Back in Lent a group of us read and discussed a book called On Repentance and Repair, by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. The book explores Jewish thinking on repentance, making amends, and forgiveness, based in the work of the 12th century rabbi Maimonides.
Christianity has tended to emphasize the obligation to forgive – following Jesus’ lead to some extent! It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer, for one thing, and Jesus talks in strong and urgent terms about forgiveness at other times too. I think he’s pointing to the ways that holding onto our grievances and hurts can be a burden… but not at the expense of accountability and setting things right, which he also seems to care about!
According to Ruttenberg, Judaism offers a much more victim-centered focus. The first priority is restoration of the victim, to whatever extent is possible. The second priority is the perpetrator doing their work to become someone who understands the harm they have caused, and beginning the work of becoming someone who won’t cause that kind of harm again in the future.
Restoring relationship between the victim and the one who caused harm, including the possibility of forgiveness, is farther down the list. In Jewish thought it is not always useful or necessary, especially if it would further harm the victim to have to return to what they experienced.
Ruttenberg lays out five steps in the process for a person who has caused harm. First comes naming and owning the harm. The perpetrator has to be able to recognize what they did and its impact. This step may include public confession to an appropriate audience – which is to say, not necessarily the public per se, but some community that is affected or involved, or that has a stake in both the harm and the healing, here. Not just the victim.
Note that one pretty common thing we see when public figures mess up is that they issue shallow, speedy apologies that reveal that they don’t really understand why or how their words or actions caused harm. A lot of potential repentance processes fail at this first step!
The second step is starting to change – beginning the work of listening, learning, and working on yourself to become somebody who won’t do that again.
The third step is accepting consequences and making restitution or amends, in whatever ways may be possible. When David says that the man who had his neighbor’s sheep killed must make restitution seven times over, this is what he’s talking about. The man in the story owes his neighbor seven sweet baby ewe lambs, to make up for the one that he cruelly took.
The fourth step, in Maimonides’ process, is apology. We may well be surprised by how far along in the process this falls! But the group reading the book together found that this made some sense to us. Many of us have seen or experienced the frustration of premature and shallow apologies by a person or institution that hasn’t really made any effort to address harm or change the things that caused the harm.
And the fifth step is to make different choices in the future.
Forgiveness isn’t one of these steps because these steps fundamentally aren’t about the harmed person. This is about what to do when you have caused harm. As we all have, and do.
It’s a different framework from Christianity to some extent, but it’s also just a different lens or perspective. Christianity’s focus on forgiveness is centered on the person who has experienced harm.
We may wrestle with elements of the approach laid out by Maimonides and Ruttenberg. But I do think there’s a helpful corrective here for Christians.
Over the millennia Christianity has sometimes leaned so hard on the obligation to forgive that we have lost track of accountability, true repentance and change.
Now let’s talk a little about David.
It is a big deal that David is able to hear Nathan’s indictment, and repent. It’s a big deal when David says, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
But… is the Lord the only person David has sinned against?
Who else?…. (Uriah; Bathsheba; Joab; the other soldiers killed and their loved ones; arguably even the servant…)
We read Psalm 51 a few minutes ago. A lot of the Psalms actually begin with little explanatory notes – about the music, or sometimes about the situation. Those aren’t included when we use them in worship, but they’re pretty interesting sometimes. And the heading in the Biblical text for Psalm 51 is, “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”
David NEEDS to repent to God – make no mistake.
A fun thing I learned studying this story this year: When David writes to Joab to congratulate him on getting rid of Uriah, he says, literally, “Don’t let the thing be evil in your sight.” But then a few verses further on, the text says, “But what David had done was evil in God’s sight.”
David thought – for a moment – that he could become the arbiter of good and evil. He was wrong. His repentance is – importantly – submitting himself once again to God’s sovereignty.
So, yes, David needs to humble himself before God. But not only God, surely. We just listed dozens of other people whom David has substantively harmed, because of one evening’s bad judgment.
Yet right here in verse 4 of the psalm David says to God, “Against you only have I sinned.” The Common English Bible renders it this way: “I’ve sinned against you—you alone.” Robert Alter’s close translation of the Hebrew has, “You alone have I offended.”
That verse makes it very clear, but the whole psalm is…. well, a kind way to say it is that it’s focused on restoring the vertical relationship between David and God, with zero attention to the horizontal relationships with other people. A harsher way to put it would be to say that it’s incredibly self-centered. David wants to get right with God so he can reclaim his mantle of righteousness, and “teach God’s ways to the wicked.” Despite knowing that the man in the parable should make restitution, there is no evidence in Scripture that David tries to do anything to mend relationships or make amends to Bathsheba, Joab, or anyone else.
Can we imagine an alternate reality in which David came clean?Confessed, apologized, made amends? Acknowledged to his people that he had violated their trust and abused his power? Maybe he would have had to step down as king… but maybe he would have been happier as a private citizen. David remained king his whole, long life – but at the cost of tremendous personal suffering. The lectionary doesn’t give us much more of David’s story, but there’s actually a lot more to it. Read the rest of 2 Samuel sometime and see the many painful ways that Nathan’s prophesy plays out – “The sword shall never depart from your own house.”
What are we to take from all this?
When our five young actors sat down for a table read of this script last Monday, Linus – our David – was the only one who hadn’t seen it already. When we hit the part where David starts planning to kill Uriah, Linus broke character to say, “Oh… I’m TERRIBLE!”
For a 3000 year old story there’s something surprisingly contemporary about David. The 20th and 21st centuries are littered with public men – in some cases, otherwise great men – who risked everything in the pursuit of what I will euphemistically call romantic interests. And not infrequently, there was some degree of uncertainty about the other party’s consent. And we are certainly familiar, in the modern world, with the principal that the coverup usually gets you into deeper trouble – as it did for David.
I’ve been putting pressure on myself for weeks, maybe months, since we decided to work with the David story for Drama Camp this summer, to find something to say to the kids and youth about what is edifying or meaningful in this story. Which is silly, because they are perfectly able interpreters of Scripture! But still: it’s an awful enough story that I felt a need to explain why it’s in the Bible and in the lectionary.
Now, I think I’ve been overthinking it. We should find in this story exactly what the ancient chroniclers meant us to find, when they recorded and passed down this unvarnished, ugly tale.
A great man, chosen and anointed by God, can still mess up, and mess up badly – and dig himself into a deeper and deeper hole.
None of us are perfect, and nobody gets a pass. David, for all his intimacy with God, did not get to decide what’s right and wrong, or who lives and who dies. No human has that right and privilege.
David is writ large in every possible way, his mistakes as towering as his triumphs. But his message to posterity is simply: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that right and wrong don’t apply to you. And when you mess up, try to fix it instead of trying to hide it. And those – apparently – are lessons for the ages.