Saying Sorry: What Does Forgiveness Mean?

This week we have the second in our occasional summer series on Saying Sorry. This week Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder PhD. the editor of this blog shares some of her reflections of the shape of forgiveness.

Person one: Ani Mevakesh S’licha U’michila

Person two: Ani Noten S’licha U’michila

I ask for forgiveness and absolution

I grant forgiveness and absolution

A few years ago, just before Rosh Hashana, I sat with a friend and reviewed the past year. It was clear that there was tension in our friendship. As we discussed what had happened, I apologized for the hurt that I had caused. She accepted my apology. In the next breath she explained that despite this, she no longer wanted to maintain a connection.

Our tradition tells us a great deal about righting a wrong that we commit. Doing teshuvah means following up on apologies with changes in behavior. As Maimonides teaches, we are obligated to forgive.[1] But while we can measure changes in bad behavior, can we measure forgiveness? In other words what does forgiveness look like?

Recently another friend was confronted with this question. A woman who had hurt her badly in the past moved into her community. At the time of the betrayal, which had involved a sexual impropriety, forgiveness has been sought and my friend had been unwilling and unable to grant it. Five years later, the woman had written my friend a letter of apology, which my friend judged as sincere, but still my friend was unable to forgive. She had thought the man involved would one day be her husband and the woman her maid of honor. A few months ago, when a mutual friend re-introduced them at Temple, the old friend acknowledged their past by saying that she they had known each other when the old friend was “younger and very, very foolish.” As my friend reported, forgiveness had been actively sought three times.

In many ways my friend had moved on from the old place of hurt and anger. In the intervening decades, my friend married a wonderful man with whom she has built a family. She is happy with her life and freely admits that had she married her then boyfriend it would not have been nearly as happy. Until this woman moved into her community she had not thought of her in years.

My friend has assumed that the distance from the events and the lessening of feelings constituted a form of forgiveness. But when the old friend reappeared, my friend was not so sure. With another newcomer to the community, my friend would have opened the doors to her home for Shabbat, offered advice on schools and camps but in this case she did not.

When repentance is sincere we obliged to forgive, but how do we know when that obligation is fulfilled?

In counseling my friend, I pointed out that in many ways she was acting on her forgiveness. She had not brought up the sins of the past. She was not shunning this woman or besmirching her name in the community. For all intents and purposes, she was allowing this woman to live the teshuvah that she claimed to seek. As Solomon Schimmel has explained in his book Wounds Not Healed by Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness there are levels of forgiveness. IWe do not have an obligation to re-embrace an individual with no memory of their transgression or the hurt it caused but we are obligated to allow them to act the fullness of their teshuvah. We do not have an obligation to return to a world that existed before the rupture occurred.

This concept is echoed in our tradition which distinguishes between mechilah –the letting go of a grudge- and slicha –the letting go that happens deep in the heart – and kapparah – the complete wiping clean of the slate.

When we ask for and are granted forgiveness it does not lead to earthly kapparah. We have to realize that in transgressing, we can never go back to the way the world was before we acted. Our actions have consequences and while we may be able to do a full teshuvah we cannot expect that the forgiveness will mean a full embrace by those we have wronged in the past. When we agree to grant mechilah we take the first step in a process with the hope that we will arrive at some day at a state of full slicha. But the final forgiveness, the full letting go is not ours to give, that level of forgiveness belongs only to God.

ואסור לנחבל להיות אכזרי ולא ימחול לו ואין זו דרך זרע ישראל אלא כיון שבקש ממנו החובל ונתחנן לו פעם ראשונה ושניה וידע שהוא שב מחטאו וניחם על רעתו ימחול לו, וכל הממהר למחול הרי הוא משובח ג ורוח חכמים נוחה הימנו.