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Jewish Community News
Ask the Rabbi: January 2004
By Rabbi Daniel Pressman
Dear
Rabbi Pressman: I heard a minister talking on the radio about forgiveness.
It seemed that he was willing to forgive the perpetrators of the World
Trade Center attack. What would Judaism say about this?
Answer: A few months after Sept. 11, I was on a panel with four Protestant ministers discussing "the limits of forgiveness." (There was supposed to be a Catholic priest, but he was called away on an emergency). They were all inclined to offer forgiveness to the Al Qaida attackers. One clergywoman even said that she had offered a prayer for Osama bin Ladin along with a prayer for the victims.
I had a hard time with this, but I wasn't surprised, because I had read Simon Wiesenthal's book, The Sunflower. In it he tells how he was summoned by a concentration camp nurse, as a random Jew, and brought to a dying SS officer.
The Nazi had some kind of deathbed conversion, and he begged Wiesenthal for forgiveness for all his atrocities against Jews. Wiesenthal refused to grant absolution, and left the room in silence. The rest of the book contains responses of many intellectuals and clergy to the question, "What would you have done?"
One of the writers, college professor Eva Fleischner, reported that when she taught this material, almost without exception, her Christian students "come out in favor of forgiveness, while the Jewish students feel that Simon did the right thing by not granting the dying man's wish." In the book, the Christian respondents were about evenly divided: one third said they would forgive, one third said they would not forgive, and one third abstained. So we can't generalize completely about Christian forgiveness, though the students' reaction represents a strong trend.
The Jewish students had learned from their tradition that forgiveness must be earned. They might not have been able to quote Mishnah Yoma 8:9, but they knew its import. "The Day of Atonement atones for sins against God, but not for sins against people, unless the injured party has been appeased." In other words, until the offender has made things right and apologized.
Jewish law established a process of repentance and forgiveness. First, the offender must admit his deed, with no rationalizations or excuses. "I did it and I was wrong!" Second, he must truly feel remorse. Third, he must apologize to and seek forgiveness from the person he hurt. Fourth, if possible he must make things right, undo the damage he did. For example, a thief must return what he stole. And finally, he must do his best to assure that this will never happen again. Only then can he be forgiven. That SS man could never do this, since his victims were dead. And it was too late for the dying German to show that he really changed.
In our daily lives, very few things are truly unforgivable. Murder, abuse, oppression — these are matters where unearned forgiveness is not only inappropriate, it is wrong. But most of the things that estrange us from others are arguments, insults, and slights of a lesser kind. I heard a story recently about two brothers who had a falling out and didn't speak for 20 years. One of them died, and at the funeral, the other brother was weeping. When asked why he was crying, he said, "Now I won't have Sam to not talk to any more!" Even if our initial anger is justified, to let anger harden into a grudge, and to refuse to forgive is unhealthy and unproductive. Likewise, we can learn to let go of our anger against those who have hurt us, not for their sake, and not to absolve them for their misdeeds if they haven't done the work of repentance, but for our own sake, so that we don't, as someone said, "let someone live in our head rent-free."
When faced with acts of terror, however, it is cheap grace indeed to offer forgiveness, especially when the perpetrators are gleefully unrepentant. There is nothing that can justify or forgive such an act, and I believe that those who do so, or who ask us to "understand" the hatred that drives such deeds, are moral accomplices of the murderers. Justice must be done, and those who confuse justice with vengeance give license to further acts of terror.
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