SHEIKH MOHAMMAD ALRAEE: When you are reciting the Quran you feel that you are talking to Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala [peace be upon Him], the creator, and you feel uplifted spiritually—not only the reciter, also the people who are listening as well. For each letter you get 10 blessings. When you listen to Quran, you are getting the same number of blessings as if you were reciter. It is God’s gift. I don’t believe that I could memorize this big book just on my own. It is from God.

DR. MUHAMMAD FAROOQ (President, Islamic Center Northern Virginia): When you have someone who is reciting in a sweet voice, then you are listening something which will impact your heart because, as we believe, words of Quran is from God. When he recites I feel like that I have sometimes goose bumps, sometimes I am overjoyed, sometimes I am literally crying, that it’s so powerful. We recite the Quran that we can understand what we are supposed to do, what God has given us the commands, what he’s saying to us and how we have to spend our life. If we understand Quran, then the chances are that we are going to do the exact same thing which God is asking us. We are being judged that what we have done. If there is something against God, he can forgive us if we asked for the forgiveness. In Islam we have the concept if you have done something wrong against any human being, you need to go back to that human being, you have to ask the forgiveness. A just society is the biggest blessing, and Quran is saying again and again in many ways that a just society is needed.

ALRAEE: Toward the end of Ramadan you feel sad that the blessing you were in you are going to be ending soon.

FAROOQ: This is such a blessing that we are able to finish. God has given us the chance to read the whole thing, and we try to remember the whole thing during the next coming year.

Read more of Bob Abernethy’s August 31, 2009 interview in Iowa with Marilynne Robinson. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Gilead and Home, and she a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop:

Marilynne Robinson

Q: In your teaching, what are the most important things you want your students to understand?

A: That they have their own testimony to offer, that if they think about what they perceive and what they feel carefully, if they watch other people closely and magnanimously, they will have something new to say, something that’s an actual addition to what has been said. That they have no obligation to be derivative or imitative in any way. That is absolutely not the point. I want them to know that if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently and to enjoy the processes of their own thought, then they will give the world something new, something worth having.

Q: In your essay on Psalm Eight in The Death of Adam you wrote, “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.” I think it’s very central to appreciating what you’ve been doing in your work.

A: Well, yes. I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is intrinsically mysterious as a physical object, say, or as a phenomenon of culture, or as an artifact of the history that lies behind it. I’ve always been almost offended by the idea of mysticism, because it seems as if it diminishes what we know by every means that gives us access to it – it diminishes the simple spectacle of what we are and where we are, the complex spectacle, I should probably have said. I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. I never had the experience of banality, as it were. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me, and I think that probably has done as much to form my mind as anything could have done.

Q: What are some of those things you’ve seen that are plainly before your eyes?

A: When I came here from living in New England for quite a long time I wanted to know what I was seeing, because every landscape has a history. It is the way it is because specific layers of population have lived in it and modified it and so on. Why is it that in the Middle West so many of the oldest structures are colleges virtually, in many cases, as old as the settlement itself? Because it’s a remarkable thing that the first thing people would feel they needed would be a college, and then it turns out that there’s a whole narrative behind that, that they were almost utopian communities that were designed to do all sorts of things. Create a culture that would be immune to the slave economy, for example. Create a culture that would be disseminating education at a high level, but accessible to anybody. All these kinds of very idealistic intentions were established very early on at what looked like little New England colleges that are scattered all over the Middle West and which tend to be, to this day, institutions of very high quality, very culturally important. But you look at a building, and you think why that period? Why that style? Who made that choice? And then you can sort of unfold almost anything that you look at, and so you find out that there’s a human narrative behind it, that there was a social vision behind it. If you just look at anything as if it were just, sort of, furniture – nothing against furniture, but then you are absolutely not seeing it. Everything needs to be queried, as they say.

I think probably the major component of seeing for me is assuming that what I see is something that I can’t see adequately or see exhaustively, and what is most remarkable in it is probably something that I have to watch very carefully in order to see any fragment of. The idea, which is very important in Calvin, that people are images of God – nothing could mystify anyone more than the idea that this is, in fact, what is being encountered, you know? Then what do you do but watch? What do you do but see what you can see? I think that it tends to be enormously partial, just given the human situation. But, nevertheless, I think it also sensitizes you to the profundity of the fact of any other life – that people can’t be thought of dismissively.

Q: Lots of people have called what it is I think you’re talking about as seeing the sacramental. Is that what it is? That in everything you see there is a quality of the holy?

A: Well, yes, in the sense that I certainly think that the holy is at the origins of everything that exists, everything, and so necessarily that’s true. I mean, there’s a sense in which it’s a signature act, you know, the beauty of it, the scale of it, the intricacy of it, all that. It’s not as if holiness were something super-added to things, and that’s why I hesitate a little bit over the word “sacramental,” because there can be an implication that an unsanctified reality exists, as if there is any kind of unholy reality. I think that one of the meanings of Christianity, of the Crucifixion, is that the holy can be unvalued, abused. There’s no question about that. A great deal that you see in the world is the abuse of the sacred. But the intrinsic sacredness is invariable, is a constant.

Q: This ability and interest in seeing everything in a very intense way, what does that add up to and where do you come out, then, in a sense of what I think many people would call a worldview?

A: If I have a worldview, which I suppose I do, I would hope it’s a very open one. You know, I’m always referring to Calvinism, my vocabulary in certain ways, but just the idea that the world is continuously unfolding itself for your further understanding, with the idea, of course, that whatever understanding you bring to this experience is incomplete, is too small. Something will tell you more, you know. I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It’s the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

Q: Is there a theological component? Is what you were just talking about part of a sense of the existence of God?

A: Oh, it’s absolutely central. Since I do use Calvin’s conceptual vocabulary, one of the things that is certainly true of him is that the givens of our situations are that we are given the world to enjoy. The signature of God in creation is beauty, as well as the expansion of understanding or the expansion of awareness, which is never complete precisely because it’s a manifestation of the presence of God. That life in the world is an enormous privilege, which is enhanced as privilege in the degree to which we are attentive to what is being given to us, not just as gift of prosperity or something, but what’s given us to understand, to allow us to reconceive.

Q: You’ve written with great kindness and understanding about mainline Protestants, your tradition. Why do you think they’ve suffered such losses in recent years?

A: Well, oddly enough, sometimes it seems to me as if they take every criticism that is offered of them and make it into a sort of modus operandi. So to the accusation that they are bland they respond by becoming blander. One of the things that is true of the mainline Protestant tradition is it’s a great theological tradition. It is as major a theological tradition as exists on the planet, and it’s as if that’s a responsibility that they really don’t want to live up to, in many cases, and they’ve sort of turned on themselves, I think, in that sense that the virtues that have defined them – moral and intellectual seriousness and so on, which had been their contribution to Christianity – are precisely the things that they have been running away from in too many cases. I don’t want to generalize too broadly.

Q: What do they do well?

A: I don’t know to what extent these things are being as effectively sustained as they ought to be by the institutions, or to what degree their carry-over from other traditions that have, perhaps, not been cultivated as well as they should in the modern period, but I think that they do sustain a sense of responsibility, strong value for what we, as people who work in the world can contribute to the world. I mean, as in many cases, work being the mode in which we can contribute to the world. I identify with them very strongly, in fact, because I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve serious attention. For example, social problems and so on, that they are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments or drawing of lines of the kind that say, “We’re the good people, and they’re the wicked ones.” There’s nothing of that in mainline tradition, and thank God for that.

Q: As one who sometimes has trouble with this himself, and I know a lot of people who do, too, I would be interested in hearing about why you believe in God.

A: I know this might not seem like the best answer in the world, but I do not not believe in God. If I were to say I don’t believe in God, I would feel that I was saying something that was not true.
I don’t think that we have a basis in our experience that allows us to put together a case for the existence of God. I don’t think that’s intended. I think that people who feel that they have to be able to put it together in that way, arrive at it rationally, as it were, simply lack acquaintance with the extreme fallibility and limitedness of human capacities for reason and for gathering relevant information and all the rest of it. I think the feeling of amazement that I think is appropriate to an alerted sense of what being is leads very naturally to deep comfort with the assumption of God.

Q: You’ve written about your childhood and how natural it was in your childhood to just assume that, yes, God exists. Is there a particular argument or a particular couple of arguments that, intellectually, provide you with conviction?

A: I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they’re capable of from thinking in that scale is something that’s really unique to theology. Given the assumptions that theologians proceed from, they are so much more capable of making meaningful articulations about what things are, what it is to exist, the experience of moral life, and so on. I mean that in the largest sense, of course. Nothing else touches it. Major philosophy doesn’t come close. Science — it’s like this wonderful conversation on another subject, you know, which — a theologically minded person is probably happy to read about the expanding universe and so on, but, of course, the whole human narrative is missing out of that. There’s nothing that can integrate reality in the way that theology can, and so I feel as if I’m reading something whole when I read great theology, and I feel as though I’m reading something very partial when I’m reading anything else.

Q: Can you find any words to describe God?

A: Well, I would use the basic biblical vocabulary. I would hesitate to do that.

Q: How do you answer the prominent atheists who have written so much recently that is critical of religion?

A: Atheism is such a longstanding tradition in Christian culture that I think it’s a necessary part of the conversation, and I have every kind of respect for somebody like Bertrand Russell or any considered atheist. I really think that to explore the question from that point of view and do it scrupulously is valuable. I think that this sort of avalanche of literature that we’ve gotten recently is very second-rate. It simply is not well-informed and not well-considered. I mean, I consider it to be kind of noise, a distraction from the conversation that actually can be fruitful.

