the wind over silence. As Rav Kook once said, “I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent.”

I don’t want to look back and wonder why I chose to say nothing when I had so much to say.

Additionally, during this time of introspection, let me take this opportunity to ask forgiveness for anything I have done – purposely or unknowingly – to cause offense or upset during the last year.  I am sincerely sorry and ask for your forgiveness.  As you ponder the purpose of this season for you and your family, I hope you find the time for introspection and the inspiration for the teshuvah you are seeking.  From my family to yours, wishing you a tzom kal (easy fast) and a day of meaning.

G’mar chatimah tovah.

We are right now near the finish line of the עשרת ימי תשובה‎ – the ten days of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  Each year, I look forward to the opportunity to pick a personal growth goal general enough to my work with students, teachers, parents, colleagues, community, etc.  By doing this publicly, I hope, it will inspire others to think about how they wish to grow, and provide me with a little public accountability to keep me honest.

This past Rosh Hashanah presented me with the strangest and strongest sense memory – or, perhaps, palpable wave of nostalgia that I can ever remember.  (Forgive this American for making a Thanksgiving reference, choose the memory that works for you.)  I can smell, taste and even feel that sense of “coming home” that only comes from having left home first.  For me, the strongest such memories come from returning home from university for Thanksgiving or Passover, or as I got older, coming home with a friend (girlfriend or otherwise) to spend a holiday at the home I grew up in with my parents.  At some point, what was once routine – the same house with the same people – totally transforms.  If I was to make a Jewish analogy, it takes something that was khol (weekday/mundane) into something kadosh (holy).  And I had almost forgotten how that felt until my older daughter Eliana came home from Queens University for Rosh Hashanah…

Sure, she had only been gone for two weeks and, yes, she’s been away from home for much longer stretches before.  And, yes, who knows what her future post-university holds.  But the feeling of anticipation for her arrival and the giddiness of having her home transformed what a month earlier had been the same four people in the same house from the regular to the special – its fleeting nature made our time together feel like a holiday.

Isn’t all time fleeting?  Don’t we all look back on our family journeys and wonder how it could be that we are at this stage when just a minute ago we were at that stage?  Wasn’t she just born?  Learned how to walk and talk?  Start Kindergarten?  Become a Bat Mitzvah?  Graduate High School?  How can she be that old when I’m not?

Each moment cannot be a holiday, of course, otherwise it would lose its meaning.  But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t or shouldn’t try to elevate the everyday miracles we take for granted into moments of liminality.  And so when I think about teshuvah and seeking “forgiveness” during this time of year, I’m sorry that I have not taken the time or the energy to appreciate what is right in front of me – a wife to treasure, daughters to savor, friends to enjoy, a job which brings me deep fulfillment, and more.  As someone who lost his father too young (as if there is any other way), I should already know better.  But I’m human and, thus, prone to error.

Let this be the year that I spend ten less minutes returning emails and ten more minutes in classrooms with children.  Let this be the year that I spend one less hour drowning in administrivia and one more hour building genuine relationship with a teacher.  Let this be the year that I send more proactive expressions of gratitude to parents than reactive responses to inevitable issues.  Let this be the year that I give myself permission to leave work while the sun still shines to take time to be with friends.  Let this be the year that “work-life balance” moves from cliché to creed.

In the end, let me be sorry now for all the ways in which I have failed to appreciate the opportunity to transform the everyday into moments of meaning so that my sorrow later not become a regret too late to remedy.

Additionally, during this time of introspection, let me take this opportunity to ask forgiveness for anything I have done – purposely or unknowingly – to cause offense or upset during the last year.  I am sincerely sorry and ask for your forgiveness.  As you ponder the purpose of this season for you and your family, I hope you find the time for introspection and the inspiration for the teshuvah you are seeking.  From my family to yours, wishing you a tzom kal (easy fast) and a day of meaning.

G’mar chatimah tovah.

