AN ALTERNATIVE TEMPLATE FOR APOLOGY?

If the dominant images of apology cause us to stumble on the idea that an apology can be genuinely collective, then the Jewish practice of teshuvah, or repentance, may well provide the alternative trope we need to rethink contemporary collective apologies. As against the inherited metaphor of apology as an essentially individual event, whose heart lies in an internal process of regret, in Judaism one finds an apologetic form that is essentially public, spoken, and collective. In fact, the collective quality of the practices and theological understandings of teshuvah cannot, without gross distortion, be reformulated in terms of the individual ‘repentance of the lone heart’ model. On the contrary, the Jewish tradition privileges the constructive role of collective symbolic action and speech and encodes it as part of a suite of reparative acts that work in concert to effect not only individual but, more importantly, collective transformation. This latter, political dimension of Judaism's apology is particularly pertinent for our purposes, because here we seem to have a model for the work that apology can do in reconstituting the identity of a community as a political entity.