The Jewish Power Blog: Escaping Victimhood (II)

Of the mechanisms for escaping victimhood the most powerful but the most problematic is forgiving. When the victim forgives the perpetrator, they are not attenuating the injury or the perpetrator’s guilt by explaining or excusing or reframing, nor are they allowing the passage of time to dull the memory of the pain: they are making a conscious decision to relinquish their resentment, to reset their relationship to the perpetrator without giving up their memory of the injury itself and the pain it caused. They are making a choice to shed their passive victimhood identity, asserting their power of agency to define the relationship on their own terms.

It is possible to ask, in many cases, whether forgiving is possible – or even whether it is a good idea, morally. This question links to the confrontation between two main conceptions of forgiving, often referred to as “Jewish” and “Christian.” The former is articulated in the Rambam’s famous ruling:

For sins committed against one’s neighbor…, one is not pardoned unless they compensate their neighbor and make an apology.  ….  If the wronged party won’t forgive the sinner, then the sinner should bring three friends to intercede for them; if they still won’t forgive, they should bring a second and a third set. If they still aren’t satisfied, then the sinner may leave them alone, for the one who refuses to forgive has become the sinner.  (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:9)

That is, forgiving is a legally defined transaction. There is an obligation of compensation and apology for the perpetrator, which, if fulfilled properly, places an obligation on the victim to forgive – even to the point that failing to do so reverses the roles, so that the unforgiven perpetrator becomes the injured party. This neat formulation is of course prone to all kinds of complications and obstacles; e.g., judging the sincerity of the apology, or the adequacy of the compensation, or the lasting impact of the injury. Moreover, do we really believe it is possible to command a change of heart? Rabbi Haim David Halevi, chief rabbi of Tel Aviv in the 1980s, stated the difficulty beautifully:

…The holy One blessed be He forgives with absolute and complete forgiveness, and the sin is as if it had never been… But a person cannot forgive [like this] for the residue of the sin will remain forever in the heart, at least in the first period after the reconciliation. A person can “bear sin” in the sense of bearing with their fellow’s sin, acting, in practice, as if the sinner’s sin never was; and perhaps, over time that residue will be cleansed from the heart completely. (Aseh Lecha Rav 6:42).

The alternative, “Christian” view of forgiving sees the act as a gift, not dependent on the perpetrator’s repentance. The ideal is for the victim to take up the power to forgive their injurer and thus unilaterally leave behind their victimhood, their powerlessness; a kind of turning the tables, and an assumption of the high moral ground not through suffering but through an act of moral strength. Indeed, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida argues, forgiving a perpetrator who has fully repented is meaningless, as they are no longer the sinner they were, no longer guilty, and are not “in need” of forgiveness. True forgiving is forgiving the unforgivable, the totally guilty  – a radical assertion of power, in no way transactional. (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 2001, p. 38)

But in this understanding, even more than in the transactional (i.e., Rambam’s) view, Rabbi Halevi’s concern about the problem of sincerity, of true change of heart, arises: does my forgiving really wipe the slate clean, or is it a performance, acted out in the aspiration to ultimately escape my resentment – my sense of victimhood – and reset my relationship to my injurer? Another problem with unilateral forgiveness is the possibility that perhaps my asserting my power to forgive an unrepentant perpetrator is actually a kind of revenge, a way to make them feel powerless and small. (See, for example, this climactic scene from the film Philomena)

In short, of all the routes for escaping victimhood, forgiving, the one we talk about the most, is the one that is hardest to define and to carry out, and often seems simply impossible. And this difficulty is only amplified when we are discussing not individual relationships, but collective and historical injuries, victimhood as collective identity, passed from generation to generation; e.g., who has the authority to forgive the Germans for the Holocaust? Which Germans? What is the meaning of an apology by an elected leader for past cruelties of their nation? Is forgiveness even relevant in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Can we even imagine, in a situation of active competitive victimhood, one side saying, “We forgive…” – or “We apologize…” –  in order to try to move forward?

It can feel glib and saccharine to talk about apologizing and forgiving in the context of our conflict. But maybe, still, we should talk about it. Another modern philosopher, Lucy Allais, offers a formulation of forgiving that seems more accessible:

Without changing our beliefs in the culpability and wrongness of another’s actions, we can come to have an attitude towards her that sees her as better than her wrong actions indicate her to be, and thus can move forward in a relationship that is not bound by past wrongdoing. (“Wiping the Slate Clean: the Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Winter 2008, p. 68)

Can we – should we – separate the actor from the act (“no bad kids…”)? the collective from its history? And if we can’t do this, can we ever find peace?