So You Probably Know This One: a Man Calls His Mother and Says, Mom, How Are You Feeling?

So you probably know this one: A man calls his mother and says, “Mom, how are you feeling?” His mother replies, “Not so good, I’m feeling a little weak.” “Mom, what’s going on? Why are you feeling weak?” the son asks. “Oh, because I haven’t been eating,” says the mother (you can probably relate, right?). “Mom, how long has it been since you’ve eaten?” asks the son, concerned. “38 days,” says his mother. “38 days!?!” cries the son. “Why haven’t you eaten in 38 days?” “Oh,” replies his mother, “Because I didn’t want to have my mouth full in case you should call.”

Or how about this one: How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? “None, I’ll just sit here in the dark and go blind.”

(Some of you may have been laughing a little too hard.) Joke books – and therapists’ offices around the country – are full of tales of Jewish mothers and that most stereotypically Jewish of emotions, guilt. We tell these jokes both to name and exorcise the specter of guilt – that unpleasant, inconvenient, and squirm-inducing emotion. Guilt is unwelcome because it makes us feel bad, inadequate, like we don’t measure up, and so we do everything we can to keep it at bay – ignore it, go into denial, rationalize our actions… even tell jokes about our own mothers.

The funny thing is, unwelcome and unpleasant as it may be, guilt is actually a powerful positive emotion. Guilt, after all, is the voice of our conscience nagging at us when we’ve done something wrong, that spurs us to face up to difficult truths (like that we need to call our mothers more often), and that spurs us to make real change. If one of my children does something mean to his brother or sister, I want him to feel guilty – not because I want him to be miserable, not because guilt is a desirable end in and of itself, but because guilt is a means to acknowledging you’ve done something wrong, to get you to take responsibility for your actions, to try to make things right or at least help prevent you from doing the same thing next time… if only to avoid those disagreeable guilty feelings. Guilt is the basis for teshuvah and the whole project of the High Holiday season, for truly feeling the things we’ve done wrong, to apologizing, and to genuinely endeavoring to make real changes in our lives.

Guilt is a little like pain – something else no one likes but which is really, really important. When something is wrong in our bodies, pain is the signal that lets us know there’s something going on we have to take a look at. The pain isn’t the problem – it’s whatever underlying condition is hurting our bodies, and pain is the warning system that alerts us so we can do something about it. What pain does for the body, guilt does for the soul – letting us know that there is some serious issue that needs to be addressed, and we do ourselves spiritual harm if we ignore its promptings – or drug ourselves in a way that knocks out the symptoms without ever touching the underlying cause. Because those promptings are powerful: Guilt caused Oskar Schindler’s courage and sacrifice, saving more than 1300 Jews after realizing his complicity in profiteering from the Nazi war machine. Guilt brought us the Nobel prize, after Alfred Nobel suffered tremendous guilt at the damage done by dynamite, which he had invented and which had made him rich, and he wanted to use his wealth for the good of humankind. For crying out loud, guilt brought us Spider Man, spurred to fight crime by the guilt he felt after deciding not to stop a dangerous criminal when given the opportunity, realizing that with great power comes great responsibility. Guilt lets us know what our responsibilities are, makes us better people, which is why it’s really unfair that guilt gets such a bad rap. Gordon Gecko famously declared in Wall Street that greed is good. Well I declare that guilt is good – just ask your mother.

The problem with guilt is that we often confuse it with another feeling which is closely associated with guilt but is very different in nature, and that is shame. Shame is very different from guilt, even though the same actions that make us feel guilty might also make us feel shame. There’s a TED talk that made the rounds a few years back by a researcher named Brené Brown, a Texas social worker who reflected on the difference between guilt and shame. According to Brown, guilt is connected to a specific action, something we’ve done wrong – getting back to our child who, let’s say, is hitting his sister. Shame can be connected to a specific action, but is usually a more generalized sense of unworthiness or baseness. Guilt is, “I have done something bad;” shame is, “I am bad.”