We are right now at the finish line of the עשרת ימי תשובה‎ – the ten days of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  Each year, I look forward to the opportunity to pick a personal growth goal general enough to my work with students, teachers, parents, colleagues, community, etc.  [Last year at this time, I blogged out my personal growth goals as well.]  By doing this publicly, I hope, it will inspire others to think about how they wish to grow and provide me with a little public accountability to keep me honest.

Of course it feels a bit chutzphadik to name yet another growth goal, as if I have somehow achieved total success tackling my last two!  (I can assure you that I have not – and if you reread the last two years’ posts, you’ll be able to see that for yourself!)  And yet, despite my fits and starts and failures – and occasional successes – I do find value in this annual exercise and encourage you to share your own growth goals with whomever and in whatever ways you are comfortable.  It feels good!

So this year, I am going take a more literal approach and actually focus in on how I would like to do better in the actual spiritual work of the High Holidays.  I will be honest and say that my thinking here has been highly influenced by one of my rabbinical school courses which conveniently was about the liturgy for the High Holidays.  I have been marinating in readings and conversation about what this time of year is truly supposed to be about and have been thinking deeply about how to incorporate a more traditional understanding of teshuvah and forgiveness into my personal practice.

Repentance contemplated, and not verbalized, is valueless. – Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Wow.

For this class, I read On Repentance in the Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik by Pinchas H. Peli, published in 1980, and this was – for me – the money quote.

Soloveitchik goes into lots of detail and scriptural sources to prove the point, but to the degree that I use my time during Yammim Noraim to engage in repentance at all, I certainly do not put almost any energy into its verbalization.  His idea here is that it is not sufficient to repent merely as part of an inner dialogue with either oneself or with God; that to make it real, it must have a physical manifestation – you have to say it out loud, or perhaps put it in writing, but you cannot truly do it without putting it into the universe.  Now in the classic distinction between the sins one commits against one’s fellow-person, and the sins one commits against God (which I will discuss below), it is easier to imagine how this might work.  I may not do it each year or with each person, but the idea that I would seek forgiveness from those I may have wronged automatically requires me to put thought into words.  Ideally, I would seek out each person for a heart-to-heart conversation, but a letter or an email would at least put physical form to my repentance.  That makes sense.  But what about my wrongs that are not directed at other people?

I do not believe that I have ever tried to speak out loud or even put in writing my annual thoughts and feelings about repenting for the all the ways I fall short.  At best, I try to use my time and my prayer to engage in an inner dialogue that is sometimes aimed towards God, but I am seriously contemplating adding this notion into my practice as I gear up for next season.  I am not sure whether I would carve out time and space to vocalize or simply to write it out, but if doing so takes me one step farther in being the person I yearn to be rather than the normal, faltering half-steps I normally accomplish, I will have gained much more from this class than knowledge.

 

So during this time of introspection, let me take this opportunity to ask forgiveness for anything I have done – purposely or unknowingly – to cause offense or upset during the last year.  I am sincerely sorry and ask for your forgiveness.  As you ponder the purpose of this season for you and your family, I hope you find the time for introspection and the inspiration for the teshuvah you are seeking.  From my family to yours, wishing you a tzom kal (easy fast) and a day of meaning.

G’mar chatimah tovah.

I am going to try really hard to blog out some thoughts, pictures and videos from our amazing COVID-friendly 4th Annual Middle School Retreat!

We are right now in the עשרת ימי תשובה‎ – the ten days of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  Each year, I look forward to the opportunity to pick a personal growth goal general enough to my work with students, teachers, parents, colleagues, community, etc.  [Last year at this time, I blogged out my personal growth goals as well.]  By doing this publicly, I hope, it will inspire others to think about how they wish to grow and provide me with a little public accountability to keep me honest.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.

