Approaching Yom Kippur

As we approach Yom Kippur in this New Year, we need to think about forgiveness. There's an awful lot of New Age psychobabble out there about forgiving & releasing guilt. But I don't believe in forgiving when the offender hasn't asked for forgiveness, made amends to you and you and the offender have worked things out. That's restorative justice.

There were some people I knew since I was a little girl that I now haven't spoken with in almost 25 years. Why? Because they expect me to forgive & forget without them saying "I'm sorry" or admitting what they'd done.

I can't be a phony. I was a good actor when I was working but that was work. I never practiced acting as a type of deception. In fact what I felt was that it was either portraying reality or some truth in a way that your audience could understand. Even in comedy I relished taking truth and blowing it up so big you couldn't miss it. Truth and honesty always resonate with an audience. And any "feelings" the characters I portrayed had - were honestly FELT by me while I was on stage.

In my real life I have a very difficult time lying or being deceitful. In real life, I'm really bad at it - so I don't bother. Honesty sometimes gets me in trouble but honesty is what I understand and give.

By the way, I personally count 'Sins of Omission'; i.e. not telling EVERYTHING, leaving things out or selective memory? As lying. There's no gray area when it comes to amends for me.



As we approach Yom Kippur I spend a lot of my mediation time thinking on Forgiveness.

Here's something that puts it better than I could:

by Kathy Krajco:

These are just my thoughts on it. I present them as an alternative to what blows in the prevailing wind on the subject. I present them for those victimized to examine — not to swallow whole as the gospel according to some authority figure. In fact, I don't know whether I am an authority figure or not, but I certainly am no authority. And nobody has any authority over what goes into someone else's head.

How about a parable? Let's say that I steal $10 from you. You come to me and say, "You stole $10 from me. Give it back." I tell you that you're crazy. I deny the offense. What are you going to do about it?

Let's say that your response is to say, "I forgive you."

Now let's get real. What are we to think of you for that?

The first thing people think is, "RED ALERT — probably a false accusation." In other words, we suspect that your "forgiveness" heaps the insult of fraud upon the injury of calumny. Adding insult to injury is an outrage, extreme perversity, the Sin of Sodom.

The other possibility is that you have no power to assert your right to justice and that your so-called forgiveness is but a deceptive way to avoid admitting that. In itself, your powerlessness in the situation is nothing reprehensible, but what does it make of your forgiveness?:

If it is forced forgiveness, it is extortion.
If it is phony forgiveness, it is fraud — under duress, of course, but fraud nonetheless.

Either way, it's not legitimate forgiveness and no more valid than a false confession.

Indeed, doing this adulterates your forgiveness. What an awful thing to do to such a precious thing as forgiveness! If I really have stolen from you, why I should I desire such cheap forgiveness as yours? It certainly isn't worth the pain of coming clean. And, if you are so holy, you should not want to discourage me from doing that. In short, your scot-free forgiveness — especially if it's only to save face — is understandable perhaps, but not honorable. Because it's not genuine.

So, this little story would never happen, because your "forgiveness" is bogus, and everybody knows it. In fact, it marks you as indelibly as Cain's answer to the question Where is thy brother? So, that's the real world in the material sphere of action. Why should it be different in the moral sphere of action?

Note that our ancient philosophy, as expressed in the Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic scriptures, uses the same terminology for moral forgiveness as for the forgiveness of a financial debt. Why? Because they are the same thing in different spheres of action. The parable shows why there is no such thing as the forgiveness of a whole debt. Only some portion of it. In real life, nobody forgives the entire amount of a debt! Some is always repaid before the balance is forgiven. If it weren't, the bank would call the FBI.

That's why you always pay at least $1 for that vehicle your father gave/sold you, don't you? That's the difference between forgiveness and stealing or extortion. That $1 acknowledges the debt/gift. The rest is mercy.

If we turn to the ancient Hebrew, Christian and Islamic writings, we see that the God of Abraham's forgiveness is legitimate, too. He does not forgive the unrepentant. To the contrary, he threatens them with fire and brimstone if they do not repent. Are his devotees not to emulate him?

I think that Catholic theology is the most detailed and precise on this point, though I do not see how secretly revealing my misdeed to a third party amounts to a real confession and how paying that third party whatever he charges releases me from my debt to YOU. Nonetheless, there is much common sense here that is taken for granted by the theologians of all Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

I neither accept nor reject notion that, if you believe in God, I owe him something too, as the father of us both. But that would be a separate transaction in a different offense — the one against him in my theft from YOU. At worst, I am disobeying his rules and causing him some grief in the harm done to YOU. So, I don't see how a just God could be satisfied if YOU ain't.

If I don't have to make amends to YOU, he is just be profiteering on sin that harms only YOU. Only when the debt is material, such as through the theft of money, do the Catholic authorities require restitution. Otherwise they seem to see no harm done to the human victim. I do. That is why I here deal with my debt to YOU and leave my debt to any God for others to argue about.

