Student Rabbi Lev DePaolo | Erev Rosh Hashanah 5787
Tonight I want to talk to you about shame. That cheeks burning, pit in your stomach, want to sink into a hole in the ground feeling. It’s a noisy, buzzy, hot, all-consuming emotion. It’s more intense than embarrassment. Shame kicks your shins and whispers taunts into your ear. Shame steals your lunch money and tells you you’re a loser. Shame is such an effective bully that you want to stuff yourself in a locker.
Guilt is a very different feeling.
If shame is a playground bully, guilt is your favorite English teacher who gives you a stern look when you’re talking in class, as if to say, I know you’re better than this. Brené Brown explains the difference between shame and guilt powerfully: she writes,
“I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful—it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort. I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”
Brené Brown’s distinction between shame and guilt makes a lot of sense to me. Guilt is an adaptive emotion that teaches us when our behavior has moved out of alignment with our internal ethical code. Guilt nudges you and says, I know you’re better than this. Something has to change. Shame screams, you messed up, you’re a terrible person, and you’re beyond repair.
For me, shame hits the hardest when I have caused harm unintentionally. Sometimes I get defensive and become so fixated on what my intention was that I overlook the actual impact of my actions, which makes it harder for me to care for the person in front of me. Shame tells us stories about who we are, and the more we listen to those stories, the harder it becomes to focus on repair.
I have learned a lot about how to move through shame from teaching pre-teens for over 10 years. 12-year olds often walk around swimming in a sea of shame, but are experts at camouflaging and deflecting. The kids that are hurting the most sometimes cope with overwhelming feelings of shame by acting tough, doubling down on hurtful or aggressive behavior, or pretending they don’t care. In my early years of teaching, as a baby-faced new teacher, I got it all wrong. I thought that to be respected, I needed to come down strictly on misbehavior.
I still remember the student that changed everything for me. He was the 6th grader all the 5th grade teachers warned me about: furious and tightly-coiled, casually cruel to his classmates. None of my classroom management strategies worked with him. One day, as class was letting out, I saw him look around when he thought no one was watching, step on a classmates’ drawing that had fallen on the floor, and rub his dirty shoe print into the artwork. I took a moment to calm myself, called him over, and looked right into his eyes as I said, “I saw you step on your classmate’s drawing. I know that you are a good person, and this isn’t who you are.”
He looked shocked. Then his shoulders drooped and his eyes started to well up. All of his smugness and bravado melted away and he was a hurt little boy.
I’m not so naive as to think that this one interaction fixed his behavior, but the experience certainly changed me. Instead of coming into class each day looking for misbehavior and disrespect, I looked for opportunities to give him genuine praise. I started to see how he wore his bravado like armor because people expected him to act out, and deep down he was terrified that he couldn’t change.
Shame worms its way so insidiously into our brains that we start to believe the stories it tells us.
Our Jewish tradition has a beautiful spiritual technology for channeling us towards productive guilt and away from paralyzing shame. Teshuvah is often translated as repentance, but the English word misses the nuance. Teshuvah comes from the root shin vav vet, which means to return. The process of Teshuvah guides us back towards re-alignment with our values and helps us return to the way we want to live our lives.
Maimonides (the 12th century rabbi and philosopher) outlines 4 important steps for Teshuvah, guiding us through an internal transformation that then informs our behavior going forward.
Step 1: stop doing the harmful action! This is key: damage control first.
Step 2: do the necessary internal work to understand why what you did was wrong. If we’re just going through the motions, the next 2 steps don’t work.
Step 3: if our actions harmed someone, make a sincere attempt to repair. Note: asking God for forgiveness here is a non-starter. We have to do the relational work first.
Step 4: put a plan in place so that we don’t repeat the harm.
For many of us, the process of Teshuvah means deep and uncomfortable self-reflection about how to interrupt cycles that keep us trapped. We might not be able to do this by ourselves. That’s why we have friends, therapists, coaches, self-help podcasts, and thousands of years of Jewish tradition. Embedded deep in the Torah, the Talmud, and our liturgy is this truth:
We are flawed, because we are human. And, we inherently have value, and deserve grace and compassion, because we are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.
Tomorrow morning, before the Shema, we will sing the prayer V’ha’eir Eineinu:
V’ha-eir eineinu b’toratecha
v’dabek libeinu b’mitzvotecha,
v’yached l’vaveinu l’ahava ul-yira et sh’mecha v’lo nevosh
v’lo nikalem v’lo nikashel l’olam vaed.
Enlighten us with your Torah, and our hearts will cling to your mitzvot
Unite our hearts with love and reverence for your name.
Then, we will never be ashamed, we will never be humiliated, and we will never stumble.
I love this prayer because it reminds us that we don’t have to figure out life alone. We have the collective wisdom of millenia of ancestors; flawed, beautiful, holy, human. When we feel lost, broken, or alone, we can read stories in the Torah about people who were jealous, petty, selfish, and also brave, generous, and loving. In the Talmud, we find pages and pages and pages of rabbis bending over backwards to interpret biblical laws in a way that allows for human nature, that makes it easier for us to make good choices. Enlighten our eyes with your Torah: make our paths clearer with stories of our ancestors. And our hearts will cling to your mitzvot: the holy spark in us wants to stay in alignment with what we know to be right. Unite our hearts with love and reverence for your name: help us stay connected to a source of awe and tenderness in our lives. And then, then, we will never feel shame. Then we will never become consumed by humiliation. Then, when we stumble, we will draw strength from our community: holy, flawed, beautiful, human.