Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (5 page)

ii. Apologies

1.
The effort of religions to inspire a sense of community does not stop at introducing us to one other. Religions have also been clever at solving some of what goes wrong inside groups once they are formed.

It has been the particular insight of Judaism to focus on
anger: how easy it is to feel it, how hard it is to express it and how frightening and awkward it is to appease it in others. We can see this especially clearly in the Jewish Day of Atonement, one of the most psychologically effective mechanisms ever devised for the resolution of social conflict.

Falling on the tenth day of Tishrei, shortly after the beginning of the Jewish new year, the Day of Atonement (or Yom Kippur) is a solemn and critical event in the Hebrew calendar. Leviticus instructs that on this date, Jews must set aside their usual domestic and commercial activities and mentally review their actions over the preceding year, identifying all those whom they have hurt or behaved unjustly towards. Together in synagogue, they must repeat in prayer:

They must then seek out those whom they have frustrated, angered, discarded casually or otherwise betrayed and offer them their fullest contrition. This is God's will, and a rare opportunity for blanket forgiveness. ‘All the people are in fault,' says the evening prayer, and so ‘may all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst'.

On this holy day, Jews are advised to contact their colleagues, sit down with their parents and children and send letters to acquaintances, lovers and ex-friends overseas, and to catalogue their relevant moments of sin. In turn, those to whom they apologize are urged to recognize the sincerity and effort which the offender has invested in asking for their
forgiveness. Rather than let annoyance and bitterness towards their petitioner well up in them once more, they must be ready to draw a line under past incidents, aware that their own lives have surely also not been free of fault.

God enjoys a privileged role in this cycle of apology: he is the only perfect being and therefore the only one to whom the need to apologize is alien. As for everyone else, imperfection is embedded in human nature and therefore so too must be the will to contrition. Asking others for forgiveness with courage and honesty signals an understanding of, and respect for, the difference between the human and the divine.

The Day of Atonement has the immense advantage of making the idea of saying sorry look like it came from somewhere else, the initiative of neither the perpetrator nor the victim. It is the day itself that is making us sit here and talk about the peculiar incident six months ago when you lied and I blustered and you accused me of insincerity and I made you cry, an incident that neither of us can quite forget but that we can't quite mention
either and which has been slowly corroding the trust and love we once had for each other. It is the day that has given us the opportunity, indeed the responsibility, to stop talking of our usual business and to reopen a case we pretended to have put out of our minds. We are not satisfying ourselves, we are obeying the rules.

2.
The prescriptions of the Day of Atonement bring comfort to both parties to an injury. As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appalls our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we have given to the unkind remark or the forgotten birthday, when we should long ago have become serene and impervious to such needles. Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so. Our reserve may also have a financial edge. Those who caused us injury are liable to have authority over us – they own the business and decide on the contracts – and it is this imbalance of power that is keeping us quiet, yet not for that matter saving us from bitterness and suppressed rage.

Alternatively, when we are the ones who have caused someone else pain and yet failed to offer apology, it was perhaps because acting badly made us feel intolerably guilty. We can be so sorry that we find ourselves incapable of saying sorry. We run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them,
not because we aren't bothered by what we did, but because what we did makes us feel uncomfortable with an unmanageable intensity. Our victims hence have to suffer not only the original hurt, but also the subsequent coldness we display towards them on account of our tormented consciences.

3.
All this the Day of Atonement will help to correct. A period in which human error is proclaimed as a general truth makes it easier to confess to specific infractions. It is more bearable to own up to our follies when the highest authority has told us that we are all childishly yet forgivably demented to begin with.

So cathartic is the Day of Atonement, it seems a pity that there should be only one of them a year. A secular world could without fear of excess adopt its own version to mark the start of every quarter.

iii. Our Hatred of Community

1.
It would be naive to suppose that the only reason we fail to create strong communities is because we are too shy to say hello to others. Some of our social alienation comes down to the many facets of our nature that have no interest whatsoever in communal values, sides that are bored or revolted by fidelity, self-sacrifice and empathy and which instead incline with abandon towards narcissism, jealousy, spite, promiscuity and wanton aggression.

