The paranoia, the feeling of distraction, the troubled soul, the tell-tale heart. Over this past year, we’ve discussed confession, repentance, forgiveness. But we’ve rarely spoken of guilt. We all know what it feels like but no expression of it better encapsulates it than Edgar Allan Poe’s famous 1843 short story, the “Tell-Tale Heart.”
It tells of a man fancies himself sane but presents himself as mad, a man who cannot withstand the temptation to rid himself of his fears about his elderly housemate’s evil eye. When the protagonist accidentally startles the old man, the sound of his roommate’s racing heart drives him to suffocate him under the bed and place the corpse under the floorboards. The madman thinks he has buried his sin, cleverly protected himself from being found out by the police. But as the police interview him, he can hear the heart beating again, louder and louder, until he is driven to confess.
Was it his victim’s imaginary heart that he heard or his own real one? Either way, Poe so successfully brings us into his story that we begin to feel the guilt and paranoia ourselves. Perhaps we all feel like we have skeletons in our closets, things we wish we could bury forever and never encounter again. But guilt is like a parasite, eating away at our attention, at our health, at our sanity. We are probably all familiar with this experience, with the gnawing feeling that we did not live up to who we are, we were wrong.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher, suggests that this feeling of guilt derives from a much more ancient human invention: debt. Guilt derives from the belief that there is someone to whom we owe our allegiance, some contract we have that we fear to violate. Nietzsche believed that if we could reject G-d, if we could free ourselves of a formal system of morality, then our tell-tale hearts would quiet down.
Clearly, the Torah disagrees. Tanakh is replete with rebukes and references to the need for repentance, to personal and national responsibility. This morning, however, for the first time since we restarted the Torah reading cycle, the Torah introduces us to a new kind of guilt.
דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֵאמֹר נֶפֶשׁ כִּֽי־תֶחֱטָא בִשְׁגָגָה מִכֹּל מִצְוֺת ה׳ אֲשֶׁר לֹא תֵעָשֶׂינָה וְעָשָׂה מֵאַחַת מֵהֵנָּה׃
Speak to the Children of Israel saying: When a person unwittingly sins in regard to any of Hashem’s commandments about things that should not be done, and he does one of them
Somehow, the Torah holds us responsible for unwitting, unintentional violations of the law. For example, if I was under the impression that there is nothing wrong with making some fresh-squeezed orange juice for my health-conscious family on שבת, when I later find out that I was wrong, I am liable to bring a sacrifice called a חטאת, a sin-offering. For other sins, one may be liable for another קרבן, an אשם, a guilt offering.
But why? Guilt makes sense in the context of intentional sin; rebelled against G-d, we rejected our personal responsibility. But why is there any need to make up for unintentional errors in הלכה? Does the tell-tale heartbeat for an honest mistake?
Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch suggests that the answer is yes. There is a concept in American jurisprudence: “Ignorantia juris non-excusat,” ignorance of the law is no excuse. The חטאת is only brought for serious violations of הלכה, for violations of prohibitions that incur כרת, excision from the Jewish People. The Torah expects us to take the commandments seriously, to learn at least the most basic, fundamental values of Judaism, and to observe them carefully. Similarly, אברבנל says that bringing the חטאת is not a punishment or fine for the sin but rather a warning to be careful not to commit it again.
According to these answers, there is some responsibility to make sure one knows the Halakhah and there is a cost to not doing so. But there may be another value to expiation for unintentional sins through קרבנות in a way that we might not have expected. We noted earlier that Friedrich Nietzsche advocates in his works for rejecting Jewish morality and the duality of “good” and “evil,” of right and wrong. In his view, religion leads to morality which leads to cruelty which leads to suffering. Morality and the moral conscience, reinforced by guilt, leads to punishment of those who do not obey moral law. If only humanity would reject their conscience, reject G-d, reject morality, everyone would be free.
But as David Brooks points out in the New York Times yesterday, the 21st century does not seem to have followed this logic. The rejection of moral capital, of religious and moral systems, has not led to less guilt, but rather a guilt of a different kind. Today, there are more reasons to feel guilty than ever before; in an interconnected world, there is no amount of charity you can give, no amount of kindness you can do, and say you did enough. There is always something more you should be doing לתקן עולם במלכות שקי, to repair the world and bring it closer to the ideal. In such an environment, it’s impossible to escape guilt; it surrounds you and drowns you, and undermines your self-conception. The only way to escape your shame, says Brooks, is to become a victim yourself.
If you can assert that the challenges in your life are not your fault, especially if the fault belongs to someone else, then you have no reason to feel like you did something wrong. It’s the fault of your circumstances; you need not feel any responsibility to fix every flaw and repair every injustice if it’s beyond your control. All you need to do is express moral outrage at those who are at fault and then you can have a free conscience.
