Forgiveness

Written and delivered by Edith Gelles, a Senior Scholar at Stanford's Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and a founding member of Keddem Congregation, on Yom Kippur morning.

FORGIVENESS
KEDDEM—YOM KIPPUR 2008

Edith Gelles

The story is told of the Dali Lama that when he escaped from Tibet after the Chinese takeover, many monks were left behind. They were cruelly tortured by their conquerors. Eventually some of these monks also escaped and were reunited with the Dali Lama. He asked them what was the most terrible consequence of their torture. One of them responded: He feared, he said, that he would not be able to forgive.

My topic today is forgiveness. It is NOT a topic upon which I am an expert. But I have discovered in the past few weeks that there is a vast literature on the subject of forgiveness; there are studies in psychology, in law, in ethics, in religion. In fact every religion has its own body of literature about forgiveness. My reading has been at best superficial.

But I am NOT an expert for another reason. I don't forgive easily. To me the two or three most vapid words in the language are "I'm sorry." I don’t say them easily; and I don’t hear them easily. I don’t say them, I suppose, because of pride, because my stubborn sense of justice, of right and wrong, doesn't permit me often, to see issues from another point of view. I don't hear them, because I don’t believe in the sincerity or the staying power of the apology. And I have discovered from my reading that I am not alone; I have inherited a strain of Jewish teaching that I will tell you about.

Yom Kippur is about forgiveness. It is about atonement, repentance and forgiveness, all of them related. Just as Matt Kowit told us last week about his childhood remembrance of awaiting for the entire Rosh Hashana service to hear the blast of the Shofar, so one of my outstanding childhood memories was my fascination with watching my grandfather read the Al Cheyt, the catalogue of sins that we all read many times during the Yom Kippur service. My grandfather read them in Hebrew that I am not sure that he understood, but still there was something especially profound, spiritual, even frightening about this list. And it was made so because he stood, swaying back and forth and with his fist lightly struck his chest. It was this physical gesture that fascinated the little girl that was me and who, like Matt waiting for the tone of the shofar, waited to observe it, because it was so bizarre a gesture. I knew that something very important was occurring. The litany of words was read very quickly, like speedreading. But my grandfather's face, the lined face of the elderly, clean-shaven but the few days of growth for the holidays, was intense, ethereal, transported. Surely this was a day of awe.

Let me tell you something of this grandfather. It is probably because of him that I am here at services today. He emigrated to our little town in upstate New York from another little town called Klesk, just south of Minsk in Belorus, and he did physical labor all his life. He was small and wiry, originally blond and blue-eyed but mostly bald and grey-haired when I knew him. What I DID know then and know now was that I was a favorite grandchild. As a little girl he walked with me every day to the ice cream store and purchased me a vanilla ice cream cone for a nickel. What’s most amazing to me in retrospect is that he took me to synagogue with him every Sat. morning, and I sat downstairs beside him among the men instead of being sent upstairs to the women's gallery. I became Jewish not just by birth, not just by training, but by realizing that I was given the privilege of being Jewish by my grandfather who kept me by his side in the men's section.

When I come to services, I am connected with that little girl who sat by her grandfather. When I come to services I connect forcefully with that grandfather who represents to me the history of the Jews and especially the history of Jews in America and then backward in time to the Pale and from there into Jewish history as long as there has been a tradition of pounding on one's heart during the Al Cheyt. So do we all. That is our privileged identity in the history of the world. And we recapture it and relive it by coming here today.


But more about my beloved grandfather. He had helped literally to build the little synagogue in our small town in upstate N.Y. It became the focus of his life. Years later, after I was grown and off to college, we had in town a rabbi, who, in some manner, offended my grandfather. It was undoubtedly an unintended offense, but my grandfather was wounded. For the last twenty or so years of his life, he never again went back to the synagogue that he had helped to build. He prayed at home and by himself, every day, many times a day. He would not be coaxed back to the synagogue by anyone. He couldn't forgive.

I tell this as a very sad story. I thought a lot about whether to tell it out loud here today. Am I telling gossip? Am I hurting my grandfather's memory that I so cherish? Some members of my family will doubtlessly think so. But a dear friend said I can tell it because I also tell you what a kind and generous and loving and devout man was my grandfather. And I tell it because it illustrates so much about the topic of Jewish forgiveness and forgiveness in general.

Until the last few weeks when I started reading about forgiveness, I had attributed my grandfather’s stubbornness to the "shtetl mentality." When I don't forgive, I attribute it to my peasant roots in Klesk. It’s in the metaphorical genes.