Religions know full well about these tendencies and recognize that if communities are to function, they must be dealt with, but by being artfully purged and exorcized rather than simply repressed. Religions therefore present us with an array of rituals, many of them oddly elaborate at first glance, whose function is to safely discharge what is vicious, destructive or nihilistic in our natures. These rituals don't of course advertise their brief, for to do so would bring a degree of self-consciousness that might make participants flee from them in horror, but their longevity and popularity prove that something vital has been achieved through them.

The best communal rituals effectively mediate between the needs of the individual and those of the group. Expressed freely, certain of our impulses would irreparably fracture our societies. Yet if they were simply repressed with equal force, they would end up challenging the sanity of individuals. The ritual hence conciliates self and others. It is a controlled and often aesthetically moving purgation. It demarcates a space in
which our egocentric demands can be honoured and at the same time tamed, in order that the longer-term harmony and survival of the group can be negotiated and assured.

2.
We see some of this at work in the Jewish rituals attendant on the
death of a beloved family member. Here the danger is that the mourner will be so overwhelmed with grief that he will cease to assume his responsibilities vis-à-vis the community. The group is therefore given instructions to allow the bereaved fulsome opportunity to express his sadness and yet it also applies a gentle and ever-increasing pressure to make sure that he eventually gets back to the business of living.

In the seven days of
shiva
that follow the funeral, there is allowance for a period of cataclysmic confusion, then a more restrained thirty-day period (
shloshim
) in which one is absolved from many group responsibilities, followed by a whole twelve months (
shneim asar chodesh
) in which the memory of the deceased is commemorated in a mourner's prayer during synagogue services. But at the end of the year, after the unveiling of the headstone (
matzevah
), further prayers, another service and a gathering at home, the claims of life and the community are definitively reasserted.

3.
Funerals aside, most religious communal rituals display outward cheer. They take place in halls with mountains of food, dancing, exchanges of gifts, toasts and an atmosphere of levity. But beneath the gaiety, there is often also a kernel of sadness in the people at the centre of the ritual, for they are likely to be surrendering a particular advantage for the sake of the community as a whole. The ritual is in truth a form of compensation, a transformational moment when depletion can be digested and sweetened.

It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realizing that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.

The Jewish
Bar Mitzvah ceremony is another ostensibly joyful ritual which endeavours to assuage inner tensions. Although apparently concerned with celebrating the moment when a Jewish boy enters adulthood, it is as much focused on trying to reconcile his parents to his evolving maturity. The parents are liable to be nursing complex regrets that the nurturing period which began with their son's birth is drawing to a close and – especially in the case of the father – that they will soon have to grapple with their own decline and with a sense of envy and resentment at being equalled and superseded by a new generation. On the day of the ceremony, mother and father are heartily congratulated on the eloquence and accomplishment of their child even as they are also gently encouraged to begin to let him go.

Religions are wise in not expecting us to deal with all of our emotions on our own. They know how confusing and humiliating it can be to have to admit to despair, lust, envy or egomania. They understand the difficulty we have in finding a way to tell our mother unaided that we are furious with her or our child that we envy him or our prospective spouse that the idea of
marriage alarms as much as it delights us. They hence give us special days under the cover of which our pestiferous feelings can be processed. They give us lines to recite and songs to sing while they carry us across the treacherous regions of our psyches.

In essence, religions understand that to belong to a community is both very desirable and not very easy. In this respect, they are greatly more sophisticated than those secular political theorists who write lyrically about the loss of a sense of community, while refusing to acknowledge the inherently dark aspects of social life. Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit. In their most sophisticated moments, religions accept the debt that goodness, faith and sweetness owe to their opposites.