Q: Let me turn your attention to the everyday cultural environment that we all live in, all the sounds and messages that are coming to us, what sometimes is called modern popular culture. You have found much to criticize in that.

A: Well, one thing that I find to criticize about it is that it’s not really popular, that it’s an industrial product that is sold by the means that any industrialist product is sold by, and the selling is very intense because the people that are making the product are also in a position to sell the product — the media and so on. I think that their idea, the idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life and so on, I mean, that is one of the major vectors of this phenomenon, and I think for most people, if they were making culture themselves, they’d be kind of sitting on the back porch singing a song that they maybe thought up the words for, and 200 years later people will be singing the same song. There’s a lot of profound work that has been done that’s truly popular. But now I think people are passive in relation to what they take to be popular culture, and they tolerate things that they would not themselves generate. It’s kind of an alienation of a culture from itself, I think.

Q: Do you think there are any ways to correct it?

A: Well, there’s this sort of day-to-day momentum of these things, that if something is supposed to be enormously scandalous people turn it on to see if it’s really scandalous, and then they can talk to each other about how scandalous it really was, and that sort of thing, and it’s a sort of chewing gum. It’s just this sort of continuous distraction that carries people from day to day in no significant way, just taking up time and space that would otherwise, I think, be used more imaginatively, more humanely.

Q: Do you see it as a barrier to a religious life?

A: I think it’s a severe distraction. One of the things — I mean, you’ve asked me to grumble, and so I’m grumbling – but one of the things that bothers me is that there’s a cynicism about it. People, I think, to a certain extent have to be instructed in things like the necessity of respect for other people, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable items. I really think if I had to say that religion depends on one thing, putting religion categorically, you know, we have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning, and then anything that, it seems to me that, really departs from that, that conditions people to part from it in their thinking, I think, is antagonistic to religious life.

Q: You seem, in many ways, a lot of good ways, independent of the everyday world around you. I’ve heard you called an outsider. I wonder whether you would feel comfortable with the term “gentle prophet.” How would you describe yourself in that public role?

A: I’m a very private person, and the fact that this has sort of slipped over into a public role is very surprising to me. You know, it’s certainly nothing that I would have thought about or think about much even in the ordinary course of my life. I’m just somebody who likes to write. I think growing up in the West, in the mountains where, at least when I was a child, being an independent person was very highly valued, and what that meant was, of course, cultivating an interior life that could sustain you, that dignified you. I wrote an essay a long time ago that sort of disappeared, but the word “lonely,” when I was a little kid, had a very strong positive connotation. It was an experience to be sought, and it took me a while to learn that this was not common wisdom. But I just grew up culturally, I think, very prepared to live to myself, in a certain sense, for weal or woe. I think that that does give me a certain distance from things of a more, perhaps, praising posture toward what is taken to be popular than other people might have.

Q: Let me go back to some of these religious matters that we were talking about. The Bible – how do you read it, interpret it? The Bible often is described as God’s literal word. How do you see it?

A: Well, I find that’s really remarkable, you know, considering that surely virtually anybody that makes that claim is in the habit of reading it in translation, and anybody that has any acquaintance of the variety of translations knows that from ancient Hebrew or Greek to modern English is a very, very long and perilous step. I think that is simply not a sustainable idea. I have lots of Bibles. My house is full of Bibles, and the reason for that is that whenever I look anything up, I look it up in eight different translations to try to sort of encircle what the probable meaning is, because every one of them can make the case for the interpretation it has made. I read the Bible as an ancient literature. I read it, to the extent that I can, surrounded by other ancient literature, you know, that you can now read Hittite poetry and Canaanite poetry and all the rest of it in translations also. I think that it has a long history of tendentious interpretation of various kinds, and that for a modern reader one of the most difficult things to do is to read it as if newly, as if you could put aside the fact that certain passages have been selected and underlined over history, and in a way that discourages you from noticing what comes before and what comes afterward. The Bible as a literature of antiquity is incomparably great, I think, and frankly, I hope to write about it in a way that treats it with a different kind of respect from the respect it has tended to receive up to this point. It’s a fascinating, complicated, mysterious, endlessly suggestive literature that I, again, don’t feel that I have to arrive at hard conclusions about, and that makes it, in effect, more like the rest of reality than it would be if I felt it could be encapsulated and summarized or concluded about.

Q: Let me ask you about Calvin. Many of us hear that word and we think of an ultra-strict, judgmental, unforgiving reformer. You have done a lot of thinking and writing about this.

A: One of the first things that has to be done when you’re talking about Calvin is think about the world that Calvin lived in. Was he severe by the standard of his time? And, of course, he was living in the middle of the Inquisition, which was notoriously severe. There was a sort of punitive aspect to social organization then. The question is, was Geneva more severe than any other place in Europe? No, actually. It was the first place where the Qur’an was published in Europe, and so on. All kinds of literature that would not have been tolerated anywhere else in Europe was published for the first time in Geneva in the post-classical period. He created public education for both boys and girls in Geneva. He had institutions for the relief of poverty in Geneva. He did all kinds of things that are certainly very liberal by the standards of the time. He was basically responsible for the survival of that city which was under siege through a great part of his time there, not because of him in the first place, but because it had had a political revolution and driven out its traditional ruling family, but it became the center of the Reformation, and then it came under many kinds of threats and pressure, and not only that, but reformed populations all through Europe. So he was continuously trying to keep the city safe, trying to keep these other populations in Europe safe at the same time that he was writing scores and scores of books that were interpretations of Scripture of a very high quality, from the original. He preached, in fact, from the original Greek and Hebrew. He’s a little bit like Saint Augustine. He wrote so many books that people don’t know which book to read, perhaps. Even people who call themselves Calvinists are oddly unread in what he actually wrote. But if you read his sermons on Micah or his sermons on the Ten Commandments or something like that – extraordinarily compassionate, extraordinarily generous, certainly bears up to anything that you would find in the period, or this period. He was a lightning rod for the enemies of the reform movement who, of course, generated a huge polemic around him and around the city. Most of Calvin came into English almost immediately. He was very closely followed in England. They have begun to translate the notes from the consistories, and it turns out that what they were doing, this meeting of clergy that dealt with people who were some sort of social problem, it would do things like establish the paternity of a child and make the father support the child and the mother. In some small way, of course, it sounds very minor economics by any standard we’re used to, but nevertheless, you read things like they drowned unmarried mothers and things like that. But if you look at what they actually did and what the transcripts actually say, there’s nothing judgmental, there’s nothing cruel about it. It’s just a matter of trying to keep them from bearing the worst consequences of unwed motherhood, basically.

Q: Some of the things that you’ve written, I would imagine, are consistent with what Calvin taught about the importance of forgiveness.

A: There are two things that I think are very important. One of them is the emphasis on original sin. In earlier theology the idea was that baptism removed the effects of original sin from the higher functions, and it was basically the body that continued to bear the consequences of it. But Calvin said no. Original sin is what makes it so that we can never see clearly or understand entirely. And this, of course, undermines the assumption that secure judgments can be made, that we actually know. But how to understand something in a way to draw unforgiving conclusions about it? There’s also the fact that he does not exclude anyone. People say that he doesn’t attach importance to works, as they call it, but what that means in certain contexts is that the value God assigns to a person is not something that’s necessarily evident in how we would value their lives. The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know. So you err on the side of forgiving. Or you don’t, or who knows what God’s ultimate intentions are, in any case. But you assume your fallibility and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God, or is God himself, which is sometimes how [Calvin] describes this when you are encountered by someone, even an enemy, and when Calvin talked about somebody who wanted to kill you, that was most of Europe at that point, from his point of view. But he says this is the image of God that has approached you. And the question is what does God want from this moment? And so there’s this absolute valuing of the other that comes under all circumstances and just leaves the idea of judgment as a meaningless idea.

Q: Reading Gilead and Home and reading about those two old preachers that you described and drew so beautifully certainly took me back to my childhood in a preacher’s family. You had to have great respect for those people. You couldn’t have written about them unless you loved them and respected them. What they lived for and the way they saw the world, the way they saw each other, the way they saw their people must be something that you think is very, very important – and not just in the mid-’50s, but right now.

A: Yes, granting fallibilities, granting the fact that they’re sort of culturally blinded by the conventions that surround them. Why can’t Jack talk to his father, you know? He can’t. He can’t tell him.

Q: But I would assume that in your church and in neighborhood you find much of the same thing today, don’t you?

A: I do. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that tends not to be visible in the way that popular culture tends to represent people. I know so many people whom I admire so deeply who seem to me to be enormously sensitive and really respectful of people in general, and so on. But somehow or other, it’s as if that didn’t matter, as if that’s some sort of assumed background that doesn’t have interest or value. It’s very odd. I love and feel very much at home in my culture, whether it’s Iowa or Astoria or wherever I am. I just feel that it’s not being valued. The things that are precious in it are not being acknowledged, and I think that that’s something that depletes people’s lives of a great deal of the satisfactions that are essential.

Q: Why is that? Why are these things that are so valuable being ignored?

A: I think that perhaps, well, it requires a certain subtlety. It requires attention. It’s easy to be sensationalistic. There’s nothing easier than that, and making a narrative out of thoughtfulness, you know, to make a life of it as a considered life rather than one that’s just a slash-and-burn version of human experience is hard. I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of this stuff, and then it becomes the norm. It becomes what people expect or think other people want, whether they want it themselves or not.

