On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World

by Danya Ruttenberg

American society isn’t very good at doing the work of repentance or repair.

we occupy all of these roles on the small scale—in personal relationships, for example—and on larger ones, as members of society, as stakeholders in institutions, as citizens or inhabitants of nations. So it’s critical for all of us to think through the work of repentance, accountability, and transformation, for a lot of different reasons.

In Judaism, the concepts of repentance, forgiveness, and atonement are very separate categories, and the tradition places the highest emphasis on the work of repentance. Maimonides, in his landmark work Mishneh Torah, codified and developed earlier traditional thinking, itemizing very specific steps to this process—including public confession of harm, a particular approach to making amends, and deep transformational work that culminates in changed actions.

There are a number of reasons why our society is so lacking in the tools to engage deeply in the work of repentance and repairing harm.

the post-Enlightenment move toward individualism and how this took shape in the United States.

We lack a sense of collective responsibility, a communal ethos or process that might help hold victims’ pain and urge perpetrators to hold themselves accountable.

Another has to do with its hyper-capitalist ethos. Certainly, our culture’s thirst for instant gratification feeds the desire to resolve challenges quickly, to privilege immediate catharsis over the hard, painstaking work of process and transformation.

“self-interest” is for those with power, and it disincentivizes the work of repentance.

a watered-down, secularized distortion of Protestant thinking that has infused American culture.

This focus on forgiveness has, however, had results that its originators likely did not intend. It was originally almost certainly not meant to elide questions of accountability, disincentivize perpetrators from taking responsibility, or put the onus of forgiveness on victims without meaningful redress.

Rev. Bromleigh McCleneghan has suggested that this emphasis on salvation by faith alone, and the resulting emphasis on one’s inner state over one’s outward actions, may have had a cultural consequence of privileging intent over impact when considering our actions and their outcomes.12 That is, if a person’s truest internal self is the reference point, it becomes easy to focus on “what I meant,” and to assume that meaning well is enough to be let off the hook, even if one’s actions unwittingly harm others.

Admitting culpability opens the possibility that change might be needed; claiming “those bones aren’t racist at all” is a way of saying that no change is necessary. This resistance to facing harm head on is a form of gaslighting—a manipulative way of denying reality—which piles more harm on top of the original offense.

Another thread in the American privileging of forgiveness over repentance has to do with how theology was used in the service of power in the wake of the Civil War. Shortly after the conflict ended, northern white clergy began preaching forgiveness, reconciliation, and unity with white southerners, at the expense of justice, or even safety, for Black Americans, whether newly emancipated or already free.

True Reconstruction—and repentance, and justice, and equality—would have put white northerners’ superior social status at risk in ways that they were, one presumes, unwilling to entertain.

If you find that you are feeling defensive about being invited into accountability for harm you have caused and thus want to blame the person who is asking for your repentance for making you feel uncomfortable—well, there’s some extra work you might need to do. We sometimes commit the greatest harm when we are busy convincing ourselves that we are the ones who have been hurt, and we use that hurt to rationalize our damaging behavior.

Sometimes harm can be repaired. Sometimes it can’t. Regardless, in a moral universe, there is work to be done whenever harm is inflicted.

According to Maimonides, a person doesn’t just get to mess up, mumble, “Sorry,” and get on with it. They’re not entitled to forgiveness if they haven’t done the work of repair. (And they’re not necessarily entitled to forgiveness even if they have.)

The Mishnah—the ancient oral tradition mentioned earlier—notes that the atonement for interpersonal sins offered on Yom Kippur will not work until the person who did harm “appeases their friend.”

forgiveness isn’t the same as reconciliation—returning to some sort of relationship that will continue into the future. Regardless, I want to spell out that, in Judaism, a person can do real, profound, comprehensive repentance work and even get right with God—experience atonement—even if their victim never forgives them. Repentance and forgiveness are separate processes.

forgiveness is much less important than the repair work that the person who caused harm is obligated to do.

In a spiritual context, tshuvah is about coming back to where we are supposed to be, returning to the person we know we’re capable of being—coming home, in humility and with intentionality, to behave as the person we’d like to believe we are.

