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August 14 - October 1, 2023
Calling in generally is used in a specific context: where the harm was caused by someone with whom one shares preexisting ties or community.
the reason it’s important to rebuke another person is for the victim’s own emotional and mental well-being.
the victim of harm should rebuke when (and only when, I’d argue) it might help them let go of resentment. However, when someone “sees their fellow”—that is, when they witness harm as a bystander, their role is different.
The victim’s job is to take care of their own spiritual health; the ally’s job is to get into the trenches with the perpetrator.
The writer and researcher Brené Brown somewhat famously defines guilt as the feeling that I did something bad and shame as the feeling that I am bad.
matter how rebuke is issued—even if it’s delivered in ways that feel unnecessarily harsh to us, for example, or inappropriately publicly—we can choose to receive it with humility and to regard the opportunity to begin the work of repair as a gift.
Addressing the problem in the moment can be an act of care for those hurt by it and a prevention of harm with regard to other potential perpetrators.
If you want to be different, you must not only face the truth of who you are but also make yourself vulnerable, expose your weaknesses, and ask for help in making different choices.
When we sin publicly—meaning, damage the threads of caring commitment that bind us to society as a whole—the natural consequence should be alienation from that society.
In a loving, caring community, public confession can be a way of asking for help, knowing that the road might be long and rocky. But all too often in our culture today, the public confession, sometimes written by a frazzled publicist and deployed by a public figure, is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card, as if the confession should suffice, without the work of repair or transformation, to bring this figure back into the fabric of society.
His public confession might have seemed to be a step toward accountability, but his actions show that, well, he is unwilling or unable to do repair work. Instead of helping to mend the harm to his actual victims and the ripple effect caused when his abuse became part of a larger cultural narrative, he made the choice to pump more hate and intolerance into the world.
Accountability isn’t about canceling, it’s about healing. Like, sometimes people in our communities are so hurt by something that’s been done that we have to ask the perpetrator to leave, because those who have been hurt can’t heal in their presence.
As the journalist and activist Molly Conger, best known for chronicling government meetings in Charlottesville, Virginia after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017, put it, “Deradicalization [away from extremist viewpoints] is possible, but it is a slow, difficult, and personal process . . . On a societal level, focusing on derad[icalization] as the primary tool to fight hate is like bailing out a flooded basement with a teacup while the storm still rages outside.”
We need to set a very, very high bar for repentance, particularly for people whose social influence and reach—and harmful impact—are significant.
If someone is truly, earnestly doing the work, we will be able to tell.
Institutions often prefer proactive measures focused on moving forward, she says, over the earlier stages of Maimonides’ repentance work—public acknowledgment of harm and making apologies and amends—because, all too often, they believe that “the last step makes you look good and the first steps make you look bad.”
Separate sums to compensate for the injury itself, for the pain suffered, to cover any costs of medical care, to reimburse lost income if the victim is unable to work because of their injury, and, on top of it all, compensation for the humiliation suffered—for emotional distress, as we’d call it today. This is a pretty radical departure from how we think and talk about damages today, which is usually defined in practice as “the minimum an organization can do to get away with the harm they perpetrated and make the issue vanish.”
If you want good process, you have to bake it into your whole system. We spend so much money ensuring that we’re doing everything legally, but do we employ ethics commissioners?
All too often, when confronted with the news that the institution, or someone within it, caused harm, those with power in that institution choose to deny it, dismiss it, or otherwise refuse accountability.
Dr. Freyd has turned her attention to what she calls “institutional courage”—that is to say, “an institution’s commitment to seek the truth and engage in moral action, despite unpleasantness, risk, and short-term cost. It is a pledge to protect and care for those who depend on the institution. It is a compass oriented to the common good of individuals, institutions, and the world. It is a force that transforms institutions into more accountable, equitable, healthy places for everyone.”
We must constantly urge the organizations and institutions in our lives along the path of repentance, to show them that the way forward can be an ongoing process of more transparency, more accountability, more amends, more taking ownership, more structural change, more focus on care for those who were harmed and those who are most impacted.
Jewish law makes it clear that if the person who caused harm did not pay appropriate damages and is now deceased, the victim can collect from the perpetrator’s heirs,44 and that remittance of debt applies even when both the party owed and the party who owes are deceased.
These apology resolutions . . . serve to covertly thwart reparations or other racial justice for [B]lack Americans while providing the illusion of substantive racial progress.
Kelly Brown Douglas, a Black Womanist theologian and dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary, wrote a searing piece on the limits of this approach—apology, study, even reparations—to repent for an organization’s participation in such profound evil. For, she writes, “The fact of the matter is—after the money has been paid . . . for scholarships and other programming—systems and structures are not disrupted.
The Rev. Dr. Brown Douglas outlines three key aspects of the work a faith community must do toward reparations—which, she implies, is not merely about paying money (as the term has come to mean in common parlance) but about holistic work toward repair, insofar as it is possible.
