Thursday, February 3, 2011

September 19, 2007

It's been several years since i wrote this. initially, i believe, they were just words bred from my subconscious. questions that were dormant and were destined to mean something only when I'd begin to understand them. and the better i get to know my questions, the answers only grow more elusive.



September 19, 2007

Is there any one mistake you’d give anything to take back? One scene in your life, you’d pay dearly to erase? Is there one turning point in your life that took you to the wrong side of the tracks? One where you wish you hadn't swerved?

It’s almost Yom Kippur; the most significant day of the entire year. A lifetime in a day. A lifetime of the collection of shame, regret, nullification and raw hope for something better out of yourself and life. It’s the day apologies actually mean something. We’re kneeling before a G-d that prays that we pray to Him. It seems we have it made. G-d tells us that if we do it right we could be forgiven. That’s it, completely forgiven, just like that. For all our sins, our mistakes, our errors in judgment . For anything we’ve ever thought, said or done. So we can go to sleep with no stains on our conscious. So we could count our sheep and fall into a fantasy land where our sins miraculously morph into flying ponies.

Is it that simple, truly? Are sins really like chalk on a blackboard? Can you just erase mistakes, like you do hang man survivors and math equations? But where does that white dust go when it seems to be gone? It never quite disappears. It stays, lingers around you, inside you. No deed goes unnoticed. Unpunished, maybe. But it’s all seen, all heard, all felt. By someone. Secret wounds don’t exist, neither do they vanish. So where do our sins go when G-d forgives us? What do they become?

True, G-d forgives us. Because it’s easy. Because he can. But does cleaning up the debris ever change the fact that the train crashed? That people got hurt? The question remains, just because G-d forgives us, does that mean we can forgive what happened? Does that mean we can forgive ourselves?

8 comments:

Sima said...

powerful, i think all of us humans go through this train of thought at some point
i think this topic is discussed a lot in chassidic philosophy....

Unknown said...

would love to learn about it with u sima

Mushkie said...

interesting thought...and the worst is, something slips out, you ask the other person to forgive you and they do, truly, but you're always killing yourself over it and there's nothing you can do...but i heard an interesting thought once, yknow the ribono shel olam at the beginning of krias shma...you also have to forgive yourself.

Feivel ben Mishael said...

they are elevated above seder histalshelus.... no?

Unknown said...

sounds about rite...ill take your word for it

Chan said...

What is that image from? Like what equation is that?

Anonymous said...

Are sins bad? Or just a tool for us to test gd? There is so much talk of hate and evil when sinning against gd and never once is love mentioned. I might just be a lenient Jew but why must gd be portrayed as this menacing angry sensitive hateful person, why is it so hard to believe that yes you did a sin learn from it, move on and become greater because of it. That gd loves us unconditionally whether we sin or we don't? Is that not truly the case?

Mushka said...

sins are bad, i think thats why they call them sins :) i dont think of g-d as a vengeful g-d, on the contrary, i think of him as a forgiving g-d. the person i find hardest to forgive is myself. then again, you're right. if you can learn from a sin and ensure you dont repeat it, you should be able to forgive yourself, esp if g-d can forgive you.