Q: You’re talking about writers now, what writers are doing, or just what the general public seems to believe is important?

A: Well, not really talking about writers. I have these impulsive, tribal loyalties, and when I’m speaking this way I’m never speaking about writers. But I mean just in terms of the general cultural ambience, you know, what you see when you are in a hotel room and do turn on the television set, and so on. I don’t want to be categorical, but I think that that’s a very important element, and it has a way of distracting people from what is substantial in their own lives and making people think that if they’ve never been involved in something dramatic in some painful way they somehow or other haven’t lived or something.

Q: There’s a wonderful quote from you. It had to do with looking back on one’s life, and you were saying we should get great comfort out of having comforted a child.

A: Well, I do think when you look back at your own life, and you realize that among the things that you remember might be some gesture of comfort that another person made or some small compliment that you received that for some reason redirected your life, and so I mean I think most people can tell those kinds of stories, and the other side of it is, of course, that those are the moments in which you have the opportunity to do something that actually changes life, you know, that someone could look back on and say “and after that things were different,” which is an extraordinary privilege That is the kind of thing that tends to be overlooked.

Q: You told us some years ago how much you missed hearing people say that they thought it was important to leave the world better than they found it.

A: Well, I think that was a major, dominant cliché of my childhood – that you were supposed to leave the world better than you found it. It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing that we’re going through now, “What’s in it for me?” That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it, but now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me, just – what a lovely thought, do you know? People talk about soldiers as being the standard against which things should be measured. But they, by definition, are doing things that there’s a very strong chance they will not live to enjoy. I mean, all those lovely, young people that go off and are said to be dying for freedom by definition are giving other people something that they cannot enjoy. This is a great value, so how can people have possibly got around to this “what’s in it for me?” approach to political and social life? It’s extraordinary.

Originally broadcast June 26, 2009

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: It’s a common observation that one of the most important paths to peace between enemies is to learn to see others not as demonized stereotypes, but as unique human beings. When she was in the Middle East last month, Kim Lawton learned about the Parents Circle-Families Forum — Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims who have lost loved ones in their long conflict but have learned to replace hate with reconciliation, even friendship. Here is Kim’s special report.

KIM LAWTON: Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank have been hotbeds of unrest and often scenes of angry confrontation between displaced Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. Because of the continuing military and political conflict, few Israeli civilians ever venture in. But don’t tell that to Rami Elhanan. On this day, he and his wife Nurit have come to the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem to visit their friend, Mazen Faraj. It’s is an unexpected friendship. Both have lost family members in the conflict. Yet their grief has brought them together.

MAZEN FARAJ: Today it’s our responsibility for our children and for our families to build something new.

RAMI ELHANAN: We put a crack in this wall of hatred and fear that divide these two nations, and we show another way. We show another possibility. We show the ability to listen to each other’s pain, which is essential if you want to get to any kind of reconciliation.

Mr. FARAJ: This was the first room for our house.

LAWTON: Faraj has lived in Dheisheh his entire life. During the early part of his childhood, fifteen people in his family lived in this one crowded room.

Mr. ELHANAN: This is the place he’s always talking about—that you don’t need someone to hate you to teach you how to hate when you grow up in a room like this.

LAWTON: In April of 2002, there was a violent confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians fighters outside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, the site where Christian tradition holds that Jesus was born. Palestinian fighters holed up in the church, and Israeli soldiers laid siege. During a lull in the fighting, Faraj’s 62-year-old father went out to Jerusalem to get groceries. He was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.

Mr. FARAJ: He got killed in April 2002 when he was coming back from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The Israeli soldiers, they started shooting him and without any reason. No one can kill his soul. They succeeded to kill his body, but without his soul. His soul’s still around us and give us like the power every day, how to keep going in our lives.

LAWTON: But there is great pain on the Israeli side as well. Elhanan had 14-year-old daughter, Smadar. Of four children, she was the only daughter, and the family had called her “the princess.” On September 4, 1997, the first day of school, Smadar went to a popular shopping area in Jerusalem.

Mr. ELHANAN: And she went down the street with her girlfriends to buy new books for the new year. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing five people that day, including three little girls. One of them was my 14-year-old Smadar.

LAWTON: Elhanan says he was overwhelmed by anger and despair.

Mr. ELHANAN: It took me almost a year to understand who I am, to try to recover, and to understand that I have to choose a way for myself and translate these feelings of anger and despair into something constructive and create some hope out of it. And I joined the Parents Circle and I found a meaning for my life.

LAWTON: The Parents Circle-Families Forum was launched in 1995 as a way to bring bereaved Israelis and Palestinians together. The group now has several hundred participants who’ve lost immediate family members because of the violence in this region. Organizers believe it’s the only project of its kind in an area where conflict is still ongoing. The nonprofit group sponsors face-to-face dialogue meetings for bereaved family members and public lectures about reconciliation.

Mr. ELHANAN: The minute I saw in that meeting the first bereaved Palestinian families as human beings I was completely shocked. It was the first time ever in my life that I meet Palestinians as human beings after so many years of demonizing each other. So this was the turning point.

LAWTON: Faraj, who was dealing with his own feelings of anger and revenge, went to one Parents Circle meeting where Elhanan spoke.

Mr. FARAJ: And it was this man talking about his suffering and his pain, too. But I told him, “What do you know about suffering and pain? You just live in Jerusalem. You are Israeli, you are the occupier, you are everything.” And then he starts to talk about his daughter, and then really I found out that, whoa, it’s the same pain.

LAWTON: The two men became close friends. Elhanan was drawn by Faraj’s humor.

Mr. ELHANAN: He’s the only guy in the world that makes me laugh.

LAWTON: Faraj couldn’t believe that Elhanan was willing to visit him in the refugee camp. They built a deep mutual respect.

Mr. FARAJ: He’s just a human being, and you can deal with him in an easy way, and you can build a discussion with him with easy way, and you can build the fight also in easy way, too. But the most important thing’s that he’ll respect the other.

Mr. ELHANAN: What he’s doing needs a lot of guts, and his ability to face the world, tell his truths after all the things that he’s been through, I think it’s admirable, and I really respect him for it.

LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan started doing joint lectures for the Parents Circle.

Mr. ELHANAN: We use this enormous respect that the two societies have for people who paid the highest price possible to convey this message, to convey the message of dialogue, of reconciliation, of peace.

LAWTON: Elhanan and Faraj have given more than 1,000 joint lectures in Palestinian and Israeli schools. They say most of the kids have no idea that Palestinians and Israelis can be friends.

Mr. ELHANAN: If there is only one kid at the end of the class who nods his head with acceptance to this message, we saved one drop of blood. According to Judaism, this is the whole world.

LAWTON: The Parents Circle is nonsectarian, but is supported by several Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups. In 2008, Catholic Relief Services brought Faraj and Elhanan on a speaking tour across the United States.

BURCU MUNYAS (Program Manager, Catholic Relief Services): They are giving a message of hope in the midst of hopelessness in the Holy Land. So we thought that this would be a strong message to bring to our US Catholic audiences.

LAWTON: For their part, Elhanan and Faraj try to keep the focus on relationship, not religion.

Mr. FARAJ: It’s the important things that we don’t want to make this conflict like a religion conflict.

LAWTON: Their work isn’t always easy. Both men have received sometimes strong criticism from within their respective communities.

Mr. ELHANAN: People tell me that I’m a traitor or a — but I think more people are impressed by my ability to translate the pain into hope.

Mr. FARAJ: I really believe in what I’m doing and — but not all the people they really accept that, but anyway, if you believe in something you have to continue.

LAWTON: Parents Circle supporters hope these relationships can be a model for others, which they believe will help further the political peace process.

Ms MUNYAS: By building trust with each other they become more and more ready to trust the other side, to compromise, and to tell their leaders that they are ready, that they can move ahead, they can compromise, and they can sign the peace agreements.

LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan agree.

Mr. FARAJ: We have a different culture, a different religion, and different, also, conditions on the ground, too. So how we can find a way? This the problem. It’s not about that’s it, I found the solution for the conflict. No. But the first step, we have to know each other.

Mr. ELHANAN: I devote my life to go everywhere possible to tell the very simple truth that we are not doomed. It’s not our destiny to keep on killing each other, and we can stop it by talking to one another — that simple.

LAWTON: Simple in theory, much more elusive to work out. But they hope their relationship proves it is possible. I’m Kim Lawton in the West Bank.

Marilynne Robinson

Q: In your teaching, what are the most important things you want your students to understand?

A: That they have their own testimony to offer, that if they think about what they perceive and what they feel carefully, if they watch other people closely and magnanimously, they will have something new to say, something that’s an actual addition to what has been said. That they have no obligation to be derivative or imitative in any way. That is absolutely not the point. I want them to know that if they are thoughtful people, if they have the courage to evaluate things independently and to enjoy the processes of their own thought, then they will give the world something new, something worth having.

Q: In your essay on Psalm Eight in The Death of Adam you wrote, “So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.” I think it’s very central to appreciating what you’ve been doing in your work.

A: Well, yes. I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is intrinsically mysterious as a physical object, say, or as a phenomenon of culture, or as an artifact of the history that lies behind it. I’ve always been almost offended by the idea of mysticism, because it seems as if it diminishes what we know by every means that gives us access to it – it diminishes the simple spectacle of what we are and where we are, the complex spectacle, I should probably have said. I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. I never had the experience of banality, as it were. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me, and I think that probably has done as much to form my mind as anything could have done.