I worry, in general, that one of the challenges we have in the world is a genuine empathy gap.  I think that we find it harder and harder to feel, show and teach empathy.  I think that COVID only makes this harder.  But instead of focusing on others or the culture or the pandemic, this time of year calls upon us to focus on ourselves.  And I want to spend this year shrinking my empathy gap across the stakeholder groups I encounter…

Students

School came really easily to me.  Sure I had some social concerns around adolescence (I am sure being forced to wear headgear to school did not help), but by-the-by school was a comfortable and safe place for me to be.  I had a secure social group and I got lots of positive reinforcement from teachers who recognized and appreciated my natural (and in no way earned) skill set and performance.  I fully appreciate that my experience of school is not that of all, or even most, of my students.  Part of my job is spending meaningful time with students who don’t find school easy, safe or enjoyable.  Their discomfort is made manifest in all kinds of ways – some productive, some less so – but I am making it a goal this year to start with empathy.

Before I leap to judgement or into problem-solving or consequences, I want to do a better job trying to understand their lived experiences.  I hope that helps deepen my relationships with the very students who would benefit from it the most.  I hope it helps me be more constructive in my feedback and my response to students in distress.  I hope it makes me a better principal.

Teachers

I was never a teacher.  My path to day school leadership was highly atypical.  Although I did have a brief stint as a (very) part-time teacher in the late 90s at a Jewish day school in Los Angeles, I came into Jewish day school sideways.  After a brief career in Jewish camping and some time as a congregational educator, my first full-time job in Jewish day school was as a founding head.  I was never a full-time teacher and I never worked my way up from teacher to administrator to principal to head.  I came in as the head and that’s all I have ever been.  This unorthodox (no pun intended) path has its advantages and its disadvantages.  I have always found the biggest disadvantage to be in my lack of empathy.  Do I truly understand what I am asking of teachers if I have never had to live it myself?

We have set the bar very high for teachers at OJCS, with the teachers themselves often leading the way.  COVID has only made it harder to reach towards our North Stars.  This year, I want to make sure that I dedicate time in all my teacher discussions and encounters towards building empathy.  Am I asking the right questions to truly understand the lived experience our expectations demand?

Before I leap to judgement or into problem-solving or accountability, I want to do a better job trying to understand their lived experiences.  I hope that helps deepen my relationships with the very teachers who would benefit from it the most.  I hope it helps me be more constructive in my feedback and my response to teachers in distress.  I hope it makes me a better head of school.

Parents

I am a parent.

I am struggling with how to best express this next part, because I for sure do not wish to imply that my marriage or my children or my family doesn’t have all the same stressors and challenges and flaws as everyone else’s.  It definitely does!  But I think it is fair to describe my marriage as healthy and my children as fairly typical and my family as relatively functional.  Luck has as much to do with this as anything else…

I say this only to state that I recognize that life and luck may not be equally distributed across all families and there are parents in our school and community who are dealing with challenges that I have not experienced.  As the head of school, I am sometimes privy to the burdens parents carry, but just as often, I am completely unaware.  When a parent comes forward with a question or a concern or to provide feedback or for help, I want make sure that I lead with empathy.  Have I done enough work to truly understand a parent’s experience or perspective before I offer thoughts of my own?

Before I leap to judgement or into problem-solving, I want to do a better job trying to understand their lived experiences.  I hope that helps deepen my relationships with the very parents who would benefit from it the most.  I hope it helps me be more constructive in my feedback and my response to parents in distress.  I hope it makes me a better leader.

So during this time of introspection, let me take this opportunity not only to ask forgiveness in general for anything I have done – purposely or unknowingly – to cause offense or upset during the last year, but let me specifically apologize for any moment in which I didn’t show empathy towards you.  I am sincerely sorry and ask for your forgiveness.

As you ponder the purpose of this season for you and your family, I hope you find the time for introspection and the inspiration for the teshuvah you are seeking.  From my family to yours, wishing you a tzom kal (easy fast) and a day of meaning.

G’mar chatimah tovah.

I don’t know if it is the schedule, the calendar or my unconscious, but I noticed today, that in just about each year that I have blogged, that I skip from some kind of “Shofar, So Good” blog post heading into Rosh Hashanah right into some kind of “Marching With Fruits & Vegetables” blog post heading into Sukkot (spoiler alert for next week).  Is it just timing or bandwidth that causes me to skip over Yom Kippur?  Is there something about the “Day of Atonement” of which I struggle to find words?

