The Person We Cannot Bypass

A father tells his adult daughter that everything he did was for her.

She knows.

That is not what she has come to discuss.

She has come to tell him something about the life she lived inside his love.

But her father hears a different conversation. He hears a question about the sincerity of his intentions, the magnitude of his sacrifices, perhaps even the meaning of the years he gave her.

And so he answers a question she never asked.

He tells her how much he loved her.

There is a peculiar form of human suffering that begins here: when the truth of one person’s experience is continually answered with the truth of another person’s intentions.

Both may be telling the truth.

Only one is being permitted to determine what happened.

We tend to think of moral self-deception as a failure of honesty. We conceal something from ourselves. We invent a justification. We refuse to acknowledge a motive.

But there is a more difficult possibility.

A person can be entirely honest about his motives and profoundly mistaken about the moral meaning of his actions.

The difficulty is not that he knows too little about himself.

It is that he has mistaken knowledge of himself for knowledge of what it has been like to live beside him.

We have not adequately distinguished these two kinds of knowledge.

A mother’s understanding of her devotion does not contain, somewhere within it, her child’s experience of being loved by her.

A man’s understanding of his loyalty does not contain his friend’s experience of having been betrayed in its name.

There are truths about our lives that do not reside within us.

They reside in the lives of other people.

No amount of introspection, however sincere, can give us unrestricted access to them.

This is one reason I find a particular passage in the Mishnah so extraordinary.

Near the end of tractate Yoma, the rabbis distinguish between wrongs committed against God and wrongs committed against another human being. Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, cannot atone for the latter until the person who has been wronged has been appeased.

The teaching is familiar. Yet something about it deserves to remain astonishing.

Here is a person standing before God, seeking forgiveness.

The fast may be sincere. The confession may be sincere. The remorse may reach into the deepest recesses of the person’s being.

Still, something remains unfinished.

Somewhere outside the synagogue, perhaps in a kitchen, perhaps in a house the person has not entered for years, there is another human being.

And that human being cannot be replaced by the sincerity of the prayer.

I do not read this as a diminishment of divine mercy. I read it as a refusal to make another person’s humanity disappear inside my relationship with God.

The sacred does not absorb the human being I have wronged.

It makes evading that human being impossible.

There is a contemporary difficulty here that the ancient teaching allows us to see with remarkable clarity.

We live in a culture increasingly devoted to understanding the self. We have acquired a sophisticated language for our fears, our injuries, our histories and the unconscious forces that shape our behavior.

Much of this knowledge has been liberating.

Yet there is a moment at which the journey inward can become an elegant means of avoiding the journey toward someone else.

A person tells me that I hurt them.

I understand why I did it. I understand where the impulse began. I can trace its origins to a moment long before we met.

My explanation is not necessarily an excuse. It may be entirely accurate.

But I must still notice what has happened in the conversation.

Someone came to speak about their life.

We are now speaking about mine.

If this occurs often enough, the person may eventually stop coming to me with their experience. They may learn that whatever happens between us will ultimately be interpreted through the history of the person I am.

They may even become very good at understanding me.

And I may mistake their understanding for peace.

Perhaps they have simply learned that there is no room for two witnesses here.

The Jewish concept of teshuvah is usually rendered as repentance. Its literal meaning is return.

I wonder whether one of the most neglected dimensions of return is the willingness to leave the interior of our own explanations.

To encounter a person whose account of us cannot be completed by anything we already know about ourselves.

This does not mean that another person’s judgment is infallible. People misunderstand one another. Memory is imperfect. Accusations can be unjust.

The other person is not the sole authority on everything that happened.

But neither am I.

The moral achievement is not to surrender my account of reality. It is to relinquish my claim that reality can be settled without theirs.

There is a further difficulty.

What if the person I have harmed no longer wishes to speak to me?

What if the very act of seeking forgiveness would return them to something they have spent years trying to leave?

Then perhaps the responsibility of return takes a different form.

I must not turn my desire for reconciliation into one more obligation for the person I have already burdened.

There are apologies that become demands. There are confessions that leave the injured person responsible for comforting the one who injured them.

Even the wish to be forgiven can become another way of making someone else’s life serve our own.

The work of repair must therefore include the possibility that I will never receive what I most deeply hope for.

That the person will not understand me.

That they will not welcome me back.

That I will have to become someone different without being permitted to show them who I have become.

This, too, is a way of recognizing that their life belongs to them.

The tradition that teaches us that every human being is created in the image of God also asks us to take seriously the human being whose existence interrupts our preferred understanding of ourselves.

We often find it easier to recognize the divine image in a stranger than in someone whose testimony unsettles our innocence.

Yet what would recognition mean if it extended only to the parts of another person that did not disturb us?

Return, in its deepest sense, may begin when we discover that we cannot arrive at the truth of our lives alone.

The father and his daughter are still sitting together.

He has told her how much he loved her.

She has not disputed it.

For a while, neither speaks.

And then, perhaps for the first time in all their years together, he asks her a question whose answer he does not already possess.

What was it like for you?

Eran Landau

LEGATO

Notes from the way back.