Q: What are some of those things you’ve seen that are plainly before your eyes?

A: When I came here from living in New England for quite a long time I wanted to know what I was seeing, because every landscape has a history. It is the way it is because specific layers of population have lived in it and modified it and so on. Why is it that in the Middle West so many of the oldest structures are colleges virtually, in many cases, as old as the settlement itself? Because it’s a remarkable thing that the first thing people would feel they needed would be a college, and then it turns out that there’s a whole narrative behind that, that they were almost utopian communities that were designed to do all sorts of things. Create a culture that would be immune to the slave economy, for example. Create a culture that would be disseminating education at a high level, but accessible to anybody. All these kinds of very idealistic intentions were established very early on at what looked like little New England colleges that are scattered all over the Middle West and which tend to be, to this day, institutions of very high quality, very culturally important. But you look at a building, and you think why that period? Why that style? Who made that choice? And then you can sort of unfold almost anything that you look at, and so you find out that there’s a human narrative behind it, that there was a social vision behind it. If you just look at anything as if it were just, sort of, furniture – nothing against furniture, but then you are absolutely not seeing it. Everything needs to be queried, as they say.

I think probably the major component of seeing for me is assuming that what I see is something that I can’t see adequately or see exhaustively, and what is most remarkable in it is probably something that I have to watch very carefully in order to see any fragment of. The idea, which is very important in Calvin, that people are images of God – nothing could mystify anyone more than the idea that this is, in fact, what is being encountered, you know? Then what do you do but watch? What do you do but see what you can see? I think that it tends to be enormously partial, just given the human situation. But, nevertheless, I think it also sensitizes you to the profundity of the fact of any other life – that people can’t be thought of dismissively.

Q: Lots of people have called what it is I think you’re talking about as seeing the sacramental. Is that what it is? That in everything you see there is a quality of the holy?

A: Well, yes, in the sense that I certainly think that the holy is at the origins of everything that exists, everything, and so necessarily that’s true. I mean, there’s a sense in which it’s a signature act, you know, the beauty of it, the scale of it, the intricacy of it, all that. It’s not as if holiness were something super-added to things, and that’s why I hesitate a little bit over the word “sacramental,” because there can be an implication that an unsanctified reality exists, as if there is any kind of unholy reality. I think that one of the meanings of Christianity, of the Crucifixion, is that the holy can be unvalued, abused. There’s no question about that. A great deal that you see in the world is the abuse of the sacred. But the intrinsic sacredness is invariable, is a constant.

Q: This ability and interest in seeing everything in a very intense way, what does that add up to and where do you come out, then, in a sense of what I think many people would call a worldview?

A: If I have a worldview, which I suppose I do, I would hope it’s a very open one. You know, I’m always referring to Calvinism, my vocabulary in certain ways, but just the idea that the world is continuously unfolding itself for your further understanding, with the idea, of course, that whatever understanding you bring to this experience is incomplete, is too small. Something will tell you more, you know. I think about things like the fact that nobody knows what time is. Time is what? Nobody can describe it, even physics or math or anything else. But it is what we continuously experience. It’s the state of our unfolding, in a way, and in that sense that the continuous reopening of reality is what I think of as, perhaps, a worldview.

Q: Is there a theological component? Is what you were just talking about part of a sense of the existence of God?

A: Oh, it’s absolutely central. Since I do use Calvin’s conceptual vocabulary, one of the things that is certainly true of him is that the givens of our situations are that we are given the world to enjoy. The signature of God in creation is beauty, as well as the expansion of understanding or the expansion of awareness, which is never complete precisely because it’s a manifestation of the presence of God. That life in the world is an enormous privilege, which is enhanced as privilege in the degree to which we are attentive to what is being given to us, not just as gift of prosperity or something, but what’s given us to understand, to allow us to reconceive.

Q: You’ve written with great kindness and understanding about mainline Protestants, your tradition. Why do you think they’ve suffered such losses in recent years?

A: Well, oddly enough, sometimes it seems to me as if they take every criticism that is offered of them and make it into a sort of modus operandi. So to the accusation that they are bland they respond by becoming blander. One of the things that is true of the mainline Protestant tradition is it’s a great theological tradition. It is as major a theological tradition as exists on the planet, and it’s as if that’s a responsibility that they really don’t want to live up to, in many cases, and they’ve sort of turned on themselves, I think, in that sense that the virtues that have defined them – moral and intellectual seriousness and so on, which had been their contribution to Christianity – are precisely the things that they have been running away from in too many cases. I don’t want to generalize too broadly.

Q: What do they do well?

A: I don’t know to what extent these things are being as effectively sustained as they ought to be by the institutions, or to what degree their carry-over from other traditions that have, perhaps, not been cultivated as well as they should in the modern period, but I think that they do sustain a sense of responsibility, strong value for what we, as people who work in the world can contribute to the world. I mean, as in many cases, work being the mode in which we can contribute to the world. I identify with them very strongly, in fact, because I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve serious attention. For example, social problems and so on, that they are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments or drawing of lines of the kind that say, “We’re the good people, and they’re the wicked ones.” There’s nothing of that in mainline tradition, and thank God for that.

Q: As one who sometimes has trouble with this himself, and I know a lot of people who do, too, I would be interested in hearing about why you believe in God.

A: I know this might not seem like the best answer in the world, but I do not not believe in God. If I were to say I don’t believe in God, I would feel that I was saying something that was not true.
I don’t think that we have a basis in our experience that allows us to put together a case for the existence of God. I don’t think that’s intended. I think that people who feel that they have to be able to put it together in that way, arrive at it rationally, as it were, simply lack acquaintance with the extreme fallibility and limitedness of human capacities for reason and for gathering relevant information and all the rest of it. I think the feeling of amazement that I think is appropriate to an alerted sense of what being is leads very naturally to deep comfort with the assumption of God.

Q: You’ve written about your childhood and how natural it was in your childhood to just assume that, yes, God exists. Is there a particular argument or a particular couple of arguments that, intellectually, provide you with conviction?

A: I like major theology. I like Karl Barth, and I like John Calvin, and I like Martin Luther. The scale of thinking and the power of integration that they’re capable of from thinking in that scale is something that’s really unique to theology. Given the assumptions that theologians proceed from, they are so much more capable of making meaningful articulations about what things are, what it is to exist, the experience of moral life, and so on. I mean that in the largest sense, of course. Nothing else touches it. Major philosophy doesn’t come close. Science — it’s like this wonderful conversation on another subject, you know, which — a theologically minded person is probably happy to read about the expanding universe and so on, but, of course, the whole human narrative is missing out of that. There’s nothing that can integrate reality in the way that theology can, and so I feel as if I’m reading something whole when I read great theology, and I feel as though I’m reading something very partial when I’m reading anything else.

Q: Can you find any words to describe God?

A: Well, I would use the basic biblical vocabulary. I would hesitate to do that.

Q: How do you answer the prominent atheists who have written so much recently that is critical of religion?

A: Atheism is such a longstanding tradition in Christian culture that I think it’s a necessary part of the conversation, and I have every kind of respect for somebody like Bertrand Russell or any considered atheist. I really think that to explore the question from that point of view and do it scrupulously is valuable. I think that this sort of avalanche of literature that we’ve gotten recently is very second-rate. It simply is not well-informed and not well-considered. I mean, I consider it to be kind of noise, a distraction from the conversation that actually can be fruitful.

Q: Let me turn your attention to the everyday cultural environment that we all live in, all the sounds and messages that are coming to us, what sometimes is called modern popular culture. You have found much to criticize in that.

A: Well, one thing that I find to criticize about it is that it’s not really popular, that it’s an industrial product that is sold by the means that any industrialist product is sold by, and the selling is very intense because the people that are making the product are also in a position to sell the product — the media and so on. I think that their idea, the idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life and so on, I mean, that is one of the major vectors of this phenomenon, and I think for most people, if they were making culture themselves, they’d be kind of sitting on the back porch singing a song that they maybe thought up the words for, and 200 years later people will be singing the same song. There’s a lot of profound work that has been done that’s truly popular. But now I think people are passive in relation to what they take to be popular culture, and they tolerate things that they would not themselves generate. It’s kind of an alienation of a culture from itself, I think.

Q: Do you think there are any ways to correct it?

A: Well, there’s this sort of day-to-day momentum of these things, that if something is supposed to be enormously scandalous people turn it on to see if it’s really scandalous, and then they can talk to each other about how scandalous it really was, and that sort of thing, and it’s a sort of chewing gum. It’s just this sort of continuous distraction that carries people from day to day in no significant way, just taking up time and space that would otherwise, I think, be used more imaginatively, more humanely.

Q: Do you see it as a barrier to a religious life?

A: I think it’s a severe distraction. One of the things — I mean, you’ve asked me to grumble, and so I’m grumbling – but one of the things that bothers me is that there’s a cynicism about it. People, I think, to a certain extent have to be instructed in things like the necessity of respect for other people, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable items. I really think if I had to say that religion depends on one thing, putting religion categorically, you know, we have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning, and then anything that, it seems to me that, really departs from that, that conditions people to part from it in their thinking, I think, is antagonistic to religious life.

Q: You seem, in many ways, a lot of good ways, independent of the everyday world around you. I’ve heard you called an outsider. I wonder whether you would feel comfortable with the term “gentle prophet.” How would you describe yourself in that public role?

