From Israel to Northern Ireland, from Rawanda to the Balkans, the world is filled with peoples struggling to come to terms with histories mired in hatred, injustice, and atrocities. People who have suffered great cruelty are attempting to live with their former enemies, by acknowledging, without forgetting, the past.
We Jews understand the challenges only too well. It is six years this week since the historic handshake between Yassir Arafat and Yitzchak Rabin gave us cause to hope that we, both Jews and Palestinians, could be freed from the bitter cycle of pain and misunderstanding that has held us in it’s lock. And in spite of the terrorism, the political setbacks, and the sheer frustration of the ensuing years, I still believe that we have the ability to find the common ground of humanity that can enable us to succeed.
And yet, surely, doesn’t justice demand that some things should never be forgiven? Simon Wiesenthal poses that question in its starkest form in the book, The Sunflower: If a Nazi SS soldier confesses his sins to you on his deathbed, should you forgive him? Wiesenthal was a work camp prisoner in Lemberg in 1941, assigned to day labor in a military hospital. A nurse randomly picked him out, and brought him to the bedside of a dying SS soldier, who had demanded to speak to a Jew.
The dying soldier explained that he had participated in an atrocity. In the city of Dnepopertropsk, the Nazis had herded three-hundred Jews into a building, and then set it on fire. Those who tried to escape by jumping from the burning building were shot. This soldier had been haunted ever since by the faces of his victims, particularly those of a young child and his parents who jumped from the burning building. And so he sought some kind of absolution by confessing his sins to a Jew, to a representative of the people whom he had murdered.
Imagine the bizarre scene. A Jewish inmate condemned by his situation to death, asked to listen to the confession of a dying Nazi murderer. For hours, Wiesenthal sat there and listened. Sometimes he allowed the soldier to hold his hand, sometimes he withdrew it.
The Nazi reviewed his life; he recalled his early Catholic training, his growing conflict with his parents as he became involved with the Hitler Youth, and his father’s bitter disapproval of him for signing up with the SS. He recounts every detail of the atrocity itself, and describes the sense of disgust and self-loathing with which it left him. Through all this, Wiesenthal sat and listened in silence, and finally left in silence, unable to say the words of absolution that the soldier desired to hear.
Of course, Wiesenthal was correct in not granting forgiveness to the soldier, even though, it seems, the soldier was truly repentent. Because it was not his right to do so. Only the victims themselves could have granted that. And yet, Wiesenthal is unsure. He debates the issue with fellow inmates. For years, even while a prisoner on the death block at Mauthausen, he remains haunted by this encounter, and by his doubts that he might have done more.
After the war, Wiesenthal goes as far as seeking out this dead SS soldier’s mother. He wants to find out for himself if the portrait that the soldier had painted of his early family life was indeed true. The good woman freely speaks about her son, corroborating everything that Wiesenthal had heard.
The irony is that Wiesenthal is no naïve bleeding heart. He survived four years of concentration camps, and lost 89 close relatives at the hands of the Nazis. He is a man who devoted his life to hunting down unrepentant Nazis, and bringing them to justice. And yet, this question of what he might have done remains not fully resolved, even for him. As Wiesenthal brings his narrative to a close, he challenges us: "You who have just read this sad and tragic episode in my life, can mentally change places with me and ask yourself the critical question, "What would I have done?"
To forgive, or not to forgive. Are there limits to forgiveness? And if so, what after effects may we suffer by withholding our forgiveness? These same issues are raised in the Book of Jonah, which we shall read together as the Haftarah tomorrow afternoon. You remember the story: God tells Jonah to travel to Nineveh and to proclaim a message of repentance. God wants the wicked Ninevites to reform, so that He may spare them.
But this, to Jonah, seems unjust! God wants to forgive? Why should the perpetrators get off unpunished, just because they repent? Instead of traveling west to Nineveh, he hops a boat to Tarshish, in the East. Better to run away from God than to be a part of this sell-out in the name of forgiveness!
Later on in the book, the Ninevites will indeed hear the message, and they will do Teshuvah. And Jonah will moan, "You see, God? Didn’t I tell you that this would happen? For I know that you are a compassionate and gracious God, El Hanun v’Rachum, erech apayim v rav chesed, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment." Now those words sound familiar—they are, of course, a parpphrase of God’s attributes of mercy, which are first revealed to Moses in the Book of Exodus, and which we recall repeatedly, throughout the Yom Kippur Machzor. But wait—"renouncing punishment?" That’s not at all how the Biblical verse goes! The verse begins: Adonai, Adonai, El Rahum v’Hanun: The Lord, the Lord, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin—but the verse doesn’t end there. It continues, "Yet he does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of the parents upon children, and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations!"
Not once, in all the times that machzor and the siddur recall this verse, do we make mention of the second half. Nor does the author of Jonah, who goes so far as to rewrite it, because you see, by the time Jonah is written, there has been a revolution in Israel concerning how we understand God: a God who prefers mercy and repentance over vengeance.
And so you can understand Jonah’s anger. Nineveh was the capitol of the Assyrians, who had conquered and exiled half of the people of Israel. They were the Evil Empire of the Biblical world. And Jonah wants God to be the God of the early Bible, a champion of justice, clean, and clear, and not muddied by such considerations as mercy, or even repentance.
