Choosing to Forgive

Kol Nidre 5779 / 18 September 2018

The course of my dad’s life meant that he often reflected on teshuvah and its place in Jewish thought and living. We talked a lot over the years about recovery, and his slow work to rebuild his life, usually in more general terms; in our last real conversation, however, he started to share some details about his personal experience of Alcoholics Anonymous.

 When he first started in the program, he told me, the first few steps made intuitive sense. But he found the fourth step, “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of oneself,^[1] profoundly confusing. Ostensibly a self-assessment, it actually begins by asking us to make a catalog of our anger toward others about their behavior.^[2] He couldn’t make sense of it: why does an exercise in self-assessment begin by focusing on the reasons we resent others? And yet as he made his way through the process, he found that it worked, and in fact held the key to complete reflection — and then he began to wonder, why don’t we hear more about resentment over the High Holy Days and in the teshuvah literature? That was as much as he said on the subject, but the question lingered in my mind: what is resentment, really, and what role role does it play in the teshuvah process?

I started, as he had, with the “Big Book,” the core text for AA. Turning to the fourth step, similarities to teshuvah struck me right away. Although the two concepts developed independently, the Big Book’s “moral inventory” is a near-perfect translation of our term חשבון הנפש. Both use a commercial metaphor to describe the process of soul-searching that accompanies teshuvah, quite deliberately: one thing that sets an inventory apart from other means of evaluation is that, in order to be of any use, an inventory must be complete. “A business which takes no regular inventory usually goes broke,”^[3] the Big Book says, and by the same token without a comprehensive moral inventory we will likely find ourselves spiritually bankrupt.

I then saw exactly what had seemed so strange to my dad all those years before. After briefly alluding to a search for flaws in ourselves, the Big Book instructs the reader to begin writing up a “grudge list,” a record of every grievance and resentment we hold against other people in our lives. Friends, co-workers, spouses, fresh wounds and old scars, it all goes down on paper. Who do I resent? What causes that resentment? Where does it threaten me?

Reading these questions, I felt like the lid had been knocked off a boiling pot. Before I even had time to take out a piece of paper, my own resentments started to flow, some of them years-old. I hadn’t seen it inside myself, and looking directly at my resentment shook me so deeply it was a week before I could return to the book and resume reading. Clearly some essential human truth lay in this exercise, but I still didn’t understand exactly what, or why it seemed absent from traditional Jewish discussions of teshuvah.

During rabbinical school, a classmate’s wife took a retail job with a well-known clothing brand. At a Shabbat meal, she shared that the company had a policy where, if an employee went to her supervisor with a complaint about a co-worker, the supervisor would give her twenty-four hours to deal with it directly — meaning, work it out with the other person in some constructive way — or drop it. Most of us have a natural tendency to avoid conflict, so if she chooses the first option, “deal with it,” her boss would support her every step of the way: helping think of how to raise the issue, facilitating a conversation with the other party, mediating between the two until they can resolve their issues. If she chose to drop it, on the other hand, she really needed to let it go. That story stayed with me, and ever since I have adopted a similar approach in my own work. In any relationship we want to last, those are really the only two good options. If we can’t truly let go of something, and we want to maintain a healthy relationship, we must confront the person who hurt us directly and honestly.^[4] That can be deeply uncomfortable, but if we avoid those difficult conversations we will come to resent those things we don’t talk about.

We explored the first part of this equation — “deal with it” — in our Shabbat Shuvah learning. The Torah articulates a specific mitzvah to give the people in our lives direct, honest feedback when we feel they have done wrong:

לֹֽא־תִשְׂנָ֥א אֶת־אָחִ֖יךָ בִּלְבָבֶ֑ךָ הוֹכֵ֤חַ תּוֹכִ֨יחַ֙ אֶת־עֲמִיתֶ֔ךָ וְלֹֽא־תִשָּׂ֥א עָלָ֖יו חֵֽטְא:

Do not hate your brother in your heart; rebuke, yes, rebuke your fellow and do not bear sin because of him.^[5]

Hatred weakens the social bonds that hold a society together; we can head off that hatred before it starts by making a practice of talking honestly about the things that hurt us. English translation is never an exact science; “rebuke” has a harsh, punitive connotation, when in fact the concluding phrase, “do not bear sin because of him,” requires us to approach this feedback with gentle words and a compassionate spirit — lest we embarrass the other person in any way.^[6] 

It turns out that the Torah’s one and only reference to resentment comes immediately after the mitzvah of giving honest feedback:

לֹֽא־תִקֹּ֤ם וְלֹֽא־תִטֹּר֙ אֶת־בְּנֵ֣י עַמֶּ֔ךָ וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵֽעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ אֲנִ֖י ה’:

Do not take revenge or bear a grudge against the children of your people; you should love your neighbor as yourself, I am Adonai.^[7] 

The Torah leaves us with only two options: “deal with it or drop it.” To do otherwise — to hold onto our hurt and anger without addressing the harm we have suffered — would lead us into deep and poisonous resentment, toward the hatred prohibited by the first mitzvah and away from the love that this mitzvah insists we show toward others.^[8] 

Indeed, that most famous commandment, “love your neighbor as yourself,” holds one of the keys to understanding our way out of the resentment trap. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to hold a grudge against me, or worse attempt revenge. As a result, I must transcend those tendencies in myself as well. No matter how uncomfortable it might be, I would still prefer them to confront me directly and honestly, so we can work out whatever problems we have, and so I owe them the same consideration. Moreover, how we feel about others often relates directly to how we see ourselves. As the masters of both Hasidic and Mussar traditions point out, we most easily see in others the flaws we share with them.^[9] In this way the Torah’s insistence on direct, honest feedback, and its expectation that we will let go of the things we choose not to address, becomes a powerful tool for חשבון הנפש, the spiritual inventory we discussed earlier.

The notion of directly confronting the people who have hurt us makes perfect sense — if only we could go back and start from square one. Unfortunately, we’re already in the middle of all of our relationships. Family, work, neighborhood, synagogue: in each context, history feeds into how we experience our interactions. For a variety of reasons, it doesn’t always make sense to try to deal head-on with those who have wronged us. In some cases, particularly when those people have already passed away, it may not even be possible to redress the wrong. But the other option, to let it go and move on, can feel monumentally difficult, even impossible.

This leads to what I found to be the twelve-step program’s sharpest insight. After laying out all the negative feelings we harbor toward the people in our lives, the Big Book asks us to consider “that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.” Or, as one of my rabbinic mentors would ask when faced with a difficult interaction, “What is the pain in this person’s life that leads them to act in this way?” One small shift in frame yields an entirely new picture, one in which we can respond with compassion instead of anger. There is no need to excuse or condone any of the behaviors that have injured us. Instead, we seek only to break the resentment that blocks our spiritual and emotional progress and locks us into old, self-defeating patterns of behavior. We are asked to view the people we resent “as ourselves,” considering how we would want anyone else to treat us in a comparable situation. 

The week my father died I was reading a remarkable and inspiring book, A Second Chance by Catherine Hoke. It’s the perfect book for this time of year; if I haven’t already recommended it to you, the first thing you should do tomorrow night is eat a bagel, but the second thing is to buy a copy of A Second Chance. She begins with a simple but heartbreaking question: “What would it be like if you were known only for the worst thing you’ve ever done?”^[10] And although she rarely uses the word “resentment,” the book’s core themes revolve around those things in us that others won’t let go of, and the things we hold on to — about others and especially about ourselves.

Like the Big Book, A Second Chance drives home the point that our resentments form a kind of blockade preventing us from dealing with our own moral failings. No matter what we may have done, we can always find someone else at fault, a reason why the other person deserved whatever we did. So long as we look at life in this way, we avoid accountability. We also remain chained to a past we can never change — imprisoned in our thoughts and feelings. As a friend remarked when I shared this topic with him, resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Perhaps most important, an accounting of our resentments leads, sooner or later, to those things we can’t let go of about ourselves. And that opens the door to forgiveness.

