Rabbi Stephen Weiss
Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur) 2014
forgiveness not only for the sake of the person who hurt you, it is also a gift to yourself
Hello… excuse me one minute… I am just… trying… to put this old Lebron James jersey back together. You see, like a lot of people, I cut it up in pieces and tried to burn it back in 2010 when he left town. We were all so angry back then. Do you remember? Now the opening exhibition game is next Sunday and I want to wear it.
Funny, huh? How things change? One minute the guy is northeast Ohio’s worst villain, the next he is our hero again. I mean… it’s not like we forgot what he did to us. How he stood there on national TV and humiliated us in front of the whole nation. “I am taking my talents to Miami.” Right. His talents. As if our city and our team were nothing. We made him who he is, he was formed here as a basketball player. He learned everything here and honed his skills here. Hmmf. Taking his talents to Miami.
Dan Gilbert spoke for all of us when he wrote to LeBron that he was disloyal and a traitor, a quitter and a coward. Dan said we will earn a championship before LeBron does… we showed him! We took down his billboard and turned our back on him. Good riddance….
Well, I guess you can see why I am having such trouble putting this jersey back together. It’s not easy getting over that kind of hurt. But it’s been four long years and we never did get that championship. We thought heck we can do this alone, but you know what? We can’t. And in the end we all miss him. When you get right down to it, he’s our son, a son of Northeast Ohio. It felt so good to hear him say he is coming home. To know he missed us too, that he still remembers what we did for him, and what he did for us, for the Cavs, for Cleveland, for those Akron kids. To hear that his calling here is above basketball. That he wants to bring *us* a championship. Heck. That’s all we wanted to hear. You know in the end, he’s not such a bad guy. I guess we judged him too harshly. Yeah he hurt us, but I guess we hurt him too. He says he and Dan sat down and worked things out. He said everyone makes mistakes. If he can put aside the hurt, so can we…
You know, come to think of it, this Jersey isn’t the only thing I need to repair this season. I have lots of relationships in need of repair. I bet you do too. For some of those relationships, we want to heal them, but we just don’t know how. For others, we are so blinded by anger, hurt, and just pain stubbornness that, like Cleveland for the past four years, we have blocked out of our mind all the good that we knew about the other person from before and forgotten how much our relationship with them meant to us. We are afraid to draw close to them again and so we focus on what we feel they did wrong and magnify it in our minds in order to justify the estrangement so we can move on and leave them behind. But they – our family, our friends, our colleagues, are a part of us. And until we can heal and reclaim those relationships we cannot really move on.
In fact, our very society is in shreds, just like this jersey.
That’s because, more and more, we cut our selves off from each other whenever we disagree. We have lost the art of civil dialogue. Sociologists Robert Bellah and Robert Putnam observe that Americans increasingly ensconce themselves in echo chambers, where their friends, communities and choice of media all reinforce the same points of view they already hold, rather than exposing them to new perspectives. In the process we stop hearing other voices. We deride the legitimacy of other viewpoints and we demonize those who hold those viewpoints. Just look at the division in this country between red and blue. Or the debate over gun control, or immigration, or medical care, or the Jewish communities divided views in Israel. But when we limit ourselves to those with whom we agree, we tear apart our communal fabric. Our sense of shared responsibility and shared fate moves us to have the communal will to make positive changes in our society.
When someone else has a different perspective, when they see things differently than you do, it’s hard to acknowledge that view as having validity and to acknowledge the other person’s humanity. This is especially so when we feel we have been wronged.
In the midrash we are taught: A flesh and blood human king makes a mold and stamps out coins, and all of them look alike. Not so the King of Kings. He makes one mold and stamps out coins and each one is different and unique. But its not justthat each person’s physical appearance is different. Elsewhere in the midrash we read: Even as people’s faces are not alike, so their understanding is not alike. Each person has an understanding that is his very own.” That is, we all think differently and on any given issue we will all have different perspectives. But just as – though we all look different – we are al created in the same divine image, so too each of our different understandings, our varied interpretations of the same reality, is also part of the divine image. We all look at the world with different eyes, yet that multiplicity of perspectives is somehow rooted in the unity of God.
The rabbis teach that the Torah has seventy faces. That is, that the same words can be interpreted many different ways. And all of those ways represent the Truth of Torah. No one can say that their interpretation, their understanding, is any truer than anyone else’s understanding. In fact, if we want to get as close as we can to the ultimate truth, we must strive to understand and integrate all seventy faces. Only in doing so can we develop an understanding which is nuanced enough to address reality in all its complexity. We can only do this by opening ourselves up to opinions and experiences different than our own. As the rabbinic sage Ben Zoma taught: Who is wise? He who learns from all people.
It’s not just that our society is torn apart. So are our families and our friendships. Sometimes we are torn apart precisely because we have different interpretations of events in our lives. We come from different perspectives, and so we see things differently. We both have different truths. It is possible for two people to share the same experience and both come out with entirely different interpretations of what transpired. We don’t have to agree, but we need to find room to acknowledge the other person’s feelings.
Our families and friendships can also be torn apart by hurt we have inflicted upon each other. Let’s face it, we have been hurt, and not just by LeBron. Those we love have said hurtful things, done hurtful things. And we latch onto those hurts and we cannot let go. They crowd our field of vision until we can no longer see all the things we loved about them. And so we allow our hurt to crowd them out of our lives.
