By Lauren Matthew, Special to JTNews
Much like the age-old adage of Alcoholic’s Anonymous, for those who seek atonement on Yom Kippur, the first step to forgiveness is admitting you’ve done something wrong.
But this year, Hillel at the University of Washington plans to take those admittances and turn them into art. The project is called PostRegret and, according to Rabbi Jacob Fine, Hillel’s assistant director, the campus organization is encouraging Jews to anonymously submit their regrets, apologies, personal failures, etc. either through an online form or on a postcard to be displayed during Hillel’s Yom Kippur services.
“I’m not sure whose idea it was,” Fine said. “It was one of those beautiful moments that happens occasionally at our program staff meetings.”
The meeting in question, he said, was held to come up with “cool projects for the High Holidays.” PostRegret is patterned after PostSecret, an ongoing project that encourages people to mail postcards sharing what’s on their minds to a post office box. Since PostSecret’s inception in 2004, creator Frank Warren has received more than 200,000 postcards from all over the world, which he has compiled into four separate books and put on display in several different art shows. He also maintains a Weblog where he posts new secrets every week.
The PostRegret project is not quite so ambitious.
“We probably have close to a hundred now, and hopefully we’ll get a couple hundred [total],” Fine said.
Rosh Hashanah Hillel service attendees will have blank cards waiting for them at their seats to mail in later with regrets on them, he added.
“The idea is to collect them leading up to Yom Kippur, and then we’re going to print out a bunch and make them really big and put them all around the building,” Fine said.
Fine said that he and the Hillel staff were interested in making the High Holidays more meaningful for the community, and focused on methods of achieving that goal.
“I think it’s all about preparation,” he said. “We go into Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur expecting that these days will be meaningful to us, and then we’re disappointed.”
PostRegret is designed to be the first step in the process of t’shuvah: Repenting.
“This was one way that we thought of to try to encourage people to do some of that work ahead of time,” Fine noted. “Before we can change, we have to spend that time thinking about our lives.”
Fine said that the form provided on the Web site isn’t enough — regrets and sins can only run a few lines.
“But maybe it touches a larger spark and begins a larger process,” he explained.
The anonymity of the project — also an essential component of PostSecret — is what may make it appealing, he said. But in order for the spirit of the holidays to truly be captured, that aspect needs to be removed. T’shuvah, by its very nature, cannot be anonymous, he said, especially if a regret or a sin deals with another person. Fine emphasized that PostRegret should not be used as “the be-all and end-all” of the t’shuvah process.
“Just writing that down doesn’t absolve you from the transgression,” he cautioned.
“Part of what is so interesting about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is that it’s in the plural,” Fine continued. “[The prayers are] in the ‘we’ form. In the vidui, in the confessional…we say ‘we’ve’ done this…. Some might say they didn’t do certain things… so why are they repenting?”
But part of the wisdom of the Jewish tradition, Fine said, is that Jews are all responsible for each other.
“If someone in my community commits a sin, at some level I’m responsible because I, in some way, contributed or could have prevented it,” he said. The project means “we have that visual reminder that…probably at least one of us has committed each of those things that we’ve talked about [during the al chayt].”
Fine said he hopes that people “get creative” with the project and decorate their postcards, as PostSecret participants do. Regrets will remain on display even after Yom Kippur.
“It’s an experiment,” he said, “and we’ll see how it goes.”
The project is open to the entire the Jewish community. Regrets can be submitted by visiting www.hilleluw.org.