I don’t mean to even slightly belittle the very real experiences of those who suffer injustices, discrimination, or abuse. But it is the case that political parties, politicians, religious leaders, non-profit organizations, businesses, and almost everyone else have begun to use the victim narrative to sometimes avoid responsibility. Don’t blame me for this scandal you discovered, I’m the victim of a leak by a foreign government or a traitor inside my party. Don’t blame us for the violence we inflict on others, they attacked us first, they stepped into our territory. It’s not my fault, it’s theirs has become a constant refrain in the 21st century to defend every mistake, every fault, every negative behavior.
Brooks writes:
We have no clear framework or set of rituals to guide us in our quest for goodness. Worse, people have a sense of guilt and sin, but no longer a sense that they live in a loving universe marked by divine mercy, grace and forgiveness. There is sin but no formula for redemption.
Perhaps this is another reason why קרבנות, even as atonement for sins that are not your fault, are so necessary. Rav Aharon Lichtenstein points out that the רמב״ן distinguishes between two categories of sin: מצוות קלות, less severe sins, and מצוות חמורות, more severe sins
Many of us may be familiar with the idea found in פרקי אבות that one should not decide that some מצוות are more important than others because we don’t know the reward or punishment associated with them. At the same time, there is clearly a hierarchy of prohibitions. The גמרא writes that if someone is sick and starving on יום כיפור, such that his/her life is in danger, you should feed them the food that constitutes the minimal violation of הלכה, i.e. it’s better to eat נבלה, improperly slaughtered meat, which is deserving of lashes, than טבל, untithed produce
Similarly, the Talmud tells us on many occasions that certain מצוות are שקולין כנגד כל המצוות, equal in value to the fulfillment of the sum of all other commandments. The רמב״ם says צדקה, donations to the poor, is such a מצוה. The רמב״ן explains that for prohibitions that are קלות, less severe, atonement is only necessary when they are done intentionally. But for חמורות, for severe prohibitions, one must atone even for unintentional violations and you would have to bring a חטאת, a sin offering.
Rav Lichtenstein suggests that there are two elements to sin: The negative effects on the violator’s personality and character and the deleterious effects that execution of such a violation has on the world. Intentional violation of any sin, קל or חמור, represents a rebellion against Hashem, affects the personality, and requires teshuva What makes חמורות worse than קלות is that the negative effects of חמורות on the world are present even if the sin is done unintentionally
The effect on the environment and seriousness of שבת or sexual prohibitions or prohibitions related to the Temple, any violation of קדושה, happens even when it is done unintentionally. Something needs to be done, something of ours needs to be given away, to remind us of those effects. There needs to be a way of keeping us aware of what we’ve done, even if it was not done out of malice, but rather out of ignorance or lack of motivation. We need to feel some responsibility. At the same time, there needs to be a way for us to move on, to not let the guilt weigh us down until we either self-destruct or place the blame on someone else.
There are terrible things that happen in the world, so many things we should be working on, trying to improve, to make better. We need something to remind us of our responsibility, to at least symbolically or metaphysically make a difference. But we also need a way to accept that we can’t go back in time and we aren’t perfect. We can take responsibility, but let go of our shame when it’s beyond our control. We can’t have a tell-tale heart all the time or else we’ll have a permanent arrhythmia; we’ll become mad with guilt.
The problem for us is, now that we don’t have a בית המקדש, how do we achieve this goal of the קרבן חטאת? The גמרא in אבות דרבי נתן records that the great תנא named רבן יוחנן בן זכאי was once leaving Jerusalem with רבי יהושע .רבי יהושע turned to the desolate location of the בית המקדש and said:
אוי לנו על זה שהוא חרב מקום שמכפרים בו עונותיהם של ישראל
Woe for us, for this desolate place used to atone for the sins of Israel!
רבן יוחנן בן זכאי responded:
בני, אל ירע לך. יש לנו כפרה אחת שהיא כמותה, ואיזה זה? גמילות חסדים, שנאמר: כי חסד חפצתי ולא זבח (הושע ו’ ו’)
My son, do not despair, for we do still have a means of atonement like it: acts of kindness, as the prophet Hosea says, For kindness do I desire, not a sacrifice.
It is almost פסח, when we are supposed to invite the poor to join our סדרים, join our קרבן פסח, and do our small part to create an עולם חסד, and absolve us of overwhelming guilt In light of that, and the high cost of פסח food, there is a מנהג to contribute מעות חיטים, money for the poor to have food for פסח. Let’s remove our guilt together and fulfill גמילות חסדים in the best way possible.
דורש לנפשי 