Forgiving the Unforgivable

Lessons from a grieving mother and the Book of Genesis

Isaac Blesses Jacob—Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, via Wikimedia Commons...

What does it mean to forgive someone? I think most of us confuse forgiveness with absolution, that to forgive is to absolve someone of guilt. But absolution is not forgiveness. To forgive someone has a very narrow meaning. Here is the American Heritage Dictionary:

1. To give up resentment against or stop wanting to punish (someone) for an offense or fault; pardon.

2. To relent in being angry or in wishing to exact punishment for (an offense or fault).

To forgive is to move on. Saying I forgive you means I am putting aside whatever you did to me—I’m not going to carry it with me any longer. Clean slate going forward. Or as someone put it beautifully, to forgive is to give up all hope of a better past.

To forgive is not to condone. To forgive is not to justify. To forgive is to stop nursing a grudge or stoking a resentment. It means simply to be at peace with the past as the past. Something bad happened. But I no longer burn with a desire for revenge or justice.

It is very hard to forgive someone who has hurt us, even when the harm was unintentional. When it’s intentional, when we are the victims of cruelty that alters our life path, forgiveness seems impossible. We often seethe with resentment, crave revenge, seek at least an admission of wrongdoing. An apology or a request for forgiveness by the other person can help. But forgiveness can seem a bridge too far for our human frailty. Some sins against us are unforgivable.

Having been trained as an economist, I once believed that forgiveness was not just difficult but immoral. If I forgive you, if I clean the slate and put aside what you did to me in the past, I am lowering the cost of you doing it again. The same goes for forgiving myself. Having made many mistakes in my life, I once savored them, like running your tongue over a sore tooth, with the goal of remembering the shame and regret at my behavior so that the cost of repeating it would be higher. Bearing a grudge, either against myself or someone who harmed me, seemed like a way to be a better person in the future or to live in a better world.

I don’t feel that way any longer and I think my previous attitude is wildly wrong. My thoughts began to change when a teacher on a meditation retreat—Rabbi Benjamin Barnett—told the story of taking his young son to a playground. The son fell off the see-saw or some other piece of equipment and broke his two front teeth. Rabbi Barnett couldn’t forgive himself. If only he had been more vigilant, this wouldn’t have happened. And like an economist, he may have thought this guilt productive—surely the pain from his regret and guilt would make him more vigilant in the future so that he would better protect his son the next time.

But someone—his wife, perhaps—said he needed to forgive himself. Why? The reason was that every time he saw his son, he was reminded about his role in his son’s pain and he was less able to help his son cope with that pain. As Rabbi Barnett put it when I asked his permission to share this story, “the guilt and shame I carried constricted my heart, made it less able to receive and give love, to be resilient, to be open to the broken, messy journey of life and parenting and everything my son was going through.” He was less able to comfort his son effectively. To be a good father in the face of his son’s trauma, the father needed to put down his guilt and shame and move forward. He needed to forgive himself. Forgiving himself would allow his heart to open and to give his son the love he needed to cope with his suffering.

Without forgiveness, we risk dwelling perennially in the past. For me, the ideal is to forgive myself without absolving myself. I don’t pretend my mistakes were not mistakes. Similarly, I don’t pretend your cruelty was not cruel. I simply accept that those moments were in the past. I don’t pretend they didn’t happen. They did happen. The pain from my mistakes and the mistakes of those around me was real.

Eva Kor endured terrible torture and abuse in Auschwitz at the hands of Mengele. The Nazis killed her parents and other family members. In 1995, at the age of 60 and at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she forgave the Nazis. I don’t know how she managed that, but she did. This offended many people. In the past, I would have been one of those offended people. How dare she forgive such evil? But forgiveness does not mean what she endured was not evil or that Mengele did not deserve punishment or that Kor condones in any way, the wickedness of the Nazis.

As Danica Davidson who co-authored a children’s book with Kor described Kor’s feelings:

To her, forgiveness meant you stopped hating someone, because hating them hurt you, not them. Forgiveness was healing for her; it changed her life. Eva said—in a line that went into our book: “I didn’t forgive the Nazis because they deserve it. They don’t. I forgave them because I deserve it.”

Or as the saying goes, “bearing a grudge is like taking poison and expecting it to kill the other person.” It merely poisons us.

Yael Shy, in this wonderful talk on forgiveness that inspired many of my thoughts here in this essay, quotes Kor as saying that she didn’t think her dead parents would want her life to be consumed by anger. Wouldn’t her parents want her to be happy rather than poisoned by that anger for the rest of her life?

Forgiving is easier said than done. Regretting and chewing on our mistakes seem inevitable. It is hard not to constantly think, “if only.” So how can we learn to forgive? How can we accept our own mistakes and the mistakes and even cruelties we have experienced at the hands of others?