In the hope of answering those questions, at least for myself, I’m going to use this week’s blog post to lean into forgiveness…

Repentance (Hebrew: תשובה, literally, “return”, pronounced “tshuva” or “teshuva”) is one element of atoning for sin in Judaism. Judaism recognizes that everybody sins on occasion, but that people can stop or minimize those occasions in the future by repenting for past transgressions. Thus, the primary purpose of repentance in Judaism is ethical self transformation.^[1]

The Mishnah states: To a man who says, ‘I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent’, Yom Kippur brings no atonement. For sins against God, Yom Kippur brings atonement. For sins against one’s fellow man, Yom Kippur brings no atonement until he has become reconciled with the fellow man he wronged.^[3]

Before we can ask God to forgive us for how we treat each other, we have the responsibility to not only ask those we have hurt for forgiveness, but to go the extra mile to work on ourselves, so that we are less likely to behave in unkind or unethical ways in the future. That is the “ethical self-transformation” referred to above, and that is the work of this season.  It is easy (and sometimes not so easy) to say “I’m sorry,”; it is hard to grow yourself into the person you want to be.  But that is what this time of year asks us to try to do…

Without falling guilty to oversharing or self-psychologizing, in the spirit of these עשרת ימי תשובה‎ (ten days of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), I thought I would pick one thing general enough to my work with students, teachers, parents, colleagues, community, etc., to name as an area for personal growth this year. Doing this publicly, I hope, will inspire others to think about how they wish to grow this year and will provide me with a little public accountability to keep me honest.

A confession.

I am painfully shy.

That is either completely obvious to you or a complete surprise to you, depending on the kinds of interactions you are used to having with me or how well you (think you) know me.  But it is true regardless.  I am really shy and that can leave me a bit awkward in some kinds of social situations.  Sadly, that shyness oftentimes reads as aloofness at best, arrogance at worst.  Of course, sometimes I am just being aloof or arrogant, but oftentimes, I promise that I’m not!  I’m just uncomfortably shy and rendered speechless by that discomfort.  This is not new (to me) and I have, through the years, worked out all kinds of coping mechanisms and developed workarounds that help me do what I need to in order to keep myself and my work moving forward. There are lots of ways that I would love to “self-transform” in this area and I’d like to think that I have been on a journey of self-transformation for quite a while.  But there is one specific way I want to grow this year, anchored in both an apology and a promise.

I want to be more curious.

When I reflect on conversations I have with lots of folk I encounter in my life, I find that I am easily more expressive when asked a question. I can be quite comfortable sharing my opinions, my feelings and my experiences.  In that sense, I am quite transparent.  Where I fall short is asking questions of the other.  I struggle to convey my genuine curiosity about your opinions, feelings and experiences – especially in unplanned face-to-face moments –  and it can leave the opposite impression, that I am only focused on myself and incurious about others.

So during this time of introspection, let me take this opportunity not only to ask forgiveness in general for anything I have done – purposely or unknowingly – to cause offense or upset during the last year, but let me specifically apologize for any moment in which I didn’t convey my interest or concern in you.  If you left an interaction with me not feeling heard, I am sorry.  If we had a conversation and I didn’t seem as invested in learning more about you than I was in talking about myself, I am sorry.  If you were looking to make a genuine connection and I appeared disinterested, I am sorry.  To say, “It isn’t you, it’s me,” in this case is both trite and true.

I take seriously the responsibility to role model the values and ideals of our school.  Part of what it means to “learn better together” is showing care and curiosity in the other.  Part of what it means to “take responsibility each to the other” is being aware of the concerns and needs of the other.  And part of what it means to “own our learning” is being accountable for one’s shortcomings and seeking to grow.

As you ponder the purpose of this season for you and your family, I hope you find the time for introspection and the inspiration for the teshuva you are seeking.  From my family to yours, wishing you a tzom kal (easy fast) and a day of meaning.

G’mar chatimah tovah.