Throughout A Second Chance, Catherine Hoke emphasizes a simple mantra: forgiveness is a choice — not an emotion we feel, not a gift we give to the other person because we pity them, or because they deserve it in any way, but a decision we make about how we want to live.^[11] When I forgive I’m not saying that what happened was OK. It doesn’t mean I forget the pain, or mitigate the long-term consequences. Forgiveness doesn’t compel me to maintain a destructive relationship, or to expose myself to ongoing harm. I’m not letting anyone — myself or anyone else — off the hook. I choose to forgive for myself, so that I can move on with life.^[12] And in many cases, the choice to forgive is less of a permanent resolution and more like an ongoing activity to which we must periodically return. We need to keep choosing to forgive.

My dad spent his first year of recovery at an inpatient facility in Texas. I saw him once in that time, when the family got together in Dallas for Thanksgiving. He returned to Atlanta just before I started high school, and as relieved as I was to have him back, he also felt very much like a stranger to me. He was in Texas for a year, but he had been missing from my life in any meaningful way for much longer.

My mom, in her wisdom, decided that he should drive me to school every morning, and that we should go out for breakfast on the way. We settled into a routine almost immediately: in the car at 6:50; our regular table at the bagel shop, coffee for him and orange juice for me; the New York Times, freshly delivered, business section for my dad and opinion pages for me. Then we sat, quietly reading, until we finished our breakfast and left for school. In the car I would click the radio on to cover the uncomfortable silence.

Weeks turned into months. I can’t remember what happened, or exactly when, but one day he passed an article across the table to me, and we discussed it briefly. The next day, another article. I passed something to him. We slipped into conversations that lasted into the drive to school. OJ went on trial, and when my dad picked me up in the afternoon he would fill me in on the first half of the day’s proceedings while we listened to the rest of the trial coverage, following the case together. Now the newspaper didn’t always come out of its sleeve in the mornings; sometimes we had enough to talk about without it. We still listened to the radio in the car, but now it was because dad was interested in learning the music my friends and I were into. And even once I started driving myself, we still kept up our breakfast dates.

I spoke on Rosh HaShanah about my dad’s recovery as teshuvah, but I had my own kind of teshuvah to do as well. On top of everything he did to remake his life, for our relationship to work I had to let him be different. I had to choose to forgive, to let go of the hard years and experience him in new ways. I still live with the consequences of those earlier years; I struggle as a husband, as a father, as a man in the world, much of it because of our troubled early relationship. But I chose to forgive. I still choose to forgive — not just once when I was fifteen, but again and again, year after year, each time I stumble on some new reverberation of those dark times. Even now that he has left this world, I still find myself needing to forgive again. I’ve come to see that we are linked: only through forgiving him can I also forgive myself, for all the times I’ve missed the mark. In my compassion for him, I find compassion for myself too. I love him as myself; I strive to love myself as I love him. I think he understood all of this from his own חשבון הנפש, his moral inventory. I think that’s what he wanted me to find when he raised the question of resentment.

At the end of that last conversation, as I lay next to him in bed, I whispered to him:  I understand the years that you weren’t around, why you couldn’t be here, and I forgive you. I don’t know where that thought came from, but saying it I felt deep peace wash over me. Then we lay in silence for a time, until he drifted off to sleep. It’s not the very last thing I ever said to him, but it’s the last thing I’m sure he heard me say. I forgive you.

My dad’s final lesson turned out to be a big one: in order to fully engage in חשבון הנפש, we need to understand and reckon with our resentments. If we want to live free, we need to address what we can in our relationships, directly with the people involved. When we can’t, or won’t, deal with issues head-on, we need to let them go; and in order to let go, we need to forgive. That is a choice we make for ourselves, and only for ourselves. Forgiving is not about erasing the past, it is a way to write the future.

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