Thought For The Day - 19 September 2007

It’s the most famous pun in the history of the foreign office. In 1842, Major General Sir Charles Napier, commander of the British army in India, was ordered to quell an uprising in a province called Sindh, today the region around Karachi in Pakistan. He succeeded, and sent back a message consisting of one word, Peccavi, which is the Latin for ‘I have sinned.’
           
Puns aside, the hardest thing to say in any language is just that: I have sinned. I did wrong. Forgive me. Which is why, in Judaism, we have Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins this Friday night.
           
For us, it’s the holiest day of the year, and it is given over to saying in a hundred different ways, I have sinned.

It isn’t easy to do. But it’s essential to a happy life. I have seen marriages fail, families split apart, friends become estranged, whole communities divided, all because neither side was prepared to say: I got it wrong. Forgive me.
           
A former American ambassador to Britain, Philip Lader, has run for many years something called Renaissance weekends, gatherings of leaders in every field from scientists to sports stars, business people to politicians, Nobel prize winners to Olympic gold medallists. They meet, talk, and discuss the challenges they face. And what he discovered was that the hardest thing for them to do was to admit that sometimes they got it wrong.
           
So he had a brilliant idea. Each year he arranged for the opening session to be a talk by someone really famous, on the subject of My Biggest Blooper, the American for My Greatest Mistake. Somehow when you hear Tiger Woods or Arnold Schwarzenegger saying I got it wrong, it’s easier to admit, so did I.
             
And that’s what happens on the Day of Atonement. When you see everyone around you in the synagogue saying I have sinned, it’s easier to say, so did I.
           
We all make mistakes. There’s no one so righteous on earth, says the Book of Ecclesiastes, that they do only good and never sin. Every creative act, every new endeavour, every declaration of love, involves risk, and the possibility of error. God knew that when he created us: the only life form in the universe capable of disobeying his will. Which is why he wrote forgiveness into the script from the beginning. If you admit, says God, I’ll forgive. God’s forgiveness empowers us to take risks, giving us the courage to say, when we need to, I have sinned.

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