Time to repent for American racism

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, began Wednesday night. This is the season during which Jews make tshuvah — or engage in the work of repentance and repair — for all we’ve done wrong in the past year. Tshuvah isn’t just about saying sorry; it’s about healing wrongs, to whatever extent that might be possible.

And it’s that part about healing wrongs that makes this cultural moment in the United States so unsurprising. The rise of white nationalism, the election of a man who campaigned and governs on a platform of racist fearmongering, even the fact of Confederate statues serving as a political lighting rod — it’s all the product of tshuvah left undone.

Maimonides, the great 12th-century philosopher and sage, defines complete tshuvah as that which happens when a person has the opportunity to commit the same sin as he had in the past, but does not — he makes a different choice the second time around. How could it be that you might return to the exact situation in which you had previously screwed up? Who gets an instant replay like that? My rabbi, Alan Lew, used to explain Maimonides thusly: “If you haven’t done the work of tshuvah in any kind of serious way, you’ll get back there.” That is, without the necessary soulsearching and growth, you will undoubtedly manage to find yourself in some variation of the same situation over and over again.

Our country is in that position. The Christian writer Jim Wallis has famously described racism as America’s “original sin.” Our country has never done tshuvah for its many racist wrongs — particularly those committed against black and indigenous people. There has been no real introspection by those who hold institutional power, no formal apologies made to those enslaved or their descendants. There has been, on an official level, no display of curiosity about whether restitution is needed and what that might possibly look like.

Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., has introduced the bill that’s now known as H.R. 40 (the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for AfricanAmericans Act”) in Congress every single year for the last 28 years. It establishes a commission to study and develop reparation proposals that would “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present” and make recommendations for solutions.

Can an entire nation make tshuvah? One needs only look to Germany’s behavior over the past 70 or so years to know that it is, at the very least, possible to do some of the work at a national level. They have taken full responsibility for the Holocaust, issued formal apologies, paid more than 66 billion euros in reparations payments, built memorials to the victims of atrocities — in sharp contrast to the veneration of confederate slaveholders here — and are committed to being different, now. Everything from their attitude toward military engagement to the language in their textbooks is influenced by the knowledge that to become different, they must behave differently.

I don’t have a lot of hope that those with the greatest power in our federal government will be undertaking a tshuvah process for the sins of American racism any time soon. Perhaps one day our country will be ready to interrupt the cycle of injury and injustice on an institutional level. Until then, well, the rest of us have plenty of work to do.

Danya Ruttenberg is rabbi-in-residence at Avodah and author. She wrote this commentary for The Washington Post.