How not to apologise

Yom Kippur requires us to ask what it means to apologise and repent. Public life often gives us the answer by showing us what an apology is not.

The public apology has become almost a spectacle: a status game of conceding nothing and getting away with everything.

Grace Tame dismissed reports of rape on October 7 as “propaganda”, then apologised for “any harm their mischaracterisation has caused”. Mary Kostakidis said the Israeli government was “getting some of its own medicine”, then apologised “for the hurt and distress it caused” but not for the post.

These case are part of a trend in public relations where apology is not about genuine regret. It's not even about managing a reputation and stopping a controversy. Rather can be used to dig in and fuel controversy to the speaker’s benefit, while painting objectors as petty or oversensitive. It becomes a status game, designed to galvanise existing supporters. And if the continued anger of those hurt makes them seem unreasonable, all the better.

Jews have very strong opinions about apologies — about teshuvah, repentance. The hardest part of teshuvah is that you don’t control the outcome. So you have to work hard to make it mean something and to show that you sincerely regret what you’ve said.

But when you set up your apology to keep control of the outcome, it becomes an exercise in manipulation. Teshuvah asks us to seek forgiveness from the people we have hurt. It does not let us dictate their response.

You can choose your words, but you cannot choose how the other person hears you. It's very different from the complex machinations around public apologies, as well illustrated by the Kostakidis case, which was formally resolved last week without an apology.