Forgiveness is Possible (Kol Nidrei 5786)

Forgiveness is Possible
Rabbinic Intern Rebecca Thau, Kol Nidrei 5786

On Yom Kippur three years ago, 99-year-old Mildred Kirschenbaum posted a video of herself on Instagram.

She began: “[This is] a holiday asking God to be forgiven for all your sins. Looking back at my relationship with [my daughter] Gayle, today we are best friends. [...] But Gayle came into this world as an artist with a strong personality. And I guess I didn’t know how to handle it. And I was harsh with her. I picked on her. [...] Somewhere along the line, I went off track.”

By the time she recorded this video, Mildred and her daughter Gayle had spent years healing their fraught relationship. Building on these experiences, Gayle now shares her insights as a forgiveness coach, with workshops, books, and—of course—an Instagram presence. Now 102, Mildred recently wrote her own book. The last chapter is called “Forgive Before You Go.”

The fact that this heartwarming story gained traction online reflects a broader trend in American culture: we care a lot about forgiveness

This makes sense. We’re living through a disconnected, harsh, scary time, and it’s encouraging to hear stories that show us it’s possible to find and offer forgiveness.

After all, forgiveness is hard.

Sometimes we struggle to forgive because we cling to the fact that we’re right and are owed something. When we forgive, we have to let go of our desire to “get even.”

Or we might withhold forgiveness out of concern that forgiveness encourages more bad behavior. One contemporary philosopher even suggests that forgiving too easily “risks supporting a morally flabby worldview where [...] wrongdoing is not taken seriously.”¹ And then there are times when we want to forgive, but forgiveness eludes us simply because it’s hard to control our emotions.² How many of us have been desperate for an apology, only to receive it and realize that it doesn’t make our hurt go away?

Despite this difficulty, forgiveness is good for us.

Psychologist Fred Luskin, co-founder and director of Stanford’s Forgiveness Projects, teaches that forgiveness allows us to appreciate the world more fully. He explained: “You forgive because you don’t want to give up access to your own heart. And every time we hold a grudge, [...] we are building blocks against the opening of our own heart.”³

Physicians agree: forgiveness has health benefits. It can lower our blood pressure, strengthen our immune system, and even improve our cardiovascular health.⁴

And according to the Torah, forgiveness can have a positive impact on entire communities.

When our patriarch Joseph forgives his brothers at the end of Genesis, he doesn’t just improve their familial relationship—he creates the conditions for the entire Israelite community to weather a regional famine and thrive for decades in Egypt. In this story, forgiveness is the basis for communal survival and success. Especially as we end a year that has felt cruel and unforgiving, forgiveness feels more crucial than ever.

But Judaism has a complicated relationship with forgiveness.

You see, traditional Jewish sources emphasize teshuva—repentance—not forgiveness.⁵

Instead of teaching “forgive before you go,” like Mildred, Pirkei Avot teaches, “Repent one day before you die.”⁶

Forgiveness is how we might respond to someone else’s bad actions; repentance is how we rectify the wrongs we’ve caused. Repentance is the heart of this High Holiday season. We enumerate our collective sins and contemplate the ways we’ve personally missed the mark. This emphasis on teshuva reminds us that we all cause hurt, and if we want to repair our broken world, we have to start with an honest accounting of our mistakes.

To help with our repentance work, our rabbis provide a detailed teshuva to-do list for making amends: admit the mistake to the person who was wronged, change the harmful behavior, make restitution, and apologize. 

Too often, people don’t go through these steps. They don’t reflect on their actions or acknowledge the specific harm they’ve caused. How many of us have gotten an unsatisfying “apology” like, “I’m sorry if I offended you,” or, my personal favorite, “I’m sorry you’re upset.” Waiting for an authentic apology can be agonizing.

If someone doesn’t do teshuva, Judaism never asks us to forgive in advance. If we do, we discourage—and even risk undermining—the mandated teshuva process.

But Judaism does encourage forgiveness in response to a sincere apology. After someone goes through those steps, then our sages call us to forgive.

The Medieval scholar Maimonides even taught that we must forgive someone who genuinely does teshuva. If someone sincerely apologizes three times and we still don’t forgive them, Maimonides says that we sin: withholding forgiveness from someone who is genuinely repentant is overly cruel.⁷

But, to be clear, this does not apply to all wrongs. Our tradition teaches that some wrongs are unforgivable. If someone causes irreparable damage, like bodily injury or abuse, we are never obligated to forgive them.⁸

But we go through life experiencing plenty of interpersonal harms that don’t fall into this category: the friend who was too self-absorbed to support you in a time of need; the colleague who took credit for your idea; the sibling who missed your graduation; the romantic partner who didn’t consult you before a big decision; the neighbor who berated you for your views on American or Israeli politics. 

For all their focus on seeking forgiveness, the rabbis don’t offer a roadmap for those times when someone who hurt us does do their teshuva homework—confesses, changes, pays back what they owe, apologizes—but we just can’t bring ourselves to forgive.

Maimonides’s insistence that we must forgive feels like a lot of pressure, but it’s also profoundly optimistic. Maimonides wouldn’t command something that we weren’t capable of. That means that he thinks forgiveness is possible, even when it’s hard.9

That is where our work begins tonight. We struggle to forgive, even when we want to, so we need tools to help us. Luckily, Yom Kippur provides us with three models for offering forgiveness.

They are embedded in our liturgy itself. You’ll recognize this tune: S’lach lanu, m’chal lanu, kaper lanu.

