The Trouble With Guilt

In the 1970s, psychologist Baruch Fischhoff conducted an experiment that revealed something unsettling about the way we judge the past.

Once people were told how an uncertain event had actually turned out, the outcome suddenly seemed more predictable than it had beforehand. Knowing the ending changed their memory of what could reasonably have been known at the beginning.

Today we call this hindsight bias. We don’t just do this with history. We do it to ourselves.We put yesterday’s self on trial and introduce evidence that wasn’t available at the time.

I should have known. I should have seen it. I should have made a different decision. I should have called. I should have realized what was happening.

Sometimes that’s true. And sometimes it isn’t.

I’ve been thinking about that distinction as the High Holidays approach, because Jews know something about guilt. We even have a brand name for it: Jewish guilt. Then comes Yom Kippur, when we stand together and recite an alphabetical catalogue of our failures: Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu. We have been guilty. We have betrayed. We have stolen.

It can feel as though the worse we feel, the more seriously we are taking the day. But perhaps we have confused feeling guilty with taking responsibility.

The Hebrew word asham is revealing. In the Bible, it is not primarily the name of an emotion. It is closer to culpability or liability. Something happened. I bear responsibility for it. The question is less “How guilty do I feel?” and more “What am I actually responsible for?” That distinction runs through this week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei. It contains 74 mitzvot, traditionally counted as more than any other portion in the Torah. And what strikes me is how specific they are. They deal with wages, property, loans, safety, family relationships, honest weights and lost objects.

Torah takes responsibility out of the abstract and puts it right in front of us.

If you see something another person has lost, the Torah says, “Lo tuchal l’hit’alem”  “You may not look away.” You saw it. You can do something. So do it. But then the rabbis complicate things. They discuss circumstances in which a person may, in fact, look away. Even responsibility has boundaries. There are things that are mine that I would rather ignore. And there are things that are not mine that I nevertheless insist on carrying.

We can get both wrong.

Sometimes guilt is entirely appropriate. I hurt someone. I broke a promise. I knew better and did it anyway. The uncomfortable feeling can wake me up. But once I am awake, something has to happen. I apologize. I repair what I can. I change the behavior.

In fact, guilt can sometimes be easier than responsibility. I can feel terrible for months. Making the phone call might take five minutes. But there is another kind of guilt that can be much harder to recognize: guilt we don’t deserve.

A parent watches a child struggle and wonders, “What did I do wrong?” A relationship ends and we replay every decision. Someone we love suffers and we think we should have seen it coming. We make the best decision we can with the information available to us, only to discover later that things turned out badly. The pain is real. The wish that things had gone differently is real. But the guilt may not be accurate.

This is where Fischhoff’s experiment becomes more than an interesting piece of psychology. Once we know what happened, it is difficult to remember what we could reasonably have known before it happened. We judge yesterday’s decisions using today’s information. And sometimes blaming ourselves gives us something else: an illusion of control. If it was my fault, then perhaps I could have prevented it.

The alternative can be harder to accept. People we love make choices we cannot control. Good decisions sometimes have bad outcomes. We miss things because human beings cannot see around corners. Terrible things happen that no amount of wisdom on our part could have prevented. Accepting our limits can sometimes be harder than blaming ourselves.

None of this is an argument for less responsibility. It is an argument for more honest responsibility.

Perhaps before asking, “How do I stop feeling guilty?” we should ask a different question: “What was actually mine?” What did I know at the time? What could I reasonably have done? What part did I play? What can still be repaired? Sometimes the answer will be uncomfortable: I knew. I could have acted differently. I need to make this right. Sometimes the answer will be more complicated: I played a part, but I was not the whole cause. And sometimes the most truthful answer may be: This hurt terribly. I wish it had been different. But it was not my fault. That sentence belongs in our High Holiday vocabulary too.

Perhaps this is where our culture of guilt, religious or otherwise, gets confused. We imagine morality on a scale: more guilt means more conscience; more anguish means greater sincerity. But Torah seems to ask something more precise.

What happened? What was my part? What can I repair? What can I learn from? And what have I been carrying that was never mine?

Maybe that’s a useful exercise before we beat our chests this Yom Kippur: sort the guilt. Not to escape responsibility, but to locate it. There are things we need to own. There are things we need to repair. There are things we cannot fix but can learn from. And there are burdens some of us have carried for years that never belonged to us at all. Teshuvah begins with telling the truth about our responsibility, even when the truth is that we are less guilty than we thought.

So perhaps before we enter another year, we should look honestly at what we’re carrying. What is mine, I need to own. What isn’t, perhaps I can finally put down.