"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach…" It's not like I can't forgive. I just realized somewhere during the High Holy Days, when we said the word a million times, that I didn't exactly know what it meant. So I decided, needless to say, to teach a class on forgiveness.
A wonderful group came together for six evenings. We pushed and pulled and chewed on various Jewish sources and our own experiences. And, in the last five minutes of the last session, listening to people's concluding comments, I had an "aha!" It had been building over the six weeks. The progression went something like this:
Getting ready for the first class, I took down all my usual sources and curled up in my big chair to read about forgiveness. There the first surprise came: while there are countless sources in the bible, the Talmud and later texts that talk about God forgiving (or not forgiving) individual people, the Jews and the world, and quite a bit about how we should seek that forgiveness from God, I found hardly anything on how people might set about forgiving each other.
Why the lacuna? People wrong each other all the time. All of us have been insulted, excluded, disregarded, slighted, and often much worse. Some of us have long-lived wounds and grudges that won't heal. Some of us have borne terrible intimate injuries, from family members, once-close friends and past loves. Most of us have bad blood with someone or other and might just as soon cross the street as say hello when we see them. What are we supposed to do with all that? Why doesn't Jewish tradition advise us better?
It's not that there is nothing on how to forgive others. In Torah we see Esau forgiving Jacob, who stole his blessing and his inheritance (and Esau not even getting any credit from the tradition for his generosity!) We see Joseph forgiving his brothers years after they had thrown him into the pit and sold him into slavery. There are a few stories in the Talmud about the rabbis forgiving (or not forgiving) each other. Maimonides tells us to forgive easily and quickly. Rabbi Nachman offers a prayer that forgiveness would come easily to our hearts. Hyla reminded me that the beautiful bedtime Shema has us drop off to sleep each night having forgiven "anyone who has sinned against me or has angered me or has shamed me, whether physically or financially, or against my honor or anything else that is mine; whether accidentally or by intention, inadvertently or deliberately, by speech or by deed, in this or any other incarnation, Jew or gentile, man or woman. May no one be punished on my account."
But how exactly? I began to imagine that the tradition sees forgiveness as a kind of a switch. When the conditions are right (because someone has cleaned up their act and asked your forgiveness, or because you decide that it hurts too much to carry the resentment) you "just" flip the switch.
But forgiveness-I know from my own experience and from the testimony of my study-mates in our class - isn't always an easy switch to flip. Resentment has staying-power. Even if you say, "Okay, I forgive you," it can still be hard, and maybe unwise, to restore an offender to trust, to like him again, to look at her and not see the old offense staring back. At the very least, we might think, forgiveness should feel good. And sometimes it doesn't. So is that really forgiveness?
A friend of mine has been taking a workshop in mussar, the practice, born in nineteenth century Lithuania, of intense ethical self-scrutiny. It has been a powerful experience for her. Each week her mussar group meets with their teacher, and they take turns sharing personal challenges from the week past. "It is different than therapy," she told me, "because in therapy the therapist would ask you, 'How did that experience feel for you?' In the mussar group the teacher asks, 'How did that experience feel for the other person?'"
What I will say next here is a huge generalization, but - cognizant of many exceptions - I generally believe it: Judaism doesn't attend very much to the feelings of its practitioners. It does care immensely about the feelings of others that we come into contact with. But the Jewish spiritual path assumes that at times you will be anxious, that sometimes you will suffer, that sometimes you will be out of sorts, unhappy, under pressure, bitter, resentful, sore and afraid. It doesn't do much to assuage those feelings. Mostly it says, "Consider the other person."
As the weeks of our class rolled onward, I found myself thinking over and over about a line we studied early on, from the Talmud (Rosh Hashana 17a): "The one who foregoes his right to exact punishment is forgiven all his iniquities."
Week five we talked about punishment, about retribution. Jewish tradition is ambivalent about retribution but not entirely against it at all. If someone injures someone else, the injured party generally has a right to exact a price in return. In the Torah that price is "an eye for an eye." Early on, in the Mishnah, that formula changes, is monetarized. Rather than the eye, the injured one is entitled to the price for an eye. Over time capital punishment is made rarer and rarer and finally extinct, and eventually other physical punishments like flogging are also translated into fines and the like. But in the end of it all, an injury still creates a right in the injured party. We might think of fulfilling that right - of retribution - as justice. I posed a question to the class: let's say one day I haul off and punch you in the nose. Would you want anything to be done to me in return?
I wasn't entirely surprised to hear some people say yes. It just didn't sit right for some people to let something so aggressive go unpunished. That conversation stayed with me over the next week.
In the last class we talked a bit about big social issues of forgiveness. Naturally I quoted Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who calls forgiveness "practical politics." Refusing to forgive past atrocities, he says, is "a timebomb that could explode at any time, rendering the new relationship [with past perpetrators] vulnerable and unstable." But what about the badness, the atrocity, of the wrongs committed? Where is the justice for the murderers, torturers, rapists? Tutu's admonition didn't sit entirely easily. Forgiveness in the social realm, I suggested, is a bit like what Churchill said about democracy: it's the worst system except all the others.
And that's where it suddenly all came together for me in a cascade of mixed metaphors. . Every injury creates a vacuum behind it, a kind of sucking energy, crying out for some kind of response. If someone hurts me, I feel a huge impulse to hurt them back. (Why is it, I've wondered, that when someone helps me the drive to return the energy is seldom equally strong?) It might be justice for me to get a slug back in the nose -- or a fine or a jail sentence or a censure or whatever -- after I assaulted you. But it won't feel that way to me. Retribution in theory should balance things, but it hardly ever does in the world of experience. The punished one comes out wanting to punish. It can be an endless cycle. But if you are the assaulted one, feeling that sucking pull towards retribution, you have a choice. You can exact punishment and continue the cycle. Or you can forego your right. Flip the switch. Turn off the cycle.
Will you feel good? Maybe or maybe not. Maybe you won't feel the satisfaction of justice done. Maybe, at the very least, you will wish for some assurances in place, or some repair of the damage, before you can forgive. Maybe no amount of restoration will make you like your assailant again. But how you feel is not really the issue. You have the right to continue the cycle, and you can also choose to stop it. How does the world feel?
The answers aren't simple, as Jewish tradition reflects. But more and more I hope that, in our personal lives and on the world stage, people will take a breath and stop the cycles of injury, even if they have a right to keep them going. I'm writing this on December 13, execution day in California. I wish Arnold Schwartzenegger had done so last night, even if the siblings of the murdered and all the rest of us wanted to see the murderer fry.
© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 01/01/2006 (rge)