But if we are honest with ourselves, we must say, Like LeBron, I’ve made mistakes too. I have hurt others too. After all, its human nature. We all do things we regret, we all make wrong choices. We make commitments and we break them. We say things that are hurtful. We do things that are wrong. That’s why we are all here. We look back over the past year and see all the things we have done wrong and we want God to forgive us. We ask God not to look at our sins, but to remember the good that we have done, to be merciful to us, to show us unconditional love and to forgive us.
And God promises to draw us near. God recognizes the good in each of us and continues to believe in us. Oh, there are consequences to our actions to be sure. But there is also the possibility of repair and healing. Tonight, God says to each one of us, just as we have said to LeBron: Come Home. All is forgiven. I love you. Can’t we then do the same?
And yet we don’t. A Gallup survey showed that 94% of Americans said it was important to forgive. And yet in the same survey, only 48% said they usually tried to forgive others. 48%. That means more than half admitted that they usually do not try to forgive.
Why is it so hard to forgive?
Perhaps, we assume that forgiving someone somehow releases that person of responsibility for their actions. Nothing could be further from the truth. In December of 1983, Pope John Paul II visited the man who attempted to assassinate him in prison and forgave him. But to this day Mehmet Ali Agca remains in prison for his crime. Forgiveness is not the same as absolution. We are responsible for our actions and those actions bear consequences. But paying the price for our past actions should not preclude us from the opportunity to choose a better path in the future.
Perhaps, like Nietzsche, we associate forgiveness somehow with weakness. We assume accepting an apology is giving the other person control over our lives. The truth is just the opposite. As long as we are angry at others they control our lives. When we forgive, we free ourselves.
There is a beautiful story of two monks on a pilgrimage who came to a ford of a river. There, they saw a beautiful, voluptuous girl dressed in a flowing, silk dress, who couldn’t figure out what to do since the river was so high. Without a second thought, one of the monks lifted her onto his back, carried her across the river and put her down on dry ground on the other side.
Then the monks continued on their way. After two hours of walking in silence, the second monk couldn’t stand it anymore. He turned to the first and complained, “How could you carry that woman, when it’s against our sacred vows to even touch a woman?” The monk who had carried the girl across the river responded, “I set her down by the river two hours ago. Why are you still carrying her?”
How many of us are like that monk? Carrying around our resentments, hour after hour, day after day, year after year? But when we refuse to set down that resentment, we not only injure the other person, we hurt ourselves. Our resentment and anger become like a weight around our neck.
We should forgive first and foremost out of compassion for the other person and out of the humility o recognize we have also done wrong. But research suggests that forgiveness also has two major benefits.
The first benefit is that it reduces the stress of the state of un-forgiveness. That stress is composed of a potent mixture of bitterness, anger hostility, hatred, resentment and fear of being humiliated again. And that stress of un-forgiveness, research shows, has specific physiologic consequences such as increased blood pressure; hormonal changes linked to cardiovascular disease, immune suppression, and impaired neurological function and memory. One study compared 20 individuals in happy relationships with 20 individuals in troubled relationships. It found the latter group had a higher baseline level of cortisol, a hormone associated with impaired immune function. The level of cortisol shot up when they were asked to think about their relationships.
The second benefit of forgiveness demonstrated by studies is more subtle. Research shows that people with strong social networks – of friends, neighbors and family – tend to be healthier and live longer than loners. The article goes on to point out that someone who nurses grudges and keeps track of every slight is likely to shed some relationships.
So you see, forgiveness not only for the sake of the person who hurt you, it is also a gift to yourself.
In the days of the sages of the Mishnah, in the second century, whenever there was a drought in the land of Israel, it was believed that the drought was because of the people’s sins, and so they would fast. Once, despite the fasting, the drought did not end. The people turned to Rabbi Eliezer and asked him to pray for rain. Eliezer was a fierce firebrand, deep in his faith, strict in his interpretation of the law. Once, in confronting his fellow sages, he had called forth miraculous events to prove his view was correct. He caused a carob tree to uproot itself, made a river run backwards in its course, and had caused the very walls of the academy to fall. In the end God had declared the law in favor of those he opposed. Yet surely one who could work miracles could persuade God to send rain.
Rabbi Eliezer carefully prepared for the task at hand. He concentrated all his spiritual energy. He composed six special blessings to be added to the Amidah just to convince God to send rain. He stood at the bimah and with great kavannah – great intent, he davened the Amidah. Twenty four blessings: The regular eighteen plus his specially crafted six. He beseeched God with all his might to send rain. When he finished there was not a dry eye in the house. But outside the ground was still dry.
Suddenly Rabbi Akiva cried out: Avinu malkenu ayn lanu melech eleh atah. Avinu Malkenu, aseh imanu lmaan sh’mecha. Suddenly, the rain began to fall. And the sages began to debate: why was Rabbi Akiva’s prayer answered and not Rabbi Eliezer’s? Suddenly a heavenly voice proclaimed: Rabbi Akiva’s prayer was answered because Rabbi Akiva was willing to forgive his enemies, while Rabbi Eliezer was not.
This year, may we open ourselves to the perspectives of others, and recognize their truths even when they are different than ours. And may we find it in our hearts to forgive the hurts and slights, even the more egregious wrongs, so that like God, can find it in our hearts to love them again, and like Cleveland, can put the past behind us and say, Come home.