The Jewish Power Blog: The Power to Change
A few years ago I did a search of rabbinical responsa literature (answers to halakhic queries) looking for references to interpersonal forgiveness. Interestingly, I didn’t find a lot, and most of what I found was in the responsa of Rabbi Haim David Halevi (1924-98) who served for many years as chief rabbi of Tel Aviv.
One query was from a person concerned about their obligation to forgive, on Yom Kippur, someone who consistently slanders them (Aseh Lecha Rav 6:42). Rabbi Halevi reassures the questioner that, first of all, slander is a special category because it is almost impossible to undo, making forgiveness problematic; and secondly, if the offender refuses to desist – not to mention to apologize – then there is certainly no obligation to forgive. Here the rabbi is consistent with the mainstream view in Judaism, that forgiving can be seen as transactional – it is a response to repentance. This is opposed to what is commonly seen as the Christian view of forgiveness: that it is supererogatory; i.e., not conditioned on the offender’s repentance, but purely a gift from the victim.
But even if the offender were to reform, the questioner worries, “I fear that even if by law I am obligated to forgive him, I will not be able; even if I forgive him in my words, in my heart I will not be able to do so.” Here too the rabbi is reassuring:
The holy One blessed be He forgives with absolute and complete forgiveness, and the sin is as if it had never been… [God’s] forgiveness uproots and erases the sin completely. 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; it all depends on the person and their qualities.
Setting aside the above question of whether forgiveness must be “deserved,” Rabbi Halevi’s advice seems to be rooted in the concept famously stated in the Sefer Hachinuch (Spain, 13th cent.), “one’s heart follows one’s deeds;” i.e., our feelings and beliefs are formed by the actions to which we have become habituated. Another familiar formulation: “one who engages with Torah and mitzvot for some ulterior motive (e.g., honor) will ultimately do so for its own sake” (Bab. Talmud Sanhedrin 105b). This educational principle is of particular relevance in cases like the above one, wherein the desired end result is a matter of the heart: to forgive. Can we really impose our will on our feelings? Can we make a conscious, reasoned decision to just stop resenting – or to stop hating – or to stop fearing? Rabbi Halevi has modest expectations in that regard, suggesting that all we can do, realistically, is to make the conscious decision to act as if we forgive – even insincerely. Perhaps, over time, the repeated action will become part of our identity and will seep into our heart. And even if the victim’s act of forgiving never goes beyond play-acting, might it not still have a positive impact on both sides, reducing, over time, resentment, guilt, and animosity and supporting the flourishing of both parties?
This principle has significant ramifications for how we educate, and even for how we behave in everyday interpersonal situations. For example, assuming that speech is a form of action, if we allow ourselves to speak in certain ways about Others – or if we prevent ourselves from speaking in certain ways – then this principle suggests that the words we say or refrain from saying may, over time, affect what we think and feel about those Others. Thus, I suspect that the Trumpian breaching of the barriers to crude and disrespectful and hateful speech might well be a factor contributing to the rise in intergroup fears and hatreds in our time.
Which leads me to wonder about Israeli culture – where acts and symbols and words of bereavement over our victimhood at the hands of the world (Holocaust) and the Arabs (1948) and the Palestinians (Oct. 7) saturate our calendar, our school curriculum, and our physical environment. Memorial days, memorial sirens, memorial sites, every bus stop now plastered with commemorative stickers. And of course, implied in this story of grief and loss is the timeless guilt of the perpetrator – which, quietly and insidiously in our consciousness, sticks to every Palestinian Arab we see around us: doctors, politicians, bus drivers. Not to mention that most of us spend at least a few years in the army, where our actions fall mainly into two categories: fighting against Arabs, or training to fight against Arabs – primarily Palestinians. If our hearts follow what we do and say, it is not surprising how widespread are the feelings of hate and fear among us.
And yet, despite the culture of victimhood, and the army’s cultural centrality, and the Trumpian rhetoric of our current leaders, it almost seems miraculous – and a basis for hope – that so many of the Israeli Jewish public (still, a minority) choose (quietly) to act as if we can ultimately break out of the unsustainable stasis in which we find ourselves. Consider, for example, the glimmer of light offered by Yoav Segalovitz in the current dark election season. So “perhaps, over time, that residue [of fear and hate] will be cleansed from the heart completely.”