A: I’m a very private person, and the fact that this has sort of slipped over into a public role is very surprising to me. You know, it’s certainly nothing that I would have thought about or think about much even in the ordinary course of my life. I’m just somebody who likes to write. I think growing up in the West, in the mountains where, at least when I was a child, being an independent person was very highly valued, and what that meant was, of course, cultivating an interior life that could sustain you, that dignified you. I wrote an essay a long time ago that sort of disappeared, but the word “lonely,” when I was a little kid, had a very strong positive connotation. It was an experience to be sought, and it took me a while to learn that this was not common wisdom. But I just grew up culturally, I think, very prepared to live to myself, in a certain sense, for weal or woe. I think that that does give me a certain distance from things of a more, perhaps, praising posture toward what is taken to be popular than other people might have.

Q: Let me go back to some of these religious matters that we were talking about. The Bible – how do you read it, interpret it? The Bible often is described as God’s literal word. How do you see it?

A: Well, I find that’s really remarkable, you know, considering that surely virtually anybody that makes that claim is in the habit of reading it in translation, and anybody that has any acquaintance of the variety of translations knows that from ancient Hebrew or Greek to modern English is a very, very long and perilous step. I think that is simply not a sustainable idea. I have lots of Bibles. My house is full of Bibles, and the reason for that is that whenever I look anything up, I look it up in eight different translations to try to sort of encircle what the probable meaning is, because every one of them can make the case for the interpretation it has made. I read the Bible as an ancient literature. I read it, to the extent that I can, surrounded by other ancient literature, you know, that you can now read Hittite poetry and Canaanite poetry and all the rest of it in translations also. I think that it has a long history of tendentious interpretation of various kinds, and that for a modern reader one of the most difficult things to do is to read it as if newly, as if you could put aside the fact that certain passages have been selected and underlined over history, and in a way that discourages you from noticing what comes before and what comes afterward. The Bible as a literature of antiquity is incomparably great, I think, and frankly, I hope to write about it in a way that treats it with a different kind of respect from the respect it has tended to receive up to this point. It’s a fascinating, complicated, mysterious, endlessly suggestive literature that I, again, don’t feel that I have to arrive at hard conclusions about, and that makes it, in effect, more like the rest of reality than it would be if I felt it could be encapsulated and summarized or concluded about.

Q: Let me ask you about Calvin. Many of us hear that word and we think of an ultra-strict, judgmental, unforgiving reformer. You have done a lot of thinking and writing about this.

A: One of the first things that has to be done when you’re talking about Calvin is think about the world that Calvin lived in. Was he severe by the standard of his time? And, of course, he was living in the middle of the Inquisition, which was notoriously severe. There was a sort of punitive aspect to social organization then. The question is, was Geneva more severe than any other place in Europe? No, actually. It was the first place where the Qur’an was published in Europe, and so on. All kinds of literature that would not have been tolerated anywhere else in Europe was published for the first time in Geneva in the post-classical period. He created public education for both boys and girls in Geneva. He had institutions for the relief of poverty in Geneva. He did all kinds of things that are certainly very liberal by the standards of the time. He was basically responsible for the survival of that city which was under siege through a great part of his time there, not because of him in the first place, but because it had had a political revolution and driven out its traditional ruling family, but it became the center of the Reformation, and then it came under many kinds of threats and pressure, and not only that, but reformed populations all through Europe. So he was continuously trying to keep the city safe, trying to keep these other populations in Europe safe at the same time that he was writing scores and scores of books that were interpretations of Scripture of a very high quality, from the original. He preached, in fact, from the original Greek and Hebrew. He’s a little bit like Saint Augustine. He wrote so many books that people don’t know which book to read, perhaps. Even people who call themselves Calvinists are oddly unread in what he actually wrote. But if you read his sermons on Micah or his sermons on the Ten Commandments or something like that – extraordinarily compassionate, extraordinarily generous, certainly bears up to anything that you would find in the period, or this period. He was a lightning rod for the enemies of the reform movement who, of course, generated a huge polemic around him and around the city. Most of Calvin came into English almost immediately. He was very closely followed in England. They have begun to translate the notes from the consistories, and it turns out that what they were doing, this meeting of clergy that dealt with people who were some sort of social problem, it would do things like establish the paternity of a child and make the father support the child and the mother. In some small way, of course, it sounds very minor economics by any standard we’re used to, but nevertheless, you read things like they drowned unmarried mothers and things like that. But if you look at what they actually did and what the transcripts actually say, there’s nothing judgmental, there’s nothing cruel about it. It’s just a matter of trying to keep them from bearing the worst consequences of unwed motherhood, basically.

Q: Some of the things that you’ve written, I would imagine, are consistent with what Calvin taught about the importance of forgiveness.

A: There are two things that I think are very important. One of them is the emphasis on original sin. In earlier theology the idea was that baptism removed the effects of original sin from the higher functions, and it was basically the body that continued to bear the consequences of it. But Calvin said no. Original sin is what makes it so that we can never see clearly or understand entirely. And this, of course, undermines the assumption that secure judgments can be made, that we actually know. But how to understand something in a way to draw unforgiving conclusions about it? There’s also the fact that he does not exclude anyone. People say that he doesn’t attach importance to works, as they call it, but what that means in certain contexts is that the value God assigns to a person is not something that’s necessarily evident in how we would value their lives. The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know. So you err on the side of forgiving. Or you don’t, or who knows what God’s ultimate intentions are, in any case. But you assume your fallibility and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God, or is God himself, which is sometimes how [Calvin] describes this when you are encountered by someone, even an enemy, and when Calvin talked about somebody who wanted to kill you, that was most of Europe at that point, from his point of view. But he says this is the image of God that has approached you. And the question is what does God want from this moment? And so there’s this absolute valuing of the other that comes under all circumstances and just leaves the idea of judgment as a meaningless idea.

Q: Reading Gilead and Home and reading about those two old preachers that you described and drew so beautifully certainly took me back to my childhood in a preacher’s family. You had to have great respect for those people. You couldn’t have written about them unless you loved them and respected them. What they lived for and the way they saw the world, the way they saw each other, the way they saw their people must be something that you think is very, very important – and not just in the mid-’50s, but right now.

A: Yes, granting fallibilities, granting the fact that they’re sort of culturally blinded by the conventions that surround them. Why can’t Jack talk to his father, you know? He can’t. He can’t tell him.

Q: But I would assume that in your church and in neighborhood you find much of the same thing today, don’t you?

A: I do. Well, you know, that’s one of the things that tends not to be visible in the way that popular culture tends to represent people. I know so many people whom I admire so deeply who seem to me to be enormously sensitive and really respectful of people in general, and so on. But somehow or other, it’s as if that didn’t matter, as if that’s some sort of assumed background that doesn’t have interest or value. It’s very odd. I love and feel very much at home in my culture, whether it’s Iowa or Astoria or wherever I am. I just feel that it’s not being valued. The things that are precious in it are not being acknowledged, and I think that that’s something that depletes people’s lives of a great deal of the satisfactions that are essential.

Q: Why is that? Why are these things that are so valuable being ignored?

A: I think that perhaps, well, it requires a certain subtlety. It requires attention. It’s easy to be sensationalistic. There’s nothing easier than that, and making a narrative out of thoughtfulness, you know, to make a life of it as a considered life rather than one that’s just a slash-and-burn version of human experience is hard. I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of this stuff, and then it becomes the norm. It becomes what people expect or think other people want, whether they want it themselves or not.

Q: You’re talking about writers now, what writers are doing, or just what the general public seems to believe is important?

A: Well, not really talking about writers. I have these impulsive, tribal loyalties, and when I’m speaking this way I’m never speaking about writers. But I mean just in terms of the general cultural ambience, you know, what you see when you are in a hotel room and do turn on the television set, and so on. I don’t want to be categorical, but I think that that’s a very important element, and it has a way of distracting people from what is substantial in their own lives and making people think that if they’ve never been involved in something dramatic in some painful way they somehow or other haven’t lived or something.

Q: There’s a wonderful quote from you. It had to do with looking back on one’s life, and you were saying we should get great comfort out of having comforted a child.

A: Well, I do think when you look back at your own life, and you realize that among the things that you remember might be some gesture of comfort that another person made or some small compliment that you received that for some reason redirected your life, and so I mean I think most people can tell those kinds of stories, and the other side of it is, of course, that those are the moments in which you have the opportunity to do something that actually changes life, you know, that someone could look back on and say “and after that things were different,” which is an extraordinary privilege That is the kind of thing that tends to be overlooked.

Q: You told us some years ago how much you missed hearing people say that they thought it was important to leave the world better than they found it.

A: Well, I think that was a major, dominant cliché of my childhood – that you were supposed to leave the world better than you found it. It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing that we’re going through now, “What’s in it for me?” That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it, but now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me, just – what a lovely thought, do you know? People talk about soldiers as being the standard against which things should be measured. But they, by definition, are doing things that there’s a very strong chance they will not live to enjoy. I mean, all those lovely, young people that go off and are said to be dying for freedom by definition are giving other people something that they cannot enjoy. This is a great value, so how can people have possibly got around to this “what’s in it for me?” approach to political and social life? It’s extraordinary.