The work, she writes, demands truth-telling that “confronts the ways in which the past remains alive in the present,” how white supremacy is upheld both philosophically and culturally in institutions. It demands fostering a moral identity by “confront[ing] what it means to be a beneficiary of white supremacy and its legacy,” by working to eradicate white privilege and its manifestations, and by transforming institutions and spaces so that they can be “a sanctuary for all people.”60 In a church, she suggests, this last principle might look like interrogating choices in music, programming,
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So often when harm is committed—on the individual, institutional or national level—there is a desire by perpetrators to minimize, to mitigate, to downplay. To gaslight the victim. Public confession invites the perpetrator to accountability—but it also, crucially, validates the victim’s experience.
Telling the truth—as Maimonides would frame it, confession—is a critical first step for every nation that seeks to address the harm that it has caused. But without the other pieces of the puzzle—the reparations, the apology, and the work to become different in deep, systemic ways, to set up structures that necessarily create a new kind of reality—it is not enough.
We see, again and again in German history, a complex dance between avoidance and confrontation, between doing and naming, between performance and engagement, between intention and action. It is not straightforward, it is not linear, and it has suffered from crucial omissions.
An anonymous German commentator, writing in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, said, “A person is obliged to mention their own sins, and the sins of their ancestors. Now why should one confess the sins of their ancestors? Because a person is held accountable for holding on to the deeds of their ancestors.”
Waziyatawin suggests, it may open the door to liberation for everyone involved. Truth-telling has the potential to alleviate the burden that all of us carry—Dakota people who carry historical trauma and the pain of ongoing oppression and [w]hite Minnesotans who carry the burden of maintaining oppressive systems
Repentance does not unbreak what has been broken so much as interrupt the cycle of repeated harms—which stretches from first contact to the Trail of Tears, from Wounded Knee to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
the East German–born historian Katja Schatte suggests that “the honesty required for actual repentance is irreconcilable with the modern nation-state project” and that “much of the viability of the modern nation-state has to do with its ability to incorporate dark periods in widely digestible ways, generally at the expense of the victims and their descendants.”
We can hope that this understanding may become an entry point into the next chapter of our nation—and the development of not only more allies fighting white supremacy, but what a 2014 Indigenous Action Media ‘zine referred to as “accomplices” who are “complicit in a struggle towards liberation.”
If one of our goals as a society is to encourage those who have caused harm to take responsibility for and grapple with their actions, to do as much as they can toward repair, and to become the kinds of people who do not cause harm in the future—well, the prison system as it stands now isn’t it.
Cynical deal making, rather than a nuanced reckoning with harm and its impact, becomes the priority.
the core national violence prevention strategy relies on a tool that has as its basis the central drivers of violence.”
Excessively severe consequences for harm are such a clear barrier to an honest and thorough repentance process that the fourteenth-century Spanish rabbi Yom Tov Asevilli expressed concern that too harsh a punishment might lead someone back on the path to sin—even if they had done, or wanted to do, sincere, whole-hearted repentance work.
Restorative justice is defined by the criminologist John Braithwaite as “. . . a process where all stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm.”
Zehr, inspired by models such as these, offers six guiding questions for restorative justice work: 1. Who has been hurt? 2. What are their needs? 3. Whose obligations are these? 4. What are the causes? 5. Who has a stake in the situation? 6. What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to address causes and put things right?34 In contrast, he argues, criminal justice asks only three questions, of a very different nature: 1. What laws have been broken? 2. Who did it? 3. What do the offender(s) deserve?
Ultimately, systems cannot force repentance. Systems absolutely can hamper the work or foster it.
Some people may ask, “Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger?” [Advocacy for prison abolition] does not center that question. Instead, abolition challenges us to ask, “Why do we have no other well-resourced options?” and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm.
Judge Joseph Flies-Away, former chief judge for the Hualapai Tribal Court in Arizona, says that in his community, when a person commits a criminal act, “People say, ‘He acts like he has no relatives.’” Flies-Away regards the law as a tool not to punish, but rather to bring people back into their communal context and to help them heal.
The size at which our [local, national, and global] community has grown—it’s grown past our ability to feel deeply connected, and that’s when we lose accountability—our sense of belonging to each other. You simply can’t know that many people—there’s an empathy exhaustion that happens.
The word “forgive,” in English, comes the Old English forgyfan, which translates primarily as “to give, grant, or bestow.” One Old English dictionary connects it to the Hebrew word for “gift.”2 It’s a present that is offered, something that is granted to someone freely, without, necessarily, a conversation about whether or not they have earned it. It’s an offering, of sorts.
In Hebrew, two different words, each with its own shade of meaning and weight, are used in the context of forgiveness.
The first is mechila, which might be better translated as “pardon.” It has the connotation of relinquishing a claim against an offender; it’s transactional. It’s not a warm, fuzzy embrace but rather the victim’s acknowledgment that the perpetrator no longer owes them,
Slicha, on the other hand, may be better translated as “forgiveness”; it includes more emotion. It looks with a compassionate eye at the penitent perpetrator and sees their humanity and vulnerability, recognizes that, even if they have caused great harm, they are worthy of empathy and mercy.
there is a difference between transactional and objectifying—a transactional relationship can nonetheless be respectful, courteous, and kind.
I believe that a true apology must be an interaction that honors the full humanity of the other; it is not transactional.