This key difference helps explain why guilt and shame cause us to act differently. The boy who hits his sister feels bad and may avoid acting that way again (at least we can hope!). His guilt inspires him to behave differently and over time this builds up and even strengthens the connection and trust between the two siblings. But shame isn’t something that can be addressed just by acting differently, because shame isn’t about any specific thing you’ve done: it’s about your self-perception of who you are. When we are ashamed we tend to lash out more, or withdraw, or engage in any number of strategies that are designed to alleviate that feeling of being worthless, and this leads to isolation, to disconnection. When we feel like we are bad, undeserving people we cut ourselves off from others – either because we feel unworthy or because we fear that if other people get to know us they will come to see the ‘real’ us – the one we’re ashamed of, the one we want to keep hidden.

If I say something nasty about another person, I’ll feel guilty about what I’ve done and that can inspire me to apologize and reach out to that person, or to at least be more careful to avoid making nasty comments I the future. But I may also feel ashamed of being the kind of person who makes nasty comments about other people, and that’s a much harder nut to crack because now I’m dealing with my own feelings of inadequacy, which makes it harder to believe I can change. Shame cuts us off from the people and tools we need to confront and overcome it. But that’s not the case with guilt, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Guilt can be a tremendous motivator, because instead of reinforcing the assumptions that lead to it (“I’m a bad person, and I’ll never be able to change”) it can spur us to push back against them (“I did a bad thing, it makes me feel bad, and I don’t want to have to feel that way again.”). Guilt is constructive, shame is destructive.

But to harness the productive power of guilt, we have to own up to the thing that is making us feel guilty, we have to be able to acknowledge it so we can allow it to spur us to action. This idea is at the heart of the Torah reading that Janet, Marty, Dan, and Carolyn just chanted for us: Aaron, the high priest, must confess all the sins of the Israelites over a goat which is sent away symbolically bearing those transgressions with it into the wilderness. The Torah’s text makes the point forcefully: “v’hitvadah alav et-kol avonot B’nei Yisrael, v’et kol pisheihem, l’khol chatotam” – “he will confess over [the goat] all the transgressions of the children of Israel, and all their wrongs, even all their sins.” The many different terms used to describe the people’s wrongdoings, along with the stark repetition of the word “all,” – “all their transgressions, all their wrongdoings, all their sins” – point to the need for an honest and unsparing assessment of what we have done wrong in order for the ritual to be effective.

This, of course is an ideal – fully naming all the things we have done wrong and allowing ourselves to feel our guilt. But if you’re anything like me, my guess is it’s a lot easier to ignore or rationalize the things we have done wrong, or else pay lip service in a way that goes through the motions but leaves the heart untouched. It’s uncomfortable, it’s embarrassing, and it makes us call ourselves into question to have to acknowledge what we’ve done wrong in a way that makes us really feel it. It forces us to stand outside ourselves and look at our actions the way another person would, rather than with the justifications and rationalizations we so often allow ourselves, and so seldom extend to others.

And it’s not totally our fault. We live in a society that rejects guilt as a relic of outmoded norms and moral standards. In popular culture we’re fed a steady diet of shameless celebrities and celebrity wanna-be’s who reject any moral accountability for their actions declaring, “I just gotta be me.” We live in a self-help obsessed culture that views guilt as a disempowering downer, a pesky obstacle to our self-esteem, self-fulfillment, and self-realization that we should jettison so we can live the life we’ve always dreamed of – and deserve. And in a post-modern world, there are many thinkers who declare that our norms and attitudes are all socially constructed and are fundamentally malleable so that the concept of objective standards of behavior whose violation should lead to feelings of guilt is inherently suspect. Guilt, in other words, is subjective and self-generated and, far from being a positive motivator, is primarily viewed as harmful. Against that backdrop, allowing ourselves to feel guilt is counter-cultural, negative, and outmoded: Why would we put ourselves through the largely useless exercise of allowing ourselves – let alone encouraging ourselves – to feel guilty? Surely there are easier and more pleasant paths to happiness and self-fulfillment.