Step One: Naming and Owning Harm

Notably, we’re not even discussing apology or amends yet—those steps will come later. Here, what is demanded is a simple acknowledgment of what happened.

there is work to be done even before taking the first step in Maimonides’ stages of repentance: understanding the harm caused.

then that harm must be named, owned, in as public a space as is warranted.

Maimonides says that someone who confesses their sins but “has not abandoned sin in their heart” is like someone who becomes immersed in the ritual bath19 while holding a lizard20—the living waters cannot purify as intended if someone is clutching a non-kosher creepy-crawly that will invalidate the whole process.

My own rabbi, Alan Lew, used to say something like, “Well, if you haven’t done the work, you’ll get back there.” That is, a person who hasn’t faced their problematic traits and unhealed wounds, or grappled deeply with harm caused in the past, or done the work to change processes and structures, will undoubtedly manage to find themselves in some variation of the same situation over and over

According to Maimonides, only when a person does the work needed to become a different person can they, naturally and organically, make a different choice.

The goal here isn’t merely making amends. It’s transformation.

Public apologies and statements of intent aren’t meaningful if harm is still being perpetrated.

Focusing on the work of the penitent before coming back to the victim is a critical piece of caring for the victim.

Maimonides is clear, in fact, that one who injures another physically must pay damages on five fronts: for the injury itself, the pain suffered, the medical costs, the time away from work, and the humiliation.

Notice the language being used here—to pacify, to appease. The focus is the mental and emotional state of the victim, not the boxes that a perpetrator needs to check in order to be let off the hook.

as with making amends, a real apology is not aimed at the person who has been hurt, but rather is given in relationship with them.

Repentance—tshuvah—is like the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery with gold. You can never unbreak what you have broken. But with the sincere and deep work of transformation, acts of repair have the potential to make something

Addressing harm is possible only when we bravely face the gap between the story we tell about ourselves—the one in which we’re the hero, fighting the good fight, doing our best, behaving responsibly and appropriately in every context—and the reality of our actions.

“People don’t want to lose anything. Mostly what people want is to go back, to put things back the way they were before as if they’d never broken anything, which is really different than finding your way forward, and allowing a failure to remake you and remodel you and reorganize how you see yourself.”

won’t, in this book, delve too deeply into the larger picture of Maimonides’ philosophical thinking—where his writing on repentance fits into his vision of God, the cosmos, our purpose on earth, and so forth.

Defensiveness, however, shuts out the possibility of attending to the pain we have caused. And we miss the chance to work on becoming the kind of person who does not cause pain in the future—not because we have been silenced or shamed, but because we care, because it matters, and because we don’t want to be the kind of person who causes pain.

Taking seriously that I might have hurt you—even inadvertently! even because I wasn’t at my best!—is an act of love and care.

sincere repentance work isn’t the same as self-flagellation—in fact, the latter can become a convenient way to stay stuck in inaction.

One all-too-common pitfall along the path of repentance involves trying to do this work while still holding on to power and control in a situation.

The Mishnah teaches that “for transgressions between a person and another, Yom Kippur [the Day of Atonement] does not effect atonement until [the one who caused harm] has pacified the other person.

What should we do when trying to apologize may cause more damage than healing?

There are ways to walk the path of repentance that don’t add to the hurt already inflicted, and they need to be considered carefully. It’s not unusual for the penitent to be tempted to focus on the closure or absolution they long for, rather than the needs of the victim.

Deciding the correct course of action must always hold the twin poles: the desire to be held fully accountable and care and concern for the needs of the victim.

I wonder if we might consider this text as teaching a broader principle—that once harm is released to the public in a way that can’t be contained or recalled, it necessarily carries a different kind of weight.

As the white queer writer Sian Ferguson notes, “Calling people out allows us to hold people—particularly those who have privilege over us—accountable for their oppressive actions.”

I didn’t take the agitation at first & didn’t engage but she got me, it sunk in eventually. It’s a good reminder that agitation is rarely wasted, even if it seems that way.”

Thank you, I accept that education.