Forgiveness

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Erev Kol Nidre 5765
September 24, 2004

A recently published study from the University of Michigan found that three quarters of respondents felt that God had forgiven them for their sins, but only one half had forgiven someone else.

That’s a disturbing statistic, especially for us as Jews. Our prayers to God for forgiveness presume our having forgiven those who have transgressed against us. How can we ask God to forgive us, our prayer book asks, while we continue to harbor resentments against others?

But forgiving isn’t so easy. People do things that are really wrong, really hurtful. People lie and deceive, they break their marital vows and pass on dangerous diseases, they abandon family members when they are most needed, they destroy the trust of innocent children. If we forgive them, we feel that we have let them off the hook, that they have gotten away with something. We worry that we will only encourage more similar behavior. Even in the less awful cases, if we have been treated unfairly, had our hard work go unappreciated, or gotten a worse deal than someone else, we want this to be rectified in some way. We think also of the most extreme cases, the Holocaust, those who have died recently in terrorist attacks: do those who perpetuate such atrocities deserve our forgiveness?

Sometimes we hear of someone who has been involved in an extraordinary act of forgiveness, as when Betty Menkin came and spoke to us on Shabbat Shuvah a few years ago. Her sister had been killed by a drunk driver and her family had a profound experience confronting and reconciling with the woman who had killed her. We admired Betty’s family for being able to respond with compassion to the drunk driver’s remorse and reparations. Eventually they came to see this woman’s rehabilitation and successful rearing of her own young children as a memorial to their sister; but for most of us, hearing about these exceptional people isn’t much help on a day to day basis.

In the early spring we have a few weeks with Torah portions that might be considered by some to be a little dry- sacrificial offerings, leprosy, fungus in the walls. The rabbis, I believe to make it up to us, balance those Torah portions with some of the most interesting of the Haftarot, prophetic readings. One of my favorites concerns a certain Naaman (his name means faithful) who is the general of the Arameans, enemies of the Israelites at that time. He has in his household a servant, a captive taken from her home in Judea during the last war. She tells him that in Israel there is a prophet able to cure leprosy and so he goes to the king and asks to be sent to Israel. The Israelite King is sure that this is a provocation meant to cause an international incident. Imagine today if Arafat were to die in an Israeli hospital or El Sadr of Iraq in an American medi-vac. The King is distraught, but the prophet assures him all will be well.

Naaman comes and meets with the prophet who instructs him to bathe in the Jordan river and then he will be well. Naaman is furious. He is sure he is being treated as a fool. The rivers at home are twice as big as the Jordan, which in truth is barely a stream, and those great rivers haven’t done him any good. He stalks off angry, and it seems as if the Kings worries were well founded. Again the servant woman plays an important role. She says to Naaman, suppose the prophet had told you to do something difficult, even painful, Wouldn’t you have done that in order to cure your leprosy? Naaman says yes, of course, that’s what he came here for. Then why don’t you try this easy thing? So he does, and he is cured, and war between the Israelites and the Arameans was averted, at least for a few years.

Why am I telling you this story? Because there is now a body of knowledge about forgiveness and the medical benefits it can provide that is well known and well substantiated, but because it involves no special magic and no expensive treatments people often ignore it and assume that it will do nothing for them. But I’d like to say to you as Naaman’s servant girl said to him, since you are willing to do things that are expensive, difficult and sometimes even potentially dangerous to improve your life, why not try something easy and safe?

On September 8th 2001, Selichot eve, Professor Fred Luskin of Stanford University, lead a program for us on his work with the Forgiveness Project. Dr. Luskin had developed a series of workshops which help individuals overcome longstanding grudges and resentments in their lives. He came to help us learn to Forgive for Good. Though the program went over well and seemed to respond to the concerns of our members, it was overshadowed by the events of September 11th.

Over the past three years, I have continued to bump into the Forgiveness Project and related research that point to the value of adopting an attitude of forgiveness. Wherever I go, even when I took a class for non-profit managers at Santa Clara University’s business school, I found that people were talking about the benefit of changing one’s outlook and behavior in this way.

Every one of us will be hurt by someone during our lifetime. In fact we are likely to be hurt many times over by various people and circumstances. It is the nature of human life that some things happen that we didn’t want to happen and some things that we want desperately to happen, don’t come about. Most of the time, we take that in stride, but sometimes when we are hurt by someone close to us, or in a way that offends our sense of fairness, it seems like we just can’t get over it. Sometimes that hurt develops into a grievance, and that grievance begins to interfere with our life. Dr. Luskin describes it as if we were each air traffic controllers with different events in our lives taking off and landing. A grievance is like a plane that continues to circle in the sky, using up our attention as the air traffic controller and making it that much more difficult for all the other planes to come and go safely.

Another way to think about how failing to forgive impacts your life, is to think of yourself as a country inn. Different aspects of your life come and rent rooms at the inn. A grievance may begin by renting only a small back bedroom, but eventually it takes up all the room in the inn, preventing others from finding a space. The rabbis put it similarly- first you are pulling it, but then it is pulling you.

Dr Luskin has found that with some very simple exercises one can change feelings of anger and helplessness, to less painful feelings. Even where a person has been hurt very severely, as with a group of women from Northern Ireland, who had each lost a child in religious violence, these exercises made a significant difference and a difference that was sustained over weeks and months. These women learned that forgiving doesn’t mean that what the other person did wasn’t bad or wrong. It doesn’t mean it was excusable , or that we wanted it to happen again. Forgiving just means we take control of how much we want a particular grievance to influence our lives. Forgiveness begins with our understanding that we have the power to stop events that happened long ago from making us feel badly today. What happened was very hurtful and wrong, but that doesn’t give it unlimited power over our lives now.