But here’s the thing: We often need to feel guilt if we want to make teshuvah if we want to make genuine changes in ourselves and in our lives. Yom Kippur involves guilt because Yom Kippur is about striving for change and seeking forgiveness. And it is hard to strive for change and seek forgiveness if we feel no guilt, if we aren’t willing to admit our shortcomings in a concrete way that makes us want to overcome and redeem them. On Yom Kippur we confess our wrongs – both aloud with liturgical confessional formulas like, “al chet she-chatanu” and “ashamnu” and, in the silence, adding our own specific personal transgressions whose culpability weighs on us, spurring us to stand broken but whole-hearted before our Creator. In our liturgy we acknowledge that God knows “razei olam – the secrets of the universe, the hidden recesses of all that lives, and the secret chambers of our inner being.” The Unetaneh Tokef’s words paint an image of God as the all-knowing judge, highlighting another key point about the role of guilt on Yom Kippur. On this day, we are supposed to acknowledge that we are guilty, not just in the subjective sense of feeling bad about ourselves, but in the objective sense of being found liable in a court of law – culpable and answerable for the things we have done wrong. Guilt here is not an emotion but a verdict: we stand guilty as charged, with all our frailties and imperfections, before the Judge of righteousness.

Why do we need to be found guilty on this day? I don’t think it’s because we are meant to beat ourselves up or try to convince ourselves we are bad people. Rather, I think we are judged guilty because of what guilt demands from us. The Hebrew word for ‘guilty’ in a judicial context is “chayyav,” from the root meaning “to be obligated.” In this context guilt isn’t merely an internal emotional state but a ruling that demands a response. As people who have done things wrong, we are obligated to use our guilt, to acknowledge our shortcomings, seek forgiveness for them, and strive to do better in the future. Sitting around feeling guilty does nobody any good; acknowledging that we are guilty and that we must expiate that guilt through making amends and through striving to be better can do all the good in the world. Guilt has great power: a person who has done wrong and repented, the Talmud tells us (B. Berachot 34b) is greater than the person who has never sinned at all. Guilt is the indispensable first step toward repentance, to teshuvah. And teshuvah enables us to move toward the demanding but vital work of repairing our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with God.

So is Yom Kippur hard? Yeah, it is. It makes us think about and acknowledge a lot of difficult and painful things that we’d rather ignore or bury. But as a recurring and structured course of spiritual self-examination, it alerts us to our deficiencies and gives us the opportunity to take action. It’s not easy – change never is – but the choice is ours. And Yom Kippur gives us this opportunity as well: to not merely say the words, feel a brief pang, and then walk out thinking and behaving the same way as when we came in. Because Yom Kippur affords us the opportunity to truly listen to the things we need to hear. And if we can honestly take stock of the places where we haven’t done right by God, by other people, or by our selves, if we can make the vital shift of allowing a genuine feeling of guilt and remorse to pierce our hearts, then we will actively want to take the steps necessary to remedy it. We should want to be better, to be more patient, more loving, more giving… and sometimes it takes guilt – the creeping awareness of the chasm between how we are and how we wish tobe – to help us make that leap.

So in our feelings of hunger on this day, our discomfort and unease and, if we can get there, our guilt and our feelings of brokenness there is a an opportunity and a promise: to be restored, renewed, and reborn. To start this New Year with a fresh slate and a new heart that is alive to the world and the people around us. That feels deeply and loves greatly. “Ki ba-yom ha-zeh yikhaper aleichem l’taher etchem m’kol chatoteichem lifnei Adonai titharu” (Lev. 16:30) – “For on this day atonement shall be made for you to make you pure from all of your wrongdoings. Before The Fount on Mercy you shall be pure.” May we all, this Yom Kippur, truly feel and acknowledge our failures, allow ourselves to stand guilty before our Divine source and, out of our brokenness, let this day wash us clean and help us start anew.