This theory says that I owe you your $10 plus a penalty for stealing it from you. Let's say that a fair penalty is another $10. So I owe you $20.

Why the penalty? Because I wasn't born yesterday! If there is no penalty, the most I can loose is the $10 I stole. Then the bottom line is that I owe zero. So, I have no reason not to try again tomorrow. Unless I'm a complete idiot, I will keep trying to steal $10 dollars from you till I eventually get away with it. It's kinda like free gambling.


Which is why people who overlook their vehicle registration are so appalled when they get pulled over and see the amount of the ticket they get. The fine must be high enough to deter people from doing that on purpose. Otherwise, they would profit by breaking the law until they (rarely) got caught.

Now, how do I relieve myself of this $20 debt to you? Catholic/Protestant doctrine neatly breaks my obligation down into four distinct acts:

· Confession: I must own/acknowledge what I have done.

· Contrition: I must show remorse for it. Thus I acknowledge that what I did was WRONG.

· Penance: I must acknowledge my obligation to pay you $10 + $10 = $20. That's the amount of the theft plus a penalty for theft. In other words, I must amend the damage and pay a penalty to boot.

· Firm Purpose of Amendment: I must show that I am determined to never steal from you again.

Your reaction? You are overjoyed! You appreciate what I have done by considering my means and showing mercy. You say, "Thank you! Just pay me $15 and we are even."

That's why they call it "reconciliation."

In other words, merciful you forgives a portion of my debt. Which is exactly what the God of Abraham does in "remitting sin." If people are required to be fools who forgive the whole thing, I am idiot if I don't shed crocodile tears before the judge at my sentencing.

Indeed, Christian theology says the Unforgivable Sin is the unrepented sin, the unacknowledged sin.

Yet the winds of political correctness would have us let that slip our minds.

Some [offenders] are masters at cheating on repentance. Even if his other 99 dodges fail, he must be compelled by a serious and credible threat to take even the first step (Confession). Then he acts as though that's all that's required of him and makes you feel mean if you are not satisfied. Thus conned, you forgive him. After further abuse, you are not so easy. Again compelled by a serious and credible threat, he finds it necessary to take the first two steps (Confession and Contrition). Again he acts as though that's all that's required of him and makes you feel mean if you are not satisfied. Thus conned, you forgive him some more. After further abuse, you are not so easy. Yet again compelled by a serious and credible threat, he finds it necessary to take the first two steps plus a fraction of the third. That is, he pays no penalty for devaluing you: he merely takes back a smidgen of that devaluation and makes you feel mean if you are not satisfied.

He may even think you're so stupid that you feel he has made amends by apologizing to you in private for what he said about you in public.

And so on. He never gets to Step Four: A Firm Purpose of Amendment. Oh, he may say he won't do it again, but he offers nothing as a sign of good faith. That is, he gives no guarantee or assurances. You just have to take this pathological liar at his changeable word.

A repeat [offender] is a slippery fish who characterizes your remembering anything he did yesterday as "digging back into the past." He thus makes you the guilty party by answering your grievance with the accusation that you are guilty of "not putting it behind you" and are committing the sin of not forgiving. It's a Catch-22. (Catch-22 is the bottom level of Nether Hell in Dante's Inferno).

I doubt it was the good guys who made up this stupid rule. [If Jews are to remember the Holocaust and the Miracle of Hanukah - why ask them to forget something you did to them last month?]

What's more, the [offender]'s crime is a crime in progress. That's because it is either ongoing abuse or slander and calumny that ruins the rest of a person's life. It is as impossible to forgive a crime in progress as it is to forgive a crime in advance. Purporting to do so amounts to saying that it is no crime = it is okay to be doing this to someone.

Did you ever notice that "Thank you" is the first thing out of a person's mouth when someone who has offended them sincerely repents? There's a reason for that.

In my own experience, forgiveness is something I long to give. In fact, I strongly suspect that those who "find it hard to forgive" have nothing to forgive. In other words: I suspect that they are [offender]s. My greatest grievance against the [offender]s in my life is that they won't let me forgive them.

It's sad, but the way I deal with it is by just writing them off. That is much worse than hate. That is for those unworthy of hate.

But don't expect your [offender] to understand that. His emotions are like the irrational weather. Mother is all good when she's there and all bad when she's not. He gets mad at a cat for hanging around his bird feeder, because he somehow views it as sinning and deserving punishment. He cannot understand that the cat is just being a cat. But we can understand that, and we can understand that a [offender] is just being a [offender]. No need to get mad about it.

This is not to say that abuse does not outrage powerful emotions in us.

However you decide to handle your desire to forgive a [offender], keep this in mind: Your mind is The Garden. Not wide open spaces. A garden is cultivated, surrounded by a fence or wall, and has a gate. You are the gardener and the gatekeeper. If you know what's good for you, you will assume your right/responsibility to decide what enters, exits, and grows there.

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