Earlier this week, my mother called to tell me she wanted to talk to me. We planned to go for a walk, as we often do. She arrived with her dog, and we set off to the pond a few blocks from my house. When we arrived, she told me in the same tone my first boyfriend used before he broke up with me, that she had struggled the entire night before about whether to tell me something, and she loved me dearly, but... my house smelled like cat pee. This wasn't exactly new information. We'd been struggling to get our cat to stop peeing on the floor ever since we brought her home and she and our other cat decided to start a turf war over the litter box.
It was annoying to have yet one more problem on top of a myriad that were already sapping my energy. What was far more annoying was the over-dramatic way in which my mom chose to tell me. But the icing on the cake was when she apologized. She shouldn't have told me, she said, she knew it would upset me. She'd ruined my day. She should have kept well enough alone. In all these repeated apologies, she never once hit upon the way in which she had actually hurt me: by being dishonest about the whole affair.
Mom had cared for our cats the previous summer when we were on vacation. She was familiar enough with the litter box ordeal that she could have mentioned it on any ordinary day. I know there's really no good way to deal bad news, but the direct approach would have made it feel more honest than falsely scheduling a walk just to tell me that our house now smelled like cat pee. Futhermore, frustrating as the news may have been, she wouldn't have anything to apologize for.
With High Holidays upon us, I've been thinking a lot about apologies, and I think this little incident revealed something I didn't before understand. Typically, when we apologize, we don't do it to make the other person feel better. We do it to make ourselves feel better. This was exemplfied in our almost-cantor's story last year about forcing her friends to forgive her under the slide as a child in preparation for Yom Kippor.*
It's not entirely our fault. This is, frankly, how we're socialized. When I was a child, I was taught that you hurt someone and you say, "I'm sorry." And if someone says, "I'm sorry," you have to forgive them. My go-to phrase for this as a kid was "it's okay," and I distinctly remember one teacher correcting me and telling me, after another student apologized for hitting me with a rock, that it was not okay. But this baffled my elementary school brain because if it wasn't okay, what was I supposed to say? And if it wasn't okay, why was the other kid apologizing?
Rather than being taught to give a proper apology, I was taught to give a vague, "I'm sorry," after which everyting reverts to normal. It wasn't until I was an adult that someone suggested maybe things shouldn't revert to normal. My classmates and I were not taught to consider how we could avoid hurting people in the future. We weren't even taught to consider what we had done to hurt them in the first place. Similarly, the society I live in as an adult is filled with empty apologies. If my mother had apologized for blowing things out of proportion, I might have forgiven her. Instead, her vague apologies made the ordeal worse for both of us.
The coming of the new year calls for introspection because it's not enough to know who we've hurt. We have to know how we've hurt them. And we have to commit to a change of action to avoid causing harm in the future. This is why we do tashlich. We're not just casting away sins of the past, we're comitting to taking action to avoid them in the future. Rather than returning to the norm, we are moving forward, as the river does. There are a lot of things I've done in the past to hurt people, some of which I can't attone for, as I've long since lost touch with those people. But I can commit to changing those past behavoirs so that I don't continue to cause harm. And the next time I need to apologize, I can commit to doing it right.
*And if you're reading this, and I got the story wrong, I really am sorry. I do not want to misrepresent you.
