Or Rose: Following on the last piece of the conversation, I would like to invite you to reflect further on teshuvah as a group experience, whether as a family, synagogue, corporation, or government.

Jeff Helmreich: We now have corporations and countries that are apologizing and forgiving one another as institutions. Forgiveness and repentance in general are not states of mind. An individual can’t say, “I hereby apologize to you and guarantee that from now on I will have a properly remorseful state of mind.” Old bitter-nesses bubble up and return. Rather, repentance and, for that matter, teshuvah and forgiveness, are commitments — the kind of thing that we endeavour to do and we renew all the time. For that reason, groups and countries can do it as well. The ritual of repenting and then having the commitment to teshuvah in place is a stance that we adopt, not a feeling that overtakes us.

David Ingber: The Rambam asserts that true teshuvah is when one comes back to the same place and acts differently in a similar situation. There is a notion that even contemplating teshuvah can turn a rasha, someone who’s done evil, into someone who tips the whole world in the direction of good and compassion.

Michelle Friedman: I think Jeff is saying that teshuvah has to have a starting point — a discreet X and Y coordinate — that will be part of a larger arc. And David, you’re saying that we have to begin with at least a seed of repentance that will grow into something larger.

In psychotherapy, we look at the individual experience as it’s housed within a communal or authority-driven, tradition-driven experience. We’d ask: Who is the locus of authority? What is the role of transference in the teshuvah experience? Is it to a sense of God or to some other agency outside of the self? What are the goals of the personally driven efforts in teshuvah Are they limited to the realm of relieving personal suffering? Or is there a goal that relates to a larger sense? How much do the processes of psychotherapy and teshuvah overlap and how much are they parallel?

Sue Fendrick: The comparison between psychotherapy and teshuvah actually points to one of the reservations I have about the notion of collective teshuvah. Teshuvah has to be done by an actor, an agent. Though there can be teshuvah-dik, teshuvah-orientated, teshuvah-inspired conversations on a communal level, there needs to be an agent of change. It’s hard to imagine the Jewish people going into therapy.

David Ingber: As useful as that might be.

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Sue Fendrick: We need to distinguish between a teshuvah-orientated process and the actual work of teshuvah. What does it mean to say that a group has done teshuvah Though there are behavioral aspects of teshuvah that can be manifest in a group, I can’t imagine how the internal work would be accomplished by a collectivity.

Today, there are tribunals in Rwanda in which people are being forced to confront victims and one another, and formally admit, forgive, and resolve to reconcile. This type of legal, institutional process takes time to filter down to the individual.

Jeff Helmreich: As a proponent of the collective teshuvah model, reconciliation in a place like South Africa illustrates what might be meant by collective teshuvah. When we investigate those processes, it turns out that they involve a lot of the fundamental teachings of teshuvah, like committing to change, or acknowledging and taking responsibility for doing wrong; adopting a stance of regret, and acting toward the victim as someone who owes the victim penance.

These are fundamental features of teshuvah, and it turns out that they translate remarkably well on the collective institutional level. It doesn’t feel the same; there are differences, and yet the various stances we adopt, the commitment, the public acknowledgements can be performed at a collective level. This model can work when there are groups that have been aggrieved — even while we agree that it is ultimately just a model.

Sue Fendrick: In the South African situation, to the extent that we’re talking about a government or state, there is an agent or an actor saying, “We, this state of South Africa, has committed wrongs and we, as a state, are seeking to undo those wrongs.” This doesn’t mean that every member of that collectivity is brought along in the teshuvah process. When we say collective teshuvah, how do we understand the relationship between the individual and the collectivity?

Beyond the fact that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard what South Africa as an entity did wrong, was the fact that individual people told their stories and individuals apologized for the wrongs they committed. It’s worth noting the relationship of individual and collective teshuvah and change, how they might work together, and how they may be in conflict.