I heard Dr. Lushkin again, about a month ago at a meeting of our Arab Jewish dialogue group. As the situation in the Middle East deteriorated this past year, our meetings had been filled with more and more tension. I myself was finding it hard to sit and listen patiently to comments which seemed to me misleading, manipulative, or just out of touch with reality as seen by non-conspiracy theorists. Yet, we wanted to continue. If we, a group of educated and well motivated Americans couldn’t sit together in someone’s living room in San Jose, what hope was there for the Middle East. I also felt committed to our group members particularly to an Arab member of the group, a man about my age, who had suffered a heart attack last year. His continuing to attend our meetings challenged me to open up my heart.

What I learned in Dr. Lushkin’s presentation this time is that forgiveness is less a particular action, I forgive you, than an attitude . It isn’t about forgiving some one person who did something that hurt us. It’s about looking at the world with a more gentle accepting attitude.

Even if we can’t forgive our enemies, we will get some traction from being more forgiving in other ways. We can be more forgiving with those we love, our family members who though related to us are imperfect and offend us periodically. We can forgive our parents their inadequacies, our husbands and wives their carelessness on occasion or inability to read our minds, and our children their messy rooms and abilities to push our buttons and bring out in us the parent we swore we would never be. Even that’s difficult, so we can start by being more forgiving of unimportant strangers, rude clerks, incompetent salespeople or aggressive drivers. We will never see them again in our lives, so why give them the power to raise our blood pressure?

Meditation, Prayer, breathing exercises, or other contemplative pursuits can help us when strong feelings seem to overwhelm us. These practices help us overcome the adrenaline that runs through our bodies, our physiological bias towards fight or flight.

Reframing our stories by putting them in a realistic context can help as sometimes we are less a victim than an unfortunate bystander to someone else’s tzurris. This is what the rabbis teach us by telling us to judge everyone lekaf zechut, on the side of merit. We can try to see another person’s actions in the context of their own life story. The driver who cut us off was actually hurrying to the hospital to be with someone before surgery. Our child’s temper tantrum, may not be purposely to drive us crazy, but a response to their own internal overload. A woman told of feeling better about the scar from her mastectomy when a friend suggested that rather than seeing it as a sign of her imperfection, she consider it a badge of honor for conquering fear and illness. The rabbis tell the story of a man who came to a party to which the host had not intended to invite him. The host was sure the man came to spite him, the guest was sure the invitation had been sent to make a fool of him. In truth the messenger confused two names that sounded similar. Understanding things in a different way can sometimes make a big difference.

Forgiveness understood as an attitude is actually about a basic religious issue, human limitedness, what Professor Alvin Reines called human finitude. We are not God and cannot control everything. We are prone to disease and injury, and impermanence. There are things that we might very much want, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they will happen. Sometimes we know what would be best for us, but we can’t quite get ourselves to do it. Often we are full of desires about how those around us should behave, without the ability to influence what really will happen.

Dr. Luskin calls our desire to make the world conform to our presuppositions about how things should be, unenforceable rules. He asks us to imagine that we are a police officer whose job it is to sit by a dangerous highway and ticket those who are exceeding the speed limit. Imagine one day, we are sitting in our hiding place on route 17, and see someone driving erratically at 80 miles an hour, sure to cause an accident. We get ready to go after them, and then, our car dies. We try to get on the radio and summon another officer, and the radio is also not working. We sit there getting angrier and angrier by the minute. We have written that driver a ticket, a ticket that we will never be able to deliver. That initial anger is understandable, but imagine that same police officer spending the rest of the day, even the rest of the week, sitting in that spot, writing tickets for speeders that he will never be able to catch. That is probably not the most effective use of his time. Yet many of us, when someone disappoints us or fails us over and over, continue to write tickets and seem surprised that they have no effect. We stew and stew over what should be.

Some people think that I am demanding and I know that it is hard for me to let standards drop. My inclination is to be concerned that too much of a forgiving attitude could lead to excusing a certain slacking off in others and in ourselves.

Recently though I learned something interesting about the famous serenity prayer that helped me. I always thought it was an invention of Hallmark or some other sentimentalist, though I recognized that it had a long history in AA. I imagined that the person who wrote it was using it as a way to cop out of responsibility. Actually, the famous serenity prayer was originally part of a service written by the theologian , Reinhold Neihbuhr, who spent much of his life deeply involved in social justice. He spoke out against isolationism in the 1930’s recognizing the Nazi threat, and some of his work on racial justice and non-violent protest laid the foundation for the struggles of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. At the time he wrote the prayer, in 1943, he was deeply concerned about the vulnerability of the Allies to Nazi bombing, having recently spent time in Great Britain. In his version this prayer is in the plural, Grant us, he wrote, and not grant me, as he was less concerned with individual healing than with communal responsibility. He also speaks about the things that we should change, recognizing an external moral obligation.

“God give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Neibuhr’s life’s work was with the things that should be changed, with an emphasis on the word should, but his daughter recently wrote a loving biography about him, because he also lived with an attitude of forgiveness, with kindness and patience for his family as well as other individuals. His willingness to forgive people or the world in general for those things which cannot be changed, did not diminish his tenacity in struggling to change that which should be changed.

In truth the serenity prayer is not so different that the advice of our rabbis 1800 years ago. In Pirke Avot Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai poses this challenged: Go out and see what is the best trait a person should acquire. And he answered his own question: A good heart, it is attentive to the needs of others and responds to these concerns, but looks at others with a kindly eye. (Pirke Avot).