In Which PostSecret Meets Judaism, Aladdin, and Oscar Wilde

The concept of PostSecret is simple: individuals from around the world write down their secrets on postcards and send them, anonymously, to Frank Warren, the artist who dreamed up the project. Some are visually arresting; some are just words scrawled on a card; and some are a mix of the two. Every Sunday, a new batch of secrets goes up on the project website.

Lots of other people write in to PostSecret — people who have been affected to see a stranger share the hidden shame or embarrassing truth that they thought was their own solitary burden. Many find new hope in the confessions of others.

But lots of people react to PostSecret in other ways. For me, right now, the most interesting aspect of PostSecret is the ongoing dialogue within the community about what constitutes an appropriate environment of confession. For example, a recently posted secret proclaimed that its author thought made-up names were stupid. Other posters responded with reasons the author was stupid for not realizing that all names once started as made-up — and still other posters pleaded that criticizing posters on the contents of the secrets they send in goes against the essence of PostSecret.

The idea of PostSecret, they claim, is that people finally have a safe environment to tell their deepest secrets. It’s safe not just because of its anonymity, although that plays a part. Rather, commenters should also assume that posters can see what people have said about their postcards. A “safe” environment is one in which people shouldn’t feel that being honest renders them vulnerable to judgement.

Obviously, there’s more than one reason why PostSecret might need this kind of safe environment: if people wanted to get judged by anonymous strangers, they’d go post on 4chan. PostSecret doesn’t want to discourage people from sending in their painful secrets, because if they didn’t, the project would be signficantly less interesting. Others might argue that allowing comments punishes the senders of postcards for their anonymity: the only way they can respond to accusations is by doing exactly the opposite of what PostSecret promises and logging in with an email or username to reply.

But the aspect of the comment controversy that interests me the most is what people expect and want from the process of confession.

(Oh, hey, was it Yom Kippur yesterday? Wow, what a coincidence.)

There’s no one model for confession, although the term has specific connotations in particular contexts. For instance, in a judicial or legal context, confessions often must be public, in the sense that everyone must be able to identify the confessor, and once one has confessed, there are legal consequences. Contrariwise, at least one Catholic model of confession is tied to spiritual worries, and it’s supposed to preserve the content of the confessions from the eyes of everyone but the clergy.

But of course, the model of confession with which I’m most familiar is the Jewish model: on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, most congregations rise as a community to confess their sins against fellow human beings in the section of the liturgy known as Vidui. This confession is ritualistic, taking the form of verses that exhaust almost all forms of interpersonal immorality, and it often prompts accustomed participants and persons new to the tradition alike to wonder if there’s any meaning in chanting  through the alphabetical list of generic wrongs: “We abuse, we betray, we are cruel“?

There are lots of things to delve into when it comes to communal confession: why should I confess to things my neighbour has done? To what extent are her actions my responsibility? Or is that I don’t get to decide which sins I’ve committed and which sins I haven’t — is it up to the community to tell me when I may remain silent?

But the issue that interests me this Yom Kippur — the one that makes me think of PostSecret — is the value of confessing to the rest of the community.

Granted, there’s still an anonymity of sorts in Vidui, although that anonymity is in some ways the opposite of the anonymity of PostSecret. You don’t know who posted to PostSecret; at shul, you can identify everyone around you, but you don’t know what the words they’re saying mean to them. But the idea behind Vidui isn’t to preserve the secrecy of all the participants. At its core, public confession is about the relationship of sins and sinners to the community, and the duty of being a good citizen.

There’s a traditional piece of Jewish thought in which a rabbi tells his students to fear God as much as they fear other people. The students ask, confused, “But, rabbi, shouldn’t we fear God more than we fear people?” The rabbi replies, “When you’re about to do something wrong, you think to yourself, I hope no one sees me! And if someone does happen to come in at the wrong moment, you stop what you’re doing. Well, God always sees you.”

Obviously, there’s a theistic point to be made here, but I think even for those who don’t believe, the concept is still important. As an atheist, no, I’m not concerned that God is always watching. But I do believe that, in some sense, the community always “sees.” Maybe not literally — maybe, even if asked, no one but you would be able to put their finger on exactly what you’ve done or the worry holding you back. But something always changes, even if the wrong thing you do or the fear you harbour is in the privacy of your own mind, thinking cruel thoughts or hiding part of yourself away. It might be a subtle change in the way you behave toward other people or an obvious repercussion like the pain they feel if you smack ’em upside the head.

Er… *ahem* Anyhow, there’s often a public aspect to what people do, think, and feel. And that means there’s a way for somebody, somewhere, to know. And while I don’t think that there’s any particular moral merit badge one earns for confessing one’s secrets to the community or confessing them in private or confessing them at all, I do believe in pre-emptive honesty.

See, when I watch TV, I don’t mind scenes of graphic violence or sexuality per se, although of course I’m upset by depictions of those things in disturbing contexts. No, the scenes that make me squirm and reach for the power button are those in which a character gets caught in his or her own lies. Why don’t you just tell the truth now? I rage as Hap L. S. Protagonist bumbles around trying to impersonate the rich/powerful/etc. icon for whom he has unwittingly been mistaken. They’re going to find out by the end of this movie, so you might as well get it over with before things get even more complicated!

Because that’s how the conflicts get resolved. Hap admits he’s not really a millionaire, or his own twin brother, or the Chosen One, and once everyone finally knows the truth, the important things can start to change. Once Aladdin is no longer worried about getting outed as a street rat, he can make the right choice to free the genie, and the Sultan can rationally reconsider the laws of royal marriage. Once Jack and Algernon admit Ernest never existed, they’re finally ready to learn the truth about Jack’s parentage and to work on honest relationships with their fiancées. Once secrets are free, everyone can concentrate on fixing them — or fixing the world to accommodate them — instead of hiding.

Maybe all this shows is how lucky and privileged I am to have a circle of family and friends whom I am confident will accept me no matter what. Obviously, some have justifiably bigger worries about revealing a secret — if I were, say, a homosexual individual living in a homophobic environment, I wouldn’t want to come out of the closet. Contrariwise, if your secret is that you’ve done something wrong, revealing it in public means you have to be willing to accept the censure, and if you live in an unjust society, the punishment may far outweigh the crime. But in general, I’d like to think it takes a lot to break the habit of caring about a friend, relative, partner, or neighbour.

The thing I like best about the idea of public confession is that the relationship is no longer one-way. Nobody’s listening judgmentally, absorbing the secrets of those brave enough to take the first step, sitting on the sunny side of the screen with their features shining piously in the daylight. Nobody’s perfect or feels like they have to pretend to be. Everybody’s got something to confess, and everybody knows it, and that’s okay.

Because the first step is saying, you can sometimes do things that are wrong or that frighten or upset other people and still be a member of this community. You can make mistakes — you’ll still pay for them — or you can be different, and that’s okay. And the things you confess that mean something’s the matter, either that the community is thoughtlessly judging a part of you or that there’s something about yourself that you want to change? We can all work towards fixing those kinds of things together.

Whether you’re starting a new year of school, a new year of work, or just a plain new year, have a happy and healthy one.