This period is called either the High Holy Days, the High Holidays, the Awesome Days, and they incorporate the days of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and then ten days in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which are called the ten days of repentance, and then Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There really are three basic questions that these ten days invite us to think about. One is can I change as a human being? Can I really become better? I think that’s a really hard question to ask. Can I become better or is this the way it is and I’m doing the best I can, and that’s it? And the second question is, is forgiveness possible? Can I forgive other people, and can I feel forgiven? I think that’s also a very difficult question. We talk a lot about forgiveness and wanting to be forgiven and to forgive other people, but it’s really hard. And the third question that runs through all of these days is am I accountable for my behavior? And whether you believe in a God in the sky or the cosmos or reality or the universe or whatever it is your belief system is, do you actually believe that you’re accountable for how you behave? And I think those three questions and themes run through the entire High Holy Day period.

Can I really change? Can forgiveness be real in my life, and can I be accountable? You just can’t answer those questions. You actually have to practice answering them, and so it turns out that the 30 days before Rosh Hashanah—really the 40 days before Yom Kippur—are days devoted to practicing in those three areas. So, we actually practice asking what changes in our behavior do we have to make that would be more aligned with who we imagine we ought to be, who we think God wants us to be. We practice forgiveness. In other words, you can’t come on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement, and expect some spiritual forgiveness experience without first preparing by asking people for forgiveness for things that you’ve done and by granting forgiveness to people who have done things to you. And, finally, unless you actually begin to think about your behavior and what you are accountable for and what have been the consequences of the previous year’s behavior, you’re not going to have a Yom Kippur experience.

The practice amongst the many practices in the forty days prior to Yom Kippur, first and foremost, [is] what I call a kind of spiritual, moral, or ethical inventory, and that is to go through one’s life, the different areas in one’s life. First, the family, family relationships, the most intimate relationships, extending out to friendships, then work relationships and how one is operating at work with other people and the work one is doing. Then the larger community, world, nature—to actually go through those areas. My practice, and the practice that I suggest, is to take two things. Take your checkbook and take your Day-Timer or Blackberry calendar and to look—how did I use my time this year? Because that says a lot about who we are. And how did I use my money this year? So there’s that piece, which is part of the practice in preparation, and then to actually recognize about where one is and ask people for forgiveness, and that means literally picking up the phone and saying “Hey, you know what? Earlier this year, I know, I dissed you” or “I did something that was very inappropriate,” or “I took credit for something,” whatever it is, or “I ignored you,” and to be able to come to terms and ask for forgiveness. It turns out the more you practice and prepare for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the richer that experience is.

In more traditional communities, in the mornings of the week before Rosh Hashanah there are penitential prayers. Those are prayers in which one asks for forgiveness, and it’s a kind of asking for forgiveness in general, in the hope that it’ll stimulate where, specifically, I need to ask for forgiveness, and that’s every morning for the week before. There’s also another practice starting the month before Rosh Hashanah—in other words, those forty days prior to Yom Kippur—of blowing the shofar, which is one of the central symbols of the High Holiday experience, blowing the shofar at the end of the morning prayer service, and the shofar is just a blast of the ram’s horn, and it, in a sense, wakes you up. You’re not used to hearing a blast of a ram’s horn, and it is supposed to cause you to become more alert to your own behavior.

What the Jewish wisdom tradition invites us to think is that before one can actually approach God, or what I call kind of the “vertical dimension,” one has to have the horizontal dimension in order. I would say it this way, that the moral alignment between us as individuals is a necessary component and base for the spiritual relationship that we want. I once heard a story about the Dalai Lama. He came to the United States, one of his first trips, and they brought him to a meditation center, and what struck him was that people were engaged in spiritual practice who hadn’t developed an ethical practice, and he said this was the first time he ever saw spiritual practice being built and created independent of ethical practice, and I think that most religious traditions and most spiritual wisdom traditions would suggest that the alienation or the disconnection between us and God is actually a consequence and a function of a deep disconnection between us and other human beings, and so the practice in Jewish life is you can’t come to God on Yom Kippur and ask for forgiveness or ask for a realignment in the relationship if you haven’t done the work between you and other human beings.

Changing your fate for the coming year is a part of a larger question: Do we believe that our behavior actually affects our destiny? Now we have to understand that in a fairly careful way because there’s not a direct cause-effect correspondence that we can generally pick up: “If I’m good, there’ll be no sickness; if I’m bad, I’ll be punished.” Well, it turns out that we know, most of us, that life doesn’t move that easily, and cause-effect is not that clean. But there’s a deeper sense, I think, at least in my experience, and I think this is most people’s experience, there’s a deeper sense that there’s a relationship between my behavior and my destiny, in how I feel about myself, in how I approach the world, in that whatever happens to me somehow I’m capable of dealing with what happens to me at a higher, more evolved level if my behavior is correct and aligned with the things and values that I hold most deeply. So there’s a sense on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which thousands of people gather together and go through many, many prayers in which we ask ourselves, “How have I done?” For illuminating and actually elucidating the variety of potential sins, and the word for sin in Hebrew is “chet,” which means “missing the mark,” the places where I’ve missed the mark and the sense that if I can discover some of those places and begin to correct them that my destiny will actually be better.

No matter what path you’re on, the path is always filled with unpredictability. The path is always filled with things that we can’t control and places that we can’t control. But what we can really control, as best we can, is our behavior up front and our responses to other people, and responses to the unpredictability and vulnerability and fragility in life. And Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur invite us to think about that. One of the most important prayers on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur comes right at the center of the worship service, when the most people are in the synagogue, is a prayer “Who shall live, and who shall die?” And that’s a question that we don’t often ask ourselves, and I don’t think we should ask it every day; if you ask it every day, it would be a little crazy. But once a year to come clean, to look around and say, “You know what? There’ are no guarantees here. There is a fragility to our lives. Given that, how do I want to live?” If I look at my job, I look at my spouse, I look at my friend, I look at my parents, and I say “Wow, what is really true about life or death is that I don’t know, no matter what I do, no matter how good I take care of people, I don’t know if next year at this time everybody’s going to be here.” Well, given that, what are my obligations? How do I want to treat the people both close to me, and how do I want to act in a world in which I may not be here a year from now? Now, confronting our mortality up front and surfacing the anxiety that that does produce, and then asking who do I want to be—given that, generally speaking, helps us become more ethical human beings and much more sensitive to life.

We know that we’re not going to be able to change everything, and, of course, the paradox is that we’ll probably be here the following Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, probably saying the exact same prayers and probably, for most of the things that we tried to change, having not been so successful. But part of what it means to be a human being is to stay in that game, to believe that yes, we can change, that the change happens incrementally, to not imagine that your life is over because you haven’t made those changes, and that’s part of the message of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. When I get to the service on Rosh Hashanah morning and get to those prayers that I know I said the exact same prayers—I’m 51-one years old—I remember saying them probably consciously since I’m about seven or eight. And it’s funny, pretty much for the last 25-30 years it’s the same ones that I’m still working on, you know? How to be a little bit more patient with the people I care about, how to be a little less oriented towards being in conflict with the people with whom I deeply disagree, how to be a little bit more generous and a little less ego-centered. So, you know, these are the ongoing dilemmas, and I think that if you have a regular, set time in a year, or even in a week or in a day, but here we’re talking about the High Holidays, if you have a regular, set time in which a community comes together by the thousands to do a little introspection and ask how am I aligned with other human beings, how am I aligned with God, and how am I aligned with who I deeply want to be, chances are we’ll be a little bit better.

The central activity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the activity that defines almost everything that’s happening, is the word “teshuva.” Teshuva comes from the word, “shuv,” which means “to return,” and there’s this sense that deep down, deep, deep, deep, deep down, you know, in the privacy of your own heart and your own soul and mind and spirit, we know we want to be good people, deep down. But what happens in life is things get distorted, and we get hurt, and we become fearful and filled with anxiety and scared, and so we don’t act in light of what deep, deep, deep down we know we can be and want to be. Teshuva is this process over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which we return to that place deep, deep down of who we really want to be, and so everything having to do with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all the prayers and all the liturgical readings and all the readings from scripture and the variety of practices, whether it’s blowing a shofar, or on Yom Kippur it’s fasting and staying in synagogue for most of the day, all of the practices are designed to help us make teshuva, return to that deepest path that we know we want to be on.

“Repent” would be a more Protestant or Christian term for the word for teshuva. We don’t actually have—there’s no word “repent” that way. But repent means to try to make up for what you do. We have a process in Jewish wisdom, and Maimonides was the most important articulator of this, we have a process of gaining forgiveness that I call the four R’s, and the first is to realize what one has done. You know, until you realize what you’ve done wrong, you can’t do anything about it, and realization is really hard. You know, you can tell a person they’ve done wrong, and a person can tell me “you did something wrong, you did something wrong.” But until you see it and realize it, you’re not in the game, the forgiveness game. So the first is to realize. The next is to regret, actually, that I did it. The next thing is to attempt to repair. Sometimes that repair is in a conversation. Sometimes that repair is in financial remuneration. Sometimes that repair is in actually diminishing myself a little bit to allow a realignment in the relationship and changing my behavior, and only then is there the fourth R—reconciliation, and it’s those four R’s together, which is the process of forgiveness, which for us, for Jews, is what we mean by repentance.

The last thing on Yom Kippur is a final long blast of the shofar, and at that moment I should feel two things exactly at the same time. One is I am really perfect and loved just the way I am, and I can do better, and to hold those two things together—I’m perfect and loved just as I am, and I can do better—is the process of teshuva working.