There is a strange and fascinating answer in the Book of Genesis. After Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers, he ends up in prison and then improbably, ends up as Pharaoh’s second in command. His brothers who wronged him show up in the middle of a famine seeking food. Twenty-two years have passed; the brothers don’t recognize Joseph who was a teenager when they last saw him. But Joseph recognizes his brothers. The turning point of the narrative occurs when Judah approaches Joseph and pleads for Benjamin’s life.

Joseph sends all of his retinue out of the room and announces to his brothers, “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?” And then according to the way most people tell the story, Joseph forgives his brothers and we learn the power of forgiveness.

I don’t think that’s actually what happens. Let’s look at what Joseph says next when his brothers are too stunned to reply after Joseph reveals his identity.

Don’t be sad or angry with yourself for selling me here. God sent me before you to save lives.

Is that forgiveness? I don’t think so. Actually, I’d argue that Joseph is encouraging his brothers to forgive themselves. He’s saying: don’t be sad, don’t judge yourself—it was all part of God’s plan. A few verses later he says explicitly: you didn’t send me here—God did.

If Joseph’s goal is to get the brothers to release themselves from their past sin of selling him into slavery, we could imagine different arguments. Joseph could have said, forgive yourself because it wasn’t really your fault. It was our father, Jacob, who is to blame. He favored me. He gave me that colored coat.

Or Joseph could have blamed himself. He could have said don’t blame yourself, blame me! I was arrogant. Self-centered. I mocked you with my dreams and strutted around in the coat Dad gave me. Forgive yourselves.

But instead, Joseph says, don’t feel bad, you were pawns in God’s plan. And it turned out for the best! It’s a seemingly strange argument that absolves the brothers of not just blame but takes away their agency. Would the teacher whose son fell and broke his teeth find this comforting? “Don’t feel bad about not paying enough attention to your son’s safety—it was God’s will. So forgive yourself.”

This doesn’t work for most of us. But I think there is something powerful to be learned from Joseph’s formulation. And I realized it when I thought of Joseph’s father, Jacob.

We don’t know much about Jacob’s childhood. We’re told he is a simple child, and dwells in tents. It’s not clear what that means exactly, but it’s pretty clear that he is very different from his twin brother Esau. We know that Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of soup. The significance of this exchange is unclear. It’s not exactly a transaction in a legal ledger so why is it important? We learn of it perhaps to understand that Esau is not very interested in his family’s traditions and mission.

Eventually, Jacob’s life turns on a deception that his mother Rivka suggests—dress up in a sheepskin, impersonate your brother Esau, I’ll make you some goat stew and you can pretend it’s a venison goulash and get the blessing from your father Isaac that he intends to give to Esau.

This is one of the strangest moments in the biblical narrative. Why doesn’t Rivka talk to Isaac about this? Why do Rivka and Jacob think that this deception will succeed? And it’s not clear that it does. Isaac clearly thinks something is amiss. He is old and nearly blind. But he is also very suspicious of Jacob’s ruse that Rivka devises. Does he want to deceive himself? Does he realize that even though he has a soft spot for Esau, his softer son is the one to carry on the family’s mission from Abraham to bring monotheism to the world?

We cannot know. But we do know the consequences of Rivka’s gambit and the path she pushed her son to follow. After his blessing has been stolen, Esau wants to kill Jacob. Jacob flees to the house of Lavan where he in turn is deceived and forced to work for 14 years to earn not just Rachel, the woman he loves, but Leah who he hates. Stuck with two wives, he has 12 sons and a daughter. The 10 sons of Leah despise their step-brother, Jacob’s favorite son Joseph, sell him into slavery and then deceive their father about Joseph’s fate. For 22 years, Jacob thinks his beloved son of the woman he loved has been killed by a wild animal or murdered. You could make the case that Rivka ruined her son’s life.

Jacob seems to reach a similar conclusion. When Joseph brings him down to Egypt and Jacob meets Pharaoh, Pharaoh asks him how old he is. Jacob’s answer is pure bitterness: few and evil are the days of my life. It would be understandable for Jacob to harbor a grudge against his mother for how his life unfolded. Or to harbor a grudge against himself. And maybe he did both. But was his life a disaster?

Would he have preferred to stay at home and to never have met Rachel? Would he have preferred not to run from his brother afraid for his life and to never have Joseph as his son? Sure, there are a lot of things that seemingly could have been better—for his sons to get along, for his wives to get along, for there to only be one wife not two, for his sons to temper their anger at their brother. Sure, he could have been a more hands-on father with the two sets of brothers, but he had seen the effects of hands-on parenting from his mother and maybe shied away from trying to steer things so directly.

Perhaps the real lesson for Jacob is that you have to take your life as a whole. Jacob might feel like he would have preferred that Lavan hadn’t tricked him and substituted Leah for Rachel on Jacob’s wedding night. He might might have preferred to marry Rachel and have only one wife, a wife he loved and children from that one good woman. And he might have preferred to get Rachel without having to find her at that well when he was fleeing for his life from his murderous brother, Esau. It’s natural to think: if only. But you can’t take out the pieces of your life that you don’t like and keep the parts you do.

