Jeremy Rosen
Do You Want to be Forgiven? Does God Really Care?

Well, that’s a very interesting question. The answer is, once somebody has died, no, there isn’t. And yet, and yet there is a tradition, going back to the Talmud, which does say that you can and should go to the grave of somebody who has died and ask for forgiveness of their soul. Now, that doesn’t mean to say that you have to go to the grave. And if you can’t find a grave, where’s the grave? And is that a problem? But the ritual is of a living person to ask for up to three times for forgiveness, obviously to rectify anything. But if, after having tried for three times to ask for forgiveness, and you still haven’t been forgiven, then there is nothing more that you can do. And so the law is that there’s nothing more you can do when somebody dies. But if you feel that it is cathartic for you, if you feel it is beneficial for you, then that, rather like prayer, is a very important existential expression, and it can be of great benefit. So if you feel like doing it, then it’s entirely up to you to do it.

Because that’s life. We don’t know who’s going to live tomorrow. So instead of somebody dying, who will be knocked over by a car? Who will slip and fall and bang their heads? Who will be mugged? Who will be robbed? We can take these old ideas and apply them to new. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us in this year. And we hope that we’re going to have a good year, but we know we might not. We know bad things are going to happen. Somebody might be in a plane that crashes, or somebody might be in Ukraine and a missile’s going to hit you. So this is a poetic way of saying we don’t know. We are, in a sense, in the lap of the gods. We are, in a sense, almost helpless. We do our best, but there are no guarantees. Like parents, we do our best for our kids, but no guarantee how they’re going to turn out. So it does sound scary, and I’m moved by it. I’m very moved by this idea, do I know if I’m going to live? Do I know if I’m going to have enough to eat this year? Do I know if I’m going to have somewhere to live this year? I don’t know, and therefore, I have to be grateful for what I’ve got.

It is conscious. I don’t believe in trying to pressurise people. I don’t believe in compulsion. I believe I enjoy my religious life. I’m religious because I want to be, because I enjoy it, because it appeals to me, because it gives me something. At the same time, I’m rational. And so I live with two worlds. I live with a rational world, and I live with, shall we say, a mystical world. And I enjoy it tremendously. And I want other people to enjoy it. And it hurts me when people don’t enjoy. It’s interesting, when people used to ask me as a young man, “Why did you choose a career in Jewish education and the Jewish rabbinate instead of all the other things you could have done?” And I said, “You know…” I’ll give you an example of how I explain it. Imagine you had a girlfriend, and you love this girlfriend, but everybody else thinks she’s a nasty piece of work and an ugly, mean person. Wouldn’t you want to try and convince them that she’s not as bad as they seem to think she is? Religion in my youth got a terrible… In university, everywhere, most Jews even, didn’t like religion, had something against it. And I decided that I wanted to try and do something about it. But I wanted to do something about showing how the passionate side, the committed side is important, not the theological. Brought up in England, the Church was theological. It was cold, unemotional. “You’ve got to believe, believe, believe.” How can you force people to believe? You can’t. You can encourage people to experience. And for that reason, I took the line that I took.