Bruce Taub
Yom Kipper Service
September 15, 2002

To Err is Human, To Forgive Divine ­ Yom Kippur Reflections

My reflection this evening is on the question of whether forgiveness is always the appropriate resolution for the wrongs inflicted on people by others.  At the end of this talk I will introduce the congregation to an Eastern European tradition I uncovered when reading about forgiveness.

We live in an age remarkable for public expressions of remorse and requests for forgiveness.  The Pope apologizes for the sins committed by the Roman Catholic Church.  The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions conduct hearing after painful hearing into the brutal crimes and murders committed before the white South African government surrendered power.  Leaders of Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge seek for amnesty.  Priests, ministers, rabbis, and presidents of the most powerful nation on earth ask their constituents to forgive them.  The question is can we, and should we?

On Yom Kippur, Jews who believe in the deity ask God’s forgiveness.  They are, of course, not forgiven for all their sins.  According to the Mishnah and Maimonides, those atoning on Yom Kippur are asking forgiveness only for sins against God, not sins against other humans.  Because in Jewish lore only the injured party can forgive a transgression, and transgressions are never forgiven until the wounded party is appeased.  (Although we are instructed that injured persons who refuse to forgive, despite being asked earnestly for forgiveness, are themselves deemed sinners.)  Only humans can forgive humans.

This is particularly interesting, by the way, in terms of murder, because if only the person who has been wronged can forgive, then humans cannot forgive a murderer, at least in the traditional Jewish view, because the only person who can forgive a murderer is now dead.  Even God can't forgive a murderer, because again, in the traditional Jewish view, God forgives only crimes against God, and humans only crimes against humans.  Hence a murderer can never be forgiven.

This quickly brings us into the realm of the question I posited earlier, whether forgiveness is always possible and whether forgiveness is always the appropriate resolution for the wrongs inflicted on people by others.

Reconciliation is the goal of human repentance and the search for forgiveness.

There are none among us who have not been wounded and hurt to a greater or lesser extent over the past year and all of us have also wounded in turn.  In the human realm there are, of course, modest slights, perceived disrespects and insults, words ill chosen, and there is a progression of far greater wrongs, running to the major transgressions, the perhaps unforgivable acts of brutality, of rape, intentional maiming, enslavement, and war.

True reconciliation does not come cheaply.  Forgiveness requires taking seriously the awfulness of what has happened, not pretending things are other than they are or were.  Forgiveness requires looking at the ugly wounds, confronting the anger, the shame, and the guilt that accompany the damage to a wounded person and to their sense of identity and self worth.  Those who seek to avoid this pain shall be forever caught in the cycle of revenge and regret.

Anyone who has ever been victimized, from the slightest wrong to survivors of abuse and torture, must themselves decide whether or not to forgive.  There is no middle ground: people who have been wounded either forgive the person who hurt them, or they hold on to their rage and anger until they die.

Some argue, therefore, that to not forgive means forever yielding to the transgressor’s initiative and control, locked into a sequence of action and reaction, outrage and revenge, tit for tat, the present endlessly overtaken and devoured by the past.

"When a deep injury is done to us," said Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, "we never recover until we forgive."  In this view, the inability to forgive is the central bar to our emergence from the shackles of our history.

But there is a bigger and not so simple dilemma in the forgiveness puzzle, particularly when confronting the more serious evils perpetrated by humans.  While we can forgive people who could and should have acted differently, we must hold them responsible.  We must hold them under the judgment of memory.  Even after the perpetrator repents, the evil suffered may be too important to forgive.  If your family died in Auschwitz, in the World Trade Center murders, in a refugee camp in Palestine, or at the end of a lynch-rope, you are certainly never going to forget.  And ethically speaking, why should you?  To be forgotten is the final indignity anyone can impose on you in your suffering.  The question is can and should we forgive.

Some great thinkers, like Hannah Arendt, suggest that to effect social change, to make new covenants, we can only reckon with the evils of the past through the releasing power of forgiveness.  The repetition of the cycle of human pain, driven by a desire for revenge and "justice," only serves to perpetuate tragedy. We see people grapple with this in different ways: in South Africa, in the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, at the end of the American Civil War when the victors wisely extracted no tribute or recompense from the defeated, in Israel and Palestine.

Forgiving does not mean ignoring injustice.  Letting go of grudges is one thing, and it takes an immense amount of moral muscle to do so, but the most controversial aspect of the entire subject of forgiveness, in my view, concerns confronting not ignoring the great evils perpetrated by people.  While some are prepared to forgive the war criminal, the slayer of children, the terrorist who kills innocent civilians in the name of peace, others like Cynthia Ozick insist, and reasonably so, that even if such transgressors repent, the evil suffered is too unjust to be forgiven, that only vengeance shows pity to the victim, that whoever is merciful to the cruel is indifferent to the innocent.  We must never forgive, in this view, because forgiving is a sign there is a moral escape valve, that to forgive acts of brutality is in effect to endorse and perpetuate rather than combat their evil deeds.  The blood of the innocent cries out forever.

Yet we are humbled when we read that Tomas Borge, a brutally tortured Sandanista fighter, when asked by the Nicaraguan court to name an appropriate punishment for his torturer and said, "My punishment is to forgive you."

And the father of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man brutally murdered in Wyoming told his son’s killer at his sentencing, "I would like nothing better than to see you die, but this is the time … to show mercy to someone who refused to show mercy.  I give you life in the memory of one who no longer lives.  May you have a long life, and may you thank my son Matthew every day for it."

"To be social is to be forgiving," said Robert Frost.
"Without forgiveness there is no future," said Desmond Tutu.

At the bottom line, there is the forgiveness one must ask of one’s self.  We are such flawed and imperfect creatures.  In the Jewish tradition even God lacks the power, or chooses not to exercise the power, to forgive an injustice.  It is left to people to decide.

We cannot forgive.

We must forgive.

Forgiveness is the key that can unshackle us from a past that will not rest.  As long as we are captive to the pain of having been wronged, we are not free to seek reconciliation with those who have wronged us.

Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to confront the wrongs that humans perpetuate.  What are we to do today as we ourselves atone, reflect, and pledge not to repeat our errors?

Let us do justice and act with loving-kindness toward ourselves and toward others.  Let us build more inclusive communities by joining with other people around the world.  Let us relocate healing power not in heaven, but here on earth.  Among us.  Within us.

In the end, granting forgiveness, whether to others or to ourselves, is a surrender of our hopes and fantasies that our lives could have been different.  It is an acceptance of life as it has been, in exchange for a more peaceful future.

In the East European shtetls of old, on Yom Kippur, before Kol Nidre, each congregant turned to their neighbors, their brothers and sisters, and asked the other "zeit mir mochel," please give me your forgiveness, and the reply expected was "ich bin dir mochel," I am forgiving you.
In a moment I am going to invite the congregation to stand.  To turn to our neighbors, not just the people next to us who we came in with, but also the person behind you and in front of you.  Look them in the eye; say, "please forgive me."  And if you have been asked forgiveness, tell the person asking you that you do forgive them.  Say, "I am forgiving you."  Then ask for their forgiveness.  And trust it will be granted.