The Two Presidents Who Examined Their Evil Deeds and Turned Away from Them

The focus of Yom Kippur, the weeks leading up to it, and the upcoming holiday of Hoshanah Rabbah is t’shuvah—meaning repentance, or, more literally, return. As Moses Maimonides taught, t’shuvah requires regretting one’s misdeeds, begging for forgiveness, resolving not to repeat those deeds, and then, finally, not repeating them. Jeff Jacoby examines the story of two presidents who, rather than engage in stage-managed damage control, actually did t’shuvah in their public lives. The first, Ulysses S. Grant, issued an order expelling the Jews from Tennessee during the Civil War—an act of anti-Semitism almost without parallel in U.S. history. But by the time Grant became president in 1869 he deeply regretted what his wife called “that obnoxious order.”