Complicated Characters

Rabbi Melanie Aron

S'lichot - Saturday, September 8, 2007

The High Holidays in Hollywood- Selichot Films 5768:

• Kissing Jessica Stein
• Liberty Heights
• Keeping the Faith
• Enemies: A Love Story
• Overture to Glory
• The Jazz Singer

The best movies are the ones with complex characters. Like Ben’s father tonight in “Liberty Heights”, who was a crook, but also a caring and dedicated dad, or Herman Broder, the philandering ghost writer of sermons in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Enemies A Love Story”, who out of motives that were at least in part kind and good, finds himself married to three women at the same time.

Some people find these sorts of combination distressing. It’s hard to accept that your kindly neighbor might also be a tyrannical boss, or that someone who is selfless and self sacrificing at one moment, can be petty or impatient or emotionally stingy the next. I remember when the star of a local children’s television show in Cincinnati was caught with the cameras on, losing his temper and cursing at the end of a long and trying day. There was no forgiveness in the local market. Perhaps part of that was a justified demand for integrity, but it was also an unrealistic and childlike desire that our heroes be totally heroic and show no weakness. Personally, I like complicated characters. They are the most interesting and they are also more like us.

Tradition tells us that God makes a decision for the wholly righteous and for the wholly wicked at Rosh Hashanah. It is only for those in the middle that God procrastinates, giving us time to repent and plead for mercy. Clearly there are a lot of us who are neither perfect saints, nor sinners beyond repair. It is for us that we have the ten days of repentance and the opportunity to repent up until the close of Neilah at the end of Yom Kippur.

Rachel Freedenberg, one of the copy editors of the J, in The Column in last week’s edition, wrote that she was going off to the mountains this holiday season so that she could focus on her own sins and not recite, with a crowd of people, lists of sins she did not commit. I think she’s missing part of the point. Few of us rush to really acknowledge our darker (shadow) side, nor can we stand to look at it for too long without falling into despair and self-loathing. The communal aspect of the confession, is for our benefit. We are reminded that our failings are not so unique and if we find a few on the list that we didn’t commit, that boost to our ego is tempered by the confrontation with those we fell into over and over again.

In a few minutes we will change the mantles of the Torah scrolls from the blues and purples of majesty, to white representing simplicity and purity. In part that is to remind us that these holidays require humility, that they shatter any sense of individual superiority or pride. But the white is also there to instill hope-though your sins be scarlet, they can become as snow. Guilt is pretty Jewish and not considered a bad thing, but shame, that sense of contamination and unworthiness, is something that is to be overcome through repentance.

Here in the quiet of night, O God, help us to confront all of the aspects of our personalities, the positive and the negative. Help us to bear the light shone on our hidden failings so that they not become a source of shame. Strengthen us through our coming together, and let us support one another as we cross into a good and sweet new year.