Forgiveness in Jewish law and tradition requires work, hard work. Forgiveness is a process and involves consideration and generosity. Forgiveness, in Jewish practice differs from that we know in the broader communities in which we live.

On Yom Kippur when we recite the Al Cheyt, we are asking forgiveness from God, not from each other. We are furthermore doing it in the plural. We ask God to forgive the sins of the community and we inherit the sins of the community, like it or not. Who among us has not balked at some of sins that we are asked to confess, but know we did not consciously commit? And who among us has not resisted notion that we should have to share the bad behavior of other Jews?

And at the end, we ask God's forgiveness, not for the sins past, but for the rules that we will struggle with and possibly break in the year to come. However we may interpret God—as male or female, as androgynous, as dwelling in nature, in our own good conscience, or a social conscience—that God will hear this community confession and, write us in the book or life—or not. We know not. This is our humility, the overarching human ache that we do not know what the future will bring.

But on Yom Kippur we are asked as well to clear the slate for the New Year, to repent, atone, reconcile with our families, our friends, our communities. And this is the hard part.

Jewish law and tradition set the bar for forgiveness at a high level, and contrasts with some other religions. Jews are NOT told to "turn the other cheek." Nor are Jews told that there is no standard of right and wrong; there is just behavior. Jews are not other-worldly in the sense that love supercedes and automatically cancels bad behavior. What is unique is that Judaism proposes a course of action. In Judaism, there is a distinction between the work of the victim of an offense and the offender. Each is provided with guidelines.

First, only the victim may forgive a crime or an offense. There can be no forgiveness for killing. The dead person cannot forgive. This is the one crime for which there is no atonement. The relatives of a victim may forgive the killer but they can only forgive for the hurt they experienced. They may not forgive the crime. This, of course, raises grave problems for those who would wish to forgive the Holocaust. Only the dead may forgive the criminals, but then, too, only the killers may be held responsible for the crime, not their children.

Another observation about victimhood, Jewish law also says there is a difference between forgiving and forgetting. One can forgive, that is absolve a person for a hurt, but need not forget that hurt. This suggests that a relationship may be forever changed. If your partner embezzles from your firm, you may, with the fulfillment of certain conditions, forgive him, but you probably won't do business with him in the future.

And what are those conditions that fall on the person who offends? If a person wishes to be forgiven, that person must sincerely repent and change her behavior. In other words, "I'm sorry" isn’t enough. If the offense was grave enough to require forgiveness, then the offender must reconsider the behavior that was hurtful and take action as well. She must make restitution.

So too, the victim, also, has work to do. She must to try to understand the reason she was injured. She must try to put herself in her offender’s position and to take her reasoning into account. Once she understands, forgiveness may come more easily.

The standard example in ethics is the dramatic case wherein an impoverished parent steals money from his boss to pay for medicine for his ailing child. The boss should forgive the theft, once the situation becomes clear. The parent must make restitution and vow that she will never again steal. She may even have to spend some time in jail.

Jewish law is clear. A victim of a wrongdoing should forgive the transgression, although not necessarily forget. The perpetrator must do three things to atone, that is to seek forgiveness: She must repent; she must sincerely vow to change and thirdly she must in some way make restitution. This makes sense not only in a social community where harmony among individuals is important, but in a psychological sense as well. Anger and resentment constitute too great a burden to carry into the future. Forgiveness frees one from the past.

There is in our tradition, not surprisingly, a contradiction. And perhaps it was from this contradictory position that my grandfather acted, not the "shtetl mentality" that I had always believed, but rather a Biblical mandate.

It is written several times in the Bible that God will not forgive or forget but on the contrary will punish a people forever. For instance, in Deuteronomy 25:17-19, God says that the tribe of Amalek must be exterminated. God says: "Remember what Amalek did to you in your journey out of Egypt, how he attacked you on the way... you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven." And SHE adds ominously, "Do not forget."

We need to acknowledge this minor strain in our heritage. It provides us with an alternative, which is one of the magnificent aspects of Judaism. We get to choose our behavior. We are given free will.

We may choose not to forgive, but in doing so, we cling to a wound and may continue to suffer. Both options exist. I prefer the option of forgiveness with conditions, because it speaks to peace, harmony and a free soul, by which I mean mental space. It speaks to our time.

I conclude with the words of a contemporary theorist that: "Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past." In forgiving we choose a better present and a more hopeful future.

And we wish each other L’Shana Tova Tikvoteinu, May we be written in the book of life.