Daze of Repentence

The repenting has really barely begun and already I'm procrastinating. I have gone the whole day without doing teshuvah, and although the day's not over yet, I can't help but feel that I should be more on top of this. Last year, with all the fervor of the newly quasi-religious, I was so revved up and anxious that I practically leapt into the awkward, over-earnest apologies everybody just loves.

I'm also sitting this year on something written by the incomperable Rabbi Susan Schnur, whom I hold in the highest esteem, even when she makes lots of extra work for me. (Momentary pause for shameless self-promotion: www.Lilith.org. Live it. Love it.) Schnur wrote about why sometimes, saying "I'm sorry" is the wrong thing to do, especially for women, often socialised into apologising for everything--and also often taught that not being forgiving makes them one of the dreaded b-words (it rhymes with "itch"). She says that holding onto your anger over something is often the only empowered/empowering/cathartic option available, and that women who need to should take it and not think twice.

It's the sort of lyrically subversive line of thinking that's classically Schnur, and I loved it enough to have mailed the article to my mom, who appreciated it immensely. We talked about it briefly, as it engendered (ha ha) discussion of whether that sort of knee-jerk apologetic manner is a trait solely of women. After much listening in the Lilith office, I've come to the conclusion that Susan Schnur is something of a gender-essentialist. (That I think she's brilliant anyway is testament more to the unbridled eloquence with which she crafts her ideas than to any sort of symapthy for what I feel is an outmoded and hindering school of thought.) Anyway, my mom was saying that she thinks my brother, too, displays such behaviour, and that got me off on a tangled tangent, during which I tried (unsuccessfully) to explain what I think are the multifaceted gender roles at work in my very heteronormative nuclear family.

But it did get me thinking. I inherited a lot of my poor emotional habits from my dad (not his fault--I think), and early on adopted a sort of stoicism that I use for emotional distance and "stability". Much like good dental hygiene, kids pick up their life habits for this sort of stuff young, and I've had a lot of time for plenty of what I felt to be reinforcing episodes. As my girlfriend pointed out to me not twenty-four hours ago, after many minutes of my semi-sensical apologies, I have a lot of barriers inside my head and heart. And I don't deny that it's true. What I like about this forced repentence is that is gives us an opportunity to to be a little gender-transgressive (and we all know how much I like to be gender-transgressive): it pairs agency with vulnerability. Even if halakhically we're supposed to apologise to everyone we've wronged in the last year, anyone whose ridden the rush-hour E train knows that it's just not possible--you'd never be able to track everyone down. So we pick and choose to whom we repent, and how, where, when and, to some degree, for what--but when we do, we open those inpenetrable gates.

I spent a year decoding feminist literature, so I could definitely create some great sex-based metaphors, but lest I create more things for which to repent, I'll leave it at this: giving people an order to repent, but then handing the reins over, is, I think, the most sensative way to deal with individual emotional blockage and baggage. (There's much to be said for the pros and cons of group confession and group assumption of sin--a powerful and highly contrasting methodology to other major religions--but it's late and I'm totally pooped.)

So we'll see if roommate #1 is off the phone yet, or if #2 comes home before I'm asleep, because even bone-tired, the spector of forgiveness is beckoning.

Shana tovah v'kol tov...