All the parts are inextricably linked. That’s the way life works. If you say I’d like the good parts without the bad, you’re not just fantasizing “if only.” You’re saying I wish I were God and could control the universe. It’s absurd. All of what comes before, good and bad, are tangled together and make you who you are. Jacob might wish for a life with Rachel but not Leah, but all of that came from his mother’s crazy plan. The world you want, Jacob—a world with Rachel but not Leah—that’s just not in the cards. That’s breaking the rules of life.

And if you’re a religious person, you might even tell Jacob, sure your mother’s plan went haywire, but God had something else in mind—for you to be the father of the Jewish people. Aren’t there worse fates? Jacob’s answer to Pharaoh (the years of my life are few and evil) suggests Jacob couldn’t imagine a fate worse than his own. But if you wanted to comfort Jacob and more importantly, if you wanted to get Jacob to put down the burden of his past, telling him that God wanted him to father the Jewish people might help.

Personally, I find it challenging to believe that everything is part of God’s plan. Maybe everything really does depend on what is called Divine Providence—God’s plan. I know people who seem to live as if they believe that everything, good and bad, comes from God. But for those of us—religious, atheist, or agnostic—who find it challenging, there’s a different way to think about it. It’s captured in the idea of amor fati—love of one’s fate, an idea I learned from this conversation with Brian Klaas about his book, Fluke. According to wikipedia, it’s “an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.” Nietzsche wrote:

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.

Amor fati is not just accepting your fate. It’s loving your fate. Because without everything that came before, you would not be you.

Here’s the craziest thing about amor fati. If you’re a religious person who believes that everything comes from God and that therefore everything despite its appearance is good, then you have amor fati. And if everything comes from God and was meant to be, you should let go of the pain of the past and any desire for revenge or retribution. You can forgive yourself and anyone who hurt you.

If you’re a hardcore atheist determinist, the future is not just out of anyone’s control, certainly the past is as well. So you should have amor fati. And you should certainly forgive anyone, including yourself, who did things that brought you pain. They and you are blameless. Lay down the burden of the past.

And even if you are an atheist who believes in free will going forward, you certainly can’t rewrite the past, so perhaps you can imagine accepting the past as done and even loving it. If you like who you are then you have to not just accept the past but you should be able to imagine loving your past because it makes you who you are. And because the past is what makes you, you, then you should forgive yourself and anyone who caused you pain.

All of this can help you put aside the parts of your past that embitter you. You cannot change them. They make you who you are whether that is just random fate or God’s plan. The past is a single iron block that leads to who you are today. If you change any of it, you won’t be you. You’ll be someone else. That someone else could be a happier person, but it wouldn’t be you who would be happier.

Ted Chiang in his marvelous short story, “The Story of Your Life” asks the question (spoiler alert—read this story before you read what comes next though I have tried to conceal the spoiler as much as possible), if you knew in advance how your life would turn out, would you change anything? Think about your worst mistake, your biggest regret. Would you change that if you could? Or would you embrace your fate because it is yours?

[Chiang’s story “The Story of Your Life” was made into the movie “Arrival.” My understanding of that story and much of what I came to understand about amor fati grew out of this video series “Grappling with Loss” by Rabbi David Fohrman. Highly recommended.]

These are not easy questions. While I have some strong amor fati and I can imagine the possibility of divine providence even if I struggle to fully embrace it, the past can haunt me and I think this is the curse of human memory. What we remember is hard to forget and so we sometimes suffer from a past that is well, past, even though we might wish to love what we are and what we have, acknowledging that the past is real but unchangeable.

In the darkest moment here in Israel since the war started, three Israeli hostages trying to get to safety were killed by friendly fire. An investigation was immediately opened. As is often the case, this tragedy was the result of miscommunication, the fog of war, and probably as much as anything, the incredible tension people in war have to face. As is often the case, this was no one’s fault and everyone’s fault. That it happened is unbearable. The nation would so like to rewind the tape and play this over. If only. If only. If only.

Iris Haim, the mother of one of the slain hostages, wrote to the battalion whose troops killed her son:

This is Iris Haim. I am Yotam’s mother. I wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and I hug you here from afar.

She continued, saying that if anyone is to blame for the death of her son, it is Hamas and that the soldiers should do their job. She concluded her letter:

At the first opportunity, you are invited to come to us, whoever wants to. And we want to see you with our own eyes and hug you and tell you that what you did — however hard it is to say this, and sad — it was apparently the right thing at that moment.

And nobody’s going to judge you or be angry. Not me, and not my husband Raviv. Not my daughter Noya. And not Yotam, may his memory be blessed. And not Tuval, Yotam’s brother. We love you very much. And that is all.

How can a mother write these words? I don’t know. All I know is that Iris Haim is the mother of Yotam forever, the mother of forgiveness, and one who inexplicably found a way to forgive the unforgivable.