Each of these words—s’lach, m’chal, and kaper—refers to a different type of forgiveness.

From m’chal lanu, we have mechila, transactional pardon.

Mechila simply says that the chapter is closed, the debts are erased. Mechila doesn’t require us to offer any sympathy towards the perpetrator.¹⁰

Dr. Fred Luskin, that Stanford psychologist, helped a woman named Delores find mechila after her fiancé cheated on her.

Delores came to Dr. Luskin angry, devastated, and lonely. He describes: “Even a year after Skip had cheated on her, Delores was in so much pain that she could not think straight.”

Dr. Luskin helped Delores reframe forgiveness as a tool for her to move forward, not as a gift to her now-ex. Through this work, Delores learned that she could not change Skip’s hurtful behavior, but she could mitigate how much it would still weigh on her. She—we—cannot change what happened in the past, but we can reduce the distress it causes in the present.

By turning her attention to her current emotions and needs, and away from Skip’s mistreatment, Delores was able to offer mechila to move forward.¹¹

Like Delores, we might choose to offer mechila, transactional pardon, when we want to forgive someone to close a painful chapter, but we don’t want to reenter relationship with the person who hurt us.

Until the Middle Ages, mechila was the only word used to describe the forgiveness that one human being can offer another.¹² It’s as if our earlier sages thought that this transactional pardon was all that we limited humans could attain.

Then our texts began to apply the second type of forgiveness to interpersonal interactions. This is selicha, empathetic forgiveness. Selicha is based on an emotional understanding of why the wrongdoer acted badly.¹³

Gayle reached this level of empathetic forgiveness towards her mother Mildred. After researching her mom’s history and learning about her childhood struggles, Gayle attended a forgiveness workshop. The facilitator invited her to imagine her mother and herself as little girls. Here is how Gayle describes what happened next: “I saw the hardship [my mom] went through. So, I saw a wounded little girl. [... And] I knew I was a wounded little girl. And then [the facilitator] said, ‘Now you come together.’ [...] I felt empathy for [that] little girl [who was my mom].”¹⁴

By understanding her mother’s own pain and seeing their commonality and shared struggle, Gayle cultivated selicha, empathetic forgiveness.

Like Gayle, we might offer selicha when we want to reconcile with someone who hurt us, even if we know that this new relationship won’t be the same as it was before.

Then, finally, the last type of forgiveness is kapara, as in “Yom Kippur.” Kapara, ultimate atonement, is the fullest form of forgiveness, which only God can truly offer.

One Talmudic teaching epitomizes this ultimate atonement. According to one sage, God has two thrones: the Throne of Judgment and the Throne of Mercy. Every day, God sits on the Throne of Judgment and takes stock of our innumerable human wrongs. And just when these sins pile up so high that God will have to destroy the world like Noah and the Flood all over again, God chooses to move to the Throne of Mercy.¹⁵ Every single day of our lives, we are sustained by God’s choice to show mercy to us flawed human beings—not because we deserve it, but because God chooses to give it.

Maybe this level of ultimate atonement is impossible for human beings to offer each other. But we are made in God’s image. So we can strive to emulate God’s example: just as God chooses to move to that Throne of Mercy, can we likewise choose to forgive, not because it benefits us, not because that other person deserves it, but because this is how we can bring godliness into a world that sorely needs it?

My friend Meredith teaches high school history. She told me about her student Jason, who was overwhelmed with homework, soccer practice, and SAT studying. His 11th-grade history term paper was due the next day, and he was still 500 words short. Confused and anxious, Jason panicked and copied several paragraphs from an online source directly into the paper. He submitted it right at 11:59 pm.

The next morning, Jason approached Meredith, his teacher. He confessed and sobbed, “I’ll never get into college now!”

Meredith knew the school’s strict rules about plagiarism: she was supposed to report him and fail him. This infraction would go on his record. Jason was right: this mistake really could impact his future.

But looking at this remorseful student who divulged his own infraction, Meredith decided to give Jason another chance. She hadn’t started reading the papers yet, so she let him rewrite it and submit it by the end of the week.

We might disagree about whether Meredith made the right choice, but I do know that she made a merciful choice. By giving Jason another chance that he didn’t “deserve,” Meredith emulated God’s kapara.

We can’t offer ultimate atonement—only God can do that—but at least sometimes, we can choose godly mercy and aspire towards kapara. This extraordinary approach might only apply in extraordinary circumstances when our focus is not on ourselves or our relationships, but on the world we want to live in: a merciful world where we choose to prevent suffering.

Not all forgiveness looks the same. Sometimes it’s mechila, transactional pardon; sometimes it’s selicha, empathetic forgiveness; and sometimes it’s kapara, ultimate atonement.

These models of forgiveness aren’t a “ranking.” We might call upon a different type of forgiveness for each unique situation.

By familiarizing ourselves with three models, we equip ourselves with tools to muster the strength to forgive, even when it feels impossible.

So many of us struggled to forgive in 5785. I know I did. In our personal relationships and in the public square, we often held onto grievances instead of healing. We opted for being right over being in relationship. And far too often, we did not choose mercy. In 5786, we can do better.

Offering forgiveness cannot magically erase past hurt. I wish it could. But it can alleviate some of our present suffering and point us towards a brighter future.

Imagine how centering forgiveness in this way could transform our perspectives, our relationships, and our world. Imagine the positive impact forgiveness can have on our community and on our souls.

As we embark on this journey of Yom Kippur together, may we use these sacred hours to spiritually prepare for the difficult—and holy—work of offering forgiveness in response to sincere teshuva.