Most of us are aware of the radical teachings of Jesus regarding response to harm and injury caused by another.
"Turn the other cheek also… give your cloak as well." (Mt 5:39-40)
"Forgive us our debts — as we also have forgiven our debtors…for if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." (Mt 6:12-14)
"[Forgive], not seven times, but I tell you, seventy times seven times." (Mt 18:22)
Are these instructions clear? Is their meaning obvious?
I think perhaps they are not, at least not to us in our culture. Because we, in our culture, are not very clear about what we mean by the word "forgive." And because we are not very clear about what we mean by "forgive," these instructions lay a heavy weight on people who have been harmed, are aware that there is something that Jesus calls us to do, something by the name of "forgive." The person who wants to follow Jesus' injunction to forgive may have many questions that leave them uneasy. When you don't know what forgiveness means, exactly, how do you know when you have forgiven?
- The thing about seventy times seven seems to imply a sort of limitless forgiveness—but is it limitless in the sense of a mass formless quantity of which you can never have too much? Or is it limitless in the sense of an unlimited number of discrete, completed forgivenesses?
- Is forgiveness something that mostly happens inside the person harmed? Or is forgiveness something that is not real until it has been experienced by the perpetrator?
- Who is the forgiveness for? Is it for the perpetrator's good, to bring them peace and encourage them to change for the better? Or is it for the perpetrator's just punishment, to "heap burning coals on their head" (Prov 25:22) by offering them an undeserved kindness? Or is it primarily for the harmed person, to help them move forward and away?
- When must forgiveness be offered? Does it matter if the perpetrator has admitted the wrong and tried to repair it? Does it matter if the wrong is actually irreparable? Does it matter if the perpetrator is unable to understand that he has injured someone, or unable to take any steps toward repentance, sorrow, or change?
- What if the perpetrator doesn't accept our extended forgiveness as good enough? What if he accuses us of holding a grudge and refusing to forgive, because we do not indulge him in his own idea of forgiveness? Is he correct? Have we failed to forgive?
- We all understand, I hope, that forgiveness is rarely instantaneous: is there a time limit? If we can't manage to attain it in our lifetimes, will our own trespasses remain unforgiven?
There is a desperate need for clearer thinking, if we are ever going to answer these questions. That goes for theoretical, general questions, and for the specific wounds in our own lives.
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I recently read a book that seeks to clarify the thinking around these issues: On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (Beacon Press, 2022) by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. Rabbi Ruttenberg calls on a framework of repentance that originates in the law regarding Yom Kippur, and that was further codified by Torah scholar Maimonides (1138-1204). With this she lays out for us what the Jewish tradition, at least, asks of human beings as they move forward after one has injured the other.
Along the way, Rabbi Ruttenberg points out how the vagueness of our understanding of "forgiveness" has allowed people to weaponize it against victims, demanding their silence and their peace in the face of injustice, minimizing the harm, even demanding that they put themselves back within reach of real harm. This tactic works particularly insidiously against many sincere Christians, who know they are supposed to forgive but don't understand how to make that forgiveness co-exist with, to put it bluntly, boundaries. She carefully separates and untangles forgiveness from the things that it is not, things that should be considered separately. Grounded in the Jewish tradition, she offers a way of understanding a process of forgiveness. She does not go so far as to affirm a positive responsibility to forgive in all cases—but I think her approach is wholly compatible with a Christian understanding of Jesus's radical call to mercy, and her careful treatment of the subject and distinguishing of different parts of the process can only help inform us as we try to live up to it.
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I will begin with the confession that I'm writing this a little too hastily for it to count as a complete book review. I bought the book because I needed some specific advice about repