You know where the word “scapegoat” comes from, right? In Leviticus, there’s discussion of the way the Jewish community would project all its sins onto a goat on Yom Kippur and send it out into the wilderness. Today, my part-time employer Tablet Magazine published a piece on a new app, eScapegoat, that lets you do the same thing, virtually.
Social media macher (macheress?) and creator of the Jewish site G-dcast Sarah Lefton came up with the app, which lets you submit your sins in 140-character bursts. (There’s also a web-based version.) The app places your sins on the misbegotten goat — you can send the goat on to others, or simply ask to be informed when the goat is sent away into the aether shortly before Yom Kippur. Lefton is also tweeting anonymous goat missives at @sinfulgoat on Twitter.
She told Tablet’s Isabel Fattal, “Our tradition gives us really specific ways to make private atonements, but the tradition also teaches that it’s important to do communal atonement.”
True. But of course, it’s not enough to apologize into the air. (That’s essentially what celebrities and politicians do when they apologize to microphones before and/or instead of apologizing to the people they’ve wronged.) You can eScapegoat something like this:
“I bought a donut for my daughter, then ate it before she got home from school.” –http://t.co/olcwCgYrEw
— eScapegoat (@SinfulGoat) September 16, 2014
But you also should apologize to your daughter (even though she didn’t know you stole her damn donut) preferably as you hand her the NEW donut you just bought her.
You can eScapegoat this:
“Most of the time I call my parents is at least in part to ask for money.” –http://t.co/olcwCgYrEw
— eScapegoat (@SinfulGoat) September 16, 2014
But you should tell your parents you’re sorry for treating them like an ATM. Promise to be a better son or daughter in the coming year, and then actually deliver. True repentance doesn’t live by God or goats alone; true repentance is about humanity. Call your parents more often, to share a joke or news story you thought would interest them. Ask your dad about his bursitis. Suggest a book you know your mom would love.
We’ve written about Maimonides‘s perspective on repentance. We bet he’d be pro-technology-as-tool (he was a DOCTOR, you know) but we know he was also pro-apologizing-and-changing-one’s-ways. Use your virtual goat as a dry run for actually apologizing to those you’ve wronged, making amends, and determining to do better.
When you fail to apologize to people, you make the goats scream.
There is SRSLY an app for everything. That’s both kind of funny, and kind of bizarre.
This reminds me of Catholic techies putting out a confession app during the tenure of the last Pope, and him (via the Vatican) immediately saying, “Um, no,” when it came out, and creating boundaries on exactly how it was/was not to be used — essentially, they get to use it as a notepad and keep track of their confess-worthy behaviors, and “reflect” on them in the confessional, so that they can go through with the whole action of confession – remember what you did and fix it (in whatever way – I throw no shade on Catholics for me not really understanding the whole confession thing). Which is, in essence, the same general conversation Jewish techies seem to be having about the scapegoat app; yes, it’s all very well to confess to strangers and the ether, but do something about it; confession doesn’t stop there.
Interesting.
Also, the GOATS!? THANK YOU.
*helpless, hysterical laughter*
The goats scream whether you confess or not… they scream (rather a muffled scream), if you stuff four cookies into there mouth, instead of five…
**their**
One of the things that’s always made the most profound sense to me about the Jewish outlook on these things is in the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) liturgy, and it says essentially the same thing that you wrote above, namely “True repentance doesn’t live by God or goats alone; true repentance is about humanity.” The line in the prayerbook our congregation uses for these days is something like “For transgressions against God, the Day of Atonement atones; but for transgressions of one human being against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they have made peace with one another.” If you’ve wronged another person, you are not off the hook, no matter how much breast-beating and confessing and prostrating you might do, until you have gone to that person and made amends.