But by rejecting the notion of mercy, by clinging stubbornly to the notion of strict justice, something happens to Jonah. Unwittingly, he cuts himself off from human fellowship. The author subtly describes Jonah’s flight as a series of descents: "vayered yafo": and Jonah went down to Jaffa; he found a ship, vayered ba": and went down into it. "V’yonah yared el yarctei sfinah…": and Jonah descended into the hold of the ship, and went to sleep.
And, as a tempest rocked the seas, and every other hand on board was struggling to save the ship, where was Jonah? Curled up in a fetal position in the ship’s hold.
"Wake up!" they say to him. "How can you sleep so soundly? Get up—pray to your God! Perhaps the God will be kind to us, and we will not perish!" Jonah seems to be the only one in the book who doesn’t understand that God prefers the route of kindness. But, of course, he does understand that he is the cause of the storm, and eventually he makes his final descent, overboard, into the belly of a big fish, totally separated, hermetically sealed-off from the world and from it’s concerns.
And that is what happens to every one of us when we cling so strongly to our sense of justice, or our self-righteousness, or our high standards, that we leave no room for forgiveness. We become locked in a cycle of anger or bitterness that eats away at our humanity like a cancer, and for what? Sometimes it is better to forgive, to let go, even if strict justice is not served.
Driving my car one day last April, I tuned into a discussion o National Public Radio on the topic of forgiveness: what motivates people, both individuals and whole nations, to forgive each other, even after terrible things have occurred between them, and what enables them to do it?
A young woman called into the show, and brought the question of forgiveness to a personal level. Listen to her story: Maureen was a 1996 Olympian in the sport of bicycle racing. A year and a half ago, while riding in the bike lane, she was intentionally hit by a car, driving over 60 miles per hour. To intentionally run down a cyclist—What kind of sick human being would do such a thing?
Miraculously, Maureen survived. However, she spent over a year recovering from her injuries. She was left with some scars and deformities that will never go away. And, although, thank God, she is riding a bike again, she lost a year of preparation for the 2000 Olympic Games. And, as an Olympic competitor, these games are her life.
Well, the day before the criminal trial of her attacker was to begin, the man who did this to her admitted to the felony. Pleading guilty, he said he couldn’t live with himself any longer without apologizing to Maureen face-to-face.
"I never thought that I could forgive this person for the fear that he instilled in me, and for the psychological and physical scars that he’s left with me. And for over a year I thought of this person as a monster. And when he faced me to apologize to me, it was amazing the immediate transformation that happened inside of me, when I saw him as a human being for the first time. And….I didn’t forgive him immediately, at that moment. I think I needed it to sink it, and over the past three or four weeks, it sunk in deeper and deeper, and I feel like I really will be able to forgive this person someday."
She went on to say, "I still feel like he needs to pay society for his crime, but I feel a little bit more compassionate about what his sentence will be, and a little bit more concerned about his rehabilitation and his growth, and his ability to become a productive member of society, whereas before, I just wanted revenge, and I wanted to make his life miserable, and I had a lot of negative feelings inside of me."
Listening to her story, I was astonished. I have shared many stories with you about the power of Teshuvah, about our capacity to repent and to change. But Maureen’s story is about the person on the receiving end of an apology, and how the experience transformed her: it illustrates the remarkable power of forgiveness. The ability to forgive her attacker enabled her to free herself of the months of anger, frustration, and hatred, as if a heavy weight were being lifted from her shoulders.
Our tradition teaches us that, as part of the process of teshuva, a person has to verbally confess his sin. He has to face up to what he has done by putting his sin into words, and by apologizing to the person he wronged. Clearly, until I can verbalize those words, there is a part of me that may still rationalize or deny the severity of my actions. My teshuva is not complete.
But Maureen’s story made me realize that confession benefits both parties. Hearing the confession enables the injured party to forgive, or to at least let go of the hurt, and thus bring closure to the incident.
Remember the line from the book, Love Story, "Love means never having to say you’re sorry?" Well, frankly, I never understood what that meant. If you truly care about someone, an apology can be a precious gift, because it allows that person to forgive.
And, even if we never hear those words, it is still better for our own sakes, to forgive—to not let the past strangle us in it’s grip.
The child who spends years resenting a parent who was never there for them when they were young is justified in his anger.
The wife, who can never forgive the husband who walked out on the family, is justified in her anger.
But by not forgiving the past, we allow others to have a hold over us that they do not deserve. Shlomo Carlebach, the great Jewish songwriter and storyteller, left Austria as a child, fleeing the Nazis. He lost many family members during the Holocaust. Over the years, he returned to Austria from time to time to perform. Someone once asked him, "How can you go back there? How can you perform there? Don’t you hate them….after everything they did to your family, don’t you hate them?" He answered, "If I had two neshamas, two souls, then I would devote one full-time to hating. But, I only have one soul, and I am not going to waste it on hating."
Today is Yom Kippur, a day of forgiveness. We read in the Machzor: "God, You wait for us to return to You, even until our final day. You welcome us, O our Creator, whenever we repent, knowing the weakness of your creatures; for we are mere flesh and blood."
It is in God’s nature to understand and to forgive. May I suggest, my friends, in all humility, that in this, we emulate God.
L’shannah Tova Tikateivu V’T’Chateimu—May we be written and sealed for a year of health and happiness, of goodwill, of reconciliation, and of peace.