It wasn’t a fight. In some ways Curtis and I had been fighting for weeks. It was a fairly typical feud between two not yet eleven-year-old boys who were adjusting to suddenly finding themselves in middle school: bickering, teasing each other, a snide comment here and there. A few times over the first weeks of the school year there was a more direct confrontation, but the conflict had not yet gotten physical.
On this particular day I’m pretty sure I was the one who started it. It was a rainy day in early October so we had indoor recess in our homerooms. The substitute teacher was passing out lunch calendars for the month and I made a stupid comment about our upcoming birthdays. I might have proclaimed that they were serving a better lunch on my birthday, I might have simply noted that I was a couple days older than him. Whatever I said, it got us going at each other again.
The sub, not knowing either of us or the dynamic that had been brewing for the past month, was unable to settle either of us down and, as the period was ending, our verbal sparring turned into some shoving that resulted in lots of books and papers being knocked to the ground, and my nearly eleven-year-old body shaking and holding back tears - overcome by an emotional cocktail of rage, embarrassment, and adrenaline that was new and confusing.
Half an hour later, in the middle of band class, I was still shaking to the point that I could barely hold the drumsticks steady in my hands when I was called into the Vice Principal’s office. He had heard about what happened from the sub and decided that we had gotten into a fight and therefore would each receive a two day suspension. Suddenly on the same side we tried to argue, it wasn’t a fight we both said, but there was no arguing to be had, no negotiation, no pleading of our case. The Vice Principal had made his ruling, it was a fight, and the sentence for a fight was suspension.
It was a two day suspension but because of the quirks of the calendar and the Jewish holidays, it would be nearly a week before I could return to school. Generally a week off school is not something I would have been upset about, but this felt different - there was an injustice at play, and no matter how much I didn’t like school, I liked the idea of being subject to mandatory sentencing policies and authoritarian rule even less.
But there was something else at play as well, something that lived underneath my mask of righteous indignation, justified as it was. I felt bad about the fight. Not the specific moment that the teacher and Vice Principal called a fight, but the entire conflict. I felt bad that I had been feuding with this other kid. I felt bad that I didn’t know why we were fighting, why we weren’t getting along. I didn’t like being in conflict, I didn’t like the fact that there was no opportunity to get to the bottom of the conflict, I didn’t like not being able to find resolution.
Two days later, standing outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, I suddenly got very upset. It took me a minute to understand what I was so upset about and I’m not sure I actually told anyone what I was feeling.
Yom Kippur is the day in the Jewish Calendar when we are supposed to ask forgiveness from all the people we have wronged in the past year. I was not going to be able to do that. My fight with Curtis from just a few days before was going to remain unresolved. I was going to enter the new year without having apologized for my part in the conflict we had been subsumed by. It was a devastating feeling.
Recounting this story thirty-five years later, I want to hold that younger version of myself close. I admire his integrity. I admire the seriousness with which he took the idea of forgiveness, the idea that living up to his best self required reconciliation with those he had harmed. And I want to invite him to perhaps hold it all a little more loosely, to be a little less hard on himself, to give himself a little grace for the ways that he was unable to live up to that best self.
I hope, as I prepare to enter Yom Kippur this evening, that I have the courage to face the ways I have not lived up to my best self in this past year and ask forgiveness from the people I have harmed. I hope I have the grace to forgive the people who have harmed me. And I hope I have the wisdom to find forgiveness for all the ways that I continue not living up to that best version of myself.