On Rosh Hashanah afternoon, after having been in synagogue most of the day and then coming and having a festive New Year’s meal, a practice developed called Tashlikh, from the word, l’hashlikh, to cast away or to throw away, and it is, like all ritual, a theatrical re-enactment, and we go to a brook or a river or a stream or an ocean, a body of water, and we symbolically, either taking bread or something, cast away our sins into the water, and, of course, the water carries them away, and having been in this process of teshuva, this process of spiritual and moral inventory, over the last thirty days, and now anticipating the next ten days to actually physically remove and cast away and stand at water that is a cleansing symbol to begin with, that carries away, in a sense, our sins is a very powerful interior, in a sense, re-enactment together as a community. So, literally, you just stand at the water and from young to old take a crumb of bread and throw it into the water. And there’s a passage that says “Cast away my sins, cast away my sins.” And then, very often, since it’s done kind of late afternoon and the sun is beginning to set, very often birds will come and they’ll take the bread away, and it has a wonderful theatrical feel and a sense of liberation, that my sins are being removed from me. And what that’s really saying is that I may sin, but I’m not sinful. And I think that’s a piece of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur experience. Very often, for ourselves and for other people, we confuse doing bad things with being bad people. And I’m not sure, really, if we can evolve and grow morally and psychologically and spiritually as long as we think we are bad people. We’re people who, very often, do bad things, who very often sin but have the capacity to cast away that sin, to work through those mistakes and become better people.

One of the interesting things about Rosh Hashanah in general and about the High Holiday period is that the celebratory aspect, which is Rosh Hashanah and the celebration of the New Year, actually comes before the atonement focus, which is Yom Kippur. One would expect that first I have to atone, first I have to make sure I’ve come to terms with who I am, and I’ve realized and regretted and repaired and gotten better, and then I get to celebrate. In fact, the Jewish calendar runs it in reverse. First we’re going to celebrate the New Year. Now in the context of celebration of a New Year, the change really is possible. Now let’s get down to the business of change. And I think pedagogically and methodologically and psychologically that’s a very, very important move. First, everything’s going to be okay. Now let’s work on things, as opposed to let’s work on things and see if everything’s going to be okay.

On Yom Kippur, five times during the day there’s a confessional, there’s a list of “for the sin that I did with my mouth, for the sin that I did with my eyes, for the sin that I did by stealing, for the sin that I did with arrogance,” and there’s five times during the Yom Kippur service one goes through, one goes “Al Khet” for the sin. It’s a practice of hitting one’s heart, kind of to get the heart going, that type of idea, and what’s interesting is almost all of the sins recognized are between human beings. They are not between the human being and God. On Yom Kippur, this intense, spiritual, introspective day, the vast majority of sins that are evoked or attempted to bring to consciousness are between human beings, which is a way of saying that if you really want to know God, you’d better start with the most visible symbol and image of God available, which is other human beings.

Atonement is really just a fancy word for the forgiveness process. The word Yom Kippurim, from the word “kappare,” really means to be engaged in this forgiveness process. Atonement is just a fancy word for “at one.” If you engage in forgiveness, if you do the introspection that is required during this period you will feel more at one with yourself, at one with other people, at one with the cosmos, or reality, or the universe, or God, whatever it is you call it. And that “at-one-ment,” that alignment is the goal of the Rosh Hashanah-Yom Kippur period.

In the central prayer of Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur, “Who shall live and who shall die,” in that prayer it says on Rosh Hashanah it is written (in other words your fate, your destiny is written down, is inscribed), and on Yom Kippur it’s sealed. And there is this sense, and again, whether one believes it literally or as a deep metaphor, the only issue for me is, do you take it seriously, and that our behavior does affect the nature of our life. I don’t know if it affects whether we literally live or die, but it surely affects whether we live or whether we die in life. In that respect, there’s the sense that on Rosh Hashanah, who we are going to be based on, how we make this assessment, is written down. And, yet, then you have another ten days in which to really go through that process even more deeply of asking who you are, and then it gets sealed. And “gets sealed” doesn’t mean that it’s closed forever, because of course, the paradox, or the joke, or the irony, or the, you know, in Jewish wisdom there’s as many traditions that say but it’s really not sealed until the end of the whole holiday period, or three weeks later, at the end of the Festival of Tabernacles and Simchat Torah, that it’s really not sealed. And even then it’s really not sealed, because every morning you go through a practice in which you ask for forgiveness. So “sealed” is a way of saying something does happen if you spend a full day on Yom Kippur and you spend full days on Rosh Hashanah, the forty days and the process of engaging in teshuvah and forgiveness, something does happen, and there’s a feeling that if I’ve missed that or not done it right, that it does affect who we are. It does affect our destiny.

The focus of the High Holiday period is not on death. The focus is on life. It turns out that one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death. That just turns out to be the paradox. So if on Yom Kippur we fast, if on Yom Kippur we deny ourselves certain bodily pleasures and engage in a kind of deep introspection on the moral, psychological, and spiritual level, well, it turns out we will become better people. I mean, that’s just what happens, but again there are no guarantees. You can go through everything on Yom Kippur and go through the motions, and on the other hand you can sit in Yom Kippur and never use a prayer book, but just really think about who you are, and it can make a difference in your life.

Part of the ritual on Yom Kippur is by denying yourself these variety of bodily activities, eating, making love, washing, one begins to simulate in a way one’s bodily death, and, you know, by the end of the day on Yom Kippur, that hour before the final shofar blowing at sunset, people, you know, their faces are a little more craggy and their beards a little bit—and they’re running on empty a little bit, and one discovers that there’s a deeper life than simply the physical life. And if we can tap into that life, which I think every religious and spiritual wisdom tradition tries to do, to tap into that deeper dimension of life beyond just the material and physical and body, there is a deeper or new life that emerges, and that final blow of the shofar, and the shofar blow is only dependent on one’s breath; there’s no notes, you know, it’s just the breath of life. Sometimes I call it a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for us. You know, you hear that sound and there is a rebirth and in that respect confronting one’s own mortality, at least for me confronting my own mortality. My mother passed away between last Yom Kippur and this Yom Kippur, and I know that, for me, that will be central in my mind. One of the major prayers in Yom Kippur is what’s called Yizkor, “to remember,” and the community as a whole remembers people who they loved and who’ve passed away, and you take that twenty minutes in the middle of the day and you remember someone who died and a lot of thoughts go, like, how did I really operate with that person and what do I need to do differently, and with time being so short, how do I want to love, and how do I want to be more compassionate, and how do I want to be there? And so it turns out confrontation with death is one of the great methodologies to make us appreciate life.

The central ritual on Yom Kippur, besides prayer itself, that’s most well known is fasting. Every single tradition has fasting. What fasting does is it says I’m not going to concentrate on my physical body right now. I’m going to concentrate on a different kind of food. Rather than nutrients for my body, I’m going to concentrate on the nutrients for my spirit, my heart, and my ethical way, and that surely does help. We know there’s physical aspects to this, too. If you don’t eat, certain ego structures begin to loosen up and you’re a little bit more open. I mean, it turns out there’s a lot more tears Yom Kippur afternoon when we talk about our lives than there are Yom Kippur morning, because in the end when one doesn’t eat, one’s a little bit less in control of all of the structures we build to defend against difficult truths, to defend against insights and illuminations that are going to cause pain and will force us to think about our lives in different ways. So we fast as a way to become more in tune with our spiritual and our inner life.

The most visible, really the only symbol of Rosh Hashanah, is the ram’s horn, which is blown—100 different sounds or times is it blown. There are three basic sounds to the Rosh Hashanah. One is a longer sound. That sound then is broken up into three, and that sound is broken up into nine, and each sound stimulates a kind of call. One is more plaintive, one is more a little bit frenzied, with more anxiety, and those calls together are to evoke and to wake us up. “Arise from the slumber” is what Maimonides says the shofar sounds are supposed to do, and there’ll be 1000 people or 2000 people in the room, in the synagogue, and it is perfectly silent except for the sound of the shofar that’s piercing through all of the armor, so to speak, the internal armor that we construct to avoid hearing the deepest call of our life, which is to be decent human beings.

On Yom Kippur, there’s no shofar blowing until the very, very last act at sunset. The sun is set, Yom Kippur ends. The ending of Yom Kippur is the reciting of “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” “God is God,” and that’s recited one time, another thing is recited three times, another thing is recited seven, but at the end of Yom Kippur the very final act is the longest blow of the entire High Holiday period, and it’s just one long blow.

Kol Nidre is the first prayer of the Yom Kippur service, which begins at evening and extends to the next night at sunset. Kol Nidre means “all my promises,” and it’s a paragraph in which the congregation comes together and says all the promises, all the obligations, all the bonds that I have made this year, all of them should be dissolved. Now, what that is really about is it’s making a claim that if I’m really going to assess who I am, I have to look at every promise, every obligation, every commitment that I’ve made, because that’s what defines us—our promises, our obligations, our commitments….It’s very frightening to imagine that we have no obligations…Now, once one has that experience, by the end of the Kol Nidre, which lasts about 10-15 minutes, it’s sung three times by the cantor in a very dramatic way, at the end of that all of my promises, all of my obligations are nullified. The rest of Yom Kippur, in a sense, is taking back the obligations, reassessing them….And as Yom Kippur unfolds, one takes back one’s promises in new commitments….So Kol Nidre is a very profound method and technology for stripping us of all promises and obligations that may distort us so that we stand there naked, just us, with the ability to take back promises, take back obligations over the next 25 hours….You’ve got no responsibilities now. You have no promises, no obligations. They’re all null and void. Now, who do you want to be?

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a moving story today on reconciliation in Rwanda.  In 1994, for 100 days while the world looked away, one group slaughtered another at the rate of 10,000 a day.  This Spring for another 100 days Rwandans are reliving what happened with public trials and the unearthing of mass graves. There is also repentance, forgiveness, and hope.  Lucky Severson reports on Rwanda’s recovery and one of the remarkable men who’s helping lead it.

LUCKY SEVERSON: The dormant volcanoes that loom over the hazy Rwandan countryside can erupt as suddenly and violently as the country itself did 15 years ago. Over a million Rwandans, about an eighth of the population, were massacred in one of the worst cases of genocide in recent history. Then the volcanoes were silent, and it seemed that only the gorillas that live alongside of them were safe from slaughter.

Today Rwanda is a much different place thanks, in part, to this man—Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana

Bishop JOHN RUCYAHANA (Chairman, Prison Fellowship Rwanda): People are smiling because they have the hope, but the wounds and the healing is a process that we’ll continue to engage deliberately to tell people that they just can’t cover it up. We need to be able to unearth it and deal with it head on.

SEVERSON: That’s what the bishop has been preaching from the pulpit of his beautiful church in northern Rwanda since the killing stopped: deal with it head on. And it was personal for him. How could it not be after so many members of his extended family were murdered, including his niece?

Bishop RUCYAHANA: I have forgiven those who killed my niece, and they peeled off the flesh off her arms to the wrist, and they left bare bones, and they gang-raped her, and I forgive them because forgiving is not only benefiting the criminal, it benefits me.

SEVERSON: There are still tens of thousands of people convicted of genocide in Rwandan prisons, but as many as 30,000 have been released back to their communities through a restorative justice program that Bishop John chairs called Prison Fellowship Rwanda. These criminals, shown in a Prison Fellowship video, killed their neighbors and even there friends.

ANNOUNCERS VOICE (in video): Eighty-three-year-old John Hebian Berriff lost 187 family members in the genocide, yet he has forgiven all those responsible.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN (in video): The only child I had was killed but I have forgiven so I will be free and I will have peace in heaven.

SEVERSON: Prison Fellowship sends ministers into these penitentiaries to preach repentance, and then after a long period of counseling, if the killer repents, the victims, those who are willing, are brought into the prison to meet the perpetrators face to face. And then, if the victims can find forgiveness in their hearts, the process of redemption and healing begins.

JOHN HEBIAN BERIFF (in video): You killed my wife with my child. I will not do wrong to you. I forgive you.

SEVERSON: There had been a simmering hatred fermenting in Rwanda ever since it gained independence from Belgium in 1962. The Belgians designated Rwandans with at least 10 cows as Tutsis and those with less than10, by far the larger group, as Hutus. Tutsis became the ruling, privileged class, and when the Hutus came to power they began to exact their revenge. And then for 100 days, beginning in April of 1994, as the world and the United Nations sat idly by, Rwandans killed each other at the rate of 10,000 a day.

Bishop RUCYAHANA: I knew I was not going to get the gun and go on a rampage and shoot people as a bishop or as a clergyman. But I was bitter. I was seeking a bitter judgment on them.

SEVERSON: And then he says he remembered the story of the crucifixion.

Bishop RUCYAHANA: You know, when Jesus Christ was still hanging on the tree nails were still into his palms and feet, and he was naked, and he was being mocked by Pharisees underneath the cross, he did not wait for the pain to subside. He cried to the Father, “Forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.” The fact that Jesus called within the pain is a guide and a teaching for us to forgive.

SEVERSON: Pastor John Richardson of the St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Birmingham, Alabama, has visited Rwanda four times, has seen what forgiveness and repentance can do.

Pastor JOHN RICHARDSON (St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Birmingham, AL): They have come to repent of their sins, and as part of that repentance they’re telling people where they can find their loved ones, and so they’re still digging up the bodies and laying them to rest, and these families were laying their loved ones to rest after 12 and 13 years. But it just occurs to me that for them there’s finally now some sense of closure.

SEVERSON: The Rwanda transformation is not just among the victims and perpetrators. The country still has a long way to go, lots of unhealed wounds, but Rwanda now has one of the fastest growing economies in Africa and one of the reportedly least corrupt governments. Identity cards classifying the holder as Hutu or Tutsi are no longer allowed.

Bishop RUCYAHANA: We cannot wait until we forget the genocide to build a nation. It’s now, and nobody will build that nation for us. Our destiny is our calling.

Pastor RICHARDSON: The one thing that is obvious about John is that he truly believes that the truth sets you free.

SEVERSON: This man now guards the gates at Prison Fellowship, and he knows about being set free. He was a genocide killer and says before he repented for his crime, every minute of every hour of every day a horror movie played in his head.

Bishop RUCYAHANA: You need to see the pain they have. They can’t sleep. They hear the voices of the people they hacked to death. Voices are still fresh in their minds, and the stink of death and the smell of death are still upon them. They feel it, and they need to be relieved of that by means of repentance.

SEVERSON: Fredrick killed seven members of one family. After eight years in prison, he now has a family of his own. The man with the guinea pigs is Matais. He killed five of his neighbors, even after they gave him a cow as a token of friendship.

SEVERSON: Jacquelyn lost 11 members of her family, but she has forgiven, and she says that has relieved her pain. Now the victims and the perpetrators live in the same village, side by side, in peace. In fact, this whole village was paid for by Prison Fellowship and constructed by the killers and victims working together. There are several reconciliation villages in Rwanda and more being built.

Everyone here has stories, but the idea that they would be sitting together sharing them, victims and killers, would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

Bishop RUCYAHANA: You need to be able to have both parties, give them time, cry with them, pray with them, engage them until you bring them to the level of confronting the reality that we are living in this county, we are going to produce together, and we are going to live together again.

Pastor RICHARDSON: My 17-year-old observed as we left Rwanda, she said, “You know, Dad, some of those people probably didn’t repent.” And I said, “Yeah, you’re right.” I’m sure some of them were looking for a way out. But that doesn’t mean that many of them haven’t repented and that they don’t work hand-in-hand and side-by-side.”

Bishop RUCYAHANA: No, it doesn’t always work magically. We have to give it time. We have engaged a process. We have to hang onto the process until the work comes to completion. We may even die doing it. But we have to continue doing it anyway.

SEVERSON: There are nearly 400,000 genocide orphans in Rwanda, and they make up the majority of the 1,000 students at the Sonrise Boarding School, sponsored by the prolific fundraising of Bishop John.

Bishop RUCYAHANA: My school has become one of the best schools in the country, and we are training them. We are telling them they will be the leaders of Rwanda.

SEVERSON: This is a remarkable place, especially for kids who have never seen an indoor toilet or a computer. There’s plenty of food here, and beds, and classes on just about everything. They’re connected to the outside world with a satellite dish, and there’s even a working farm to teach them how to live off the land. The school is the focus of Bishop John’s fundraising these days as he makes his Sonrise School even bigger and better. The bishop knows all the school is doing to prepare Rwandans for the future won’t be enough unless they can also deal with their past.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Muslims this week (September 30) mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan with the festive Eid al Fitr, and the Jewish High Holidays begin Monday evening (September 29) with Rosh Hoshana and end 10 days later with Yom Kippur (October 9).

Our Belief and Practice segment today centers on the High Holiday concepts of sin, repentance, and forgiveness, as explained by Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia.

Rabbi DAN EHRENKRANTZ (President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Philadelphia, PA): This process of repentance is central to my religious life.

When I recite the al Cheyt prayer I may be reciting a litany of sins, some of which are my very own, but some of which are not mine. Yet we say the prayers in the plural because we understand if these things have occurred within our community, in some ways we are responsible.

The most common Hebrew name for sin is Cheyt. Cheyt means something akin to going astray. It’s actually a term that is used in archery. So if you can imagine an arrow which is being shot from a bow that is directed towards a bull’s eye that is the trajectory of our lives.

Rabbi DEBORAH WAXMAN (Vice President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, singing prayer): And for the wrong we have done before you through an evil inclination.

Rabbi EHRENKRANTZ: The steps of teshuvah, of repentance, would involve understanding how you had hurt someone and then approaching that person for forgiveness.

Once forgiveness has been achieved between the people, repentance then needs to include asking God for forgiveness as well. To ask for forgiveness takes a level of humility to be able to say I have done wrong and then to say it out loud. It’s not enough that I realize I have done wrong; I have to say it out loud to you. I have to tell you what I did, and that is a very difficult thing for us to do. But when we remake ourselves, we truly do look back and say how could I have done such a thing?

Tashlich is a ceremony in which Jews will traditionally join together and cast breadcrumbs from their pockets, as it were, to symbolize the sins. The idea is that we are casting our sins out.

There is in Judaism no idea of original sin. Rather there is, I would say, an understanding that we as human beings are in a challenging situation. We make mistakes. We err, and it is then our responsibility to learn from our mistakes and to become better people from our mistakes.

You can be sinful in thought. Some Jews actually don’t think that that is covered, but it is. They think that it is only actions but thoughts, too, can be sinful.

Yom Kippur divides sins into sins that we have done intentionally and sins that we have done unintentionally. Most of us don’t know many of the sins we have committed over the course of the year, and yet we carry around a general sense that we haven’t always done the right thing, and so being able to purge that sense of guilt that we walk around with as a condition of being human is a great blessing.

The true mark of repentance is, have you made yourself into a different person? And if you have truly made yourself into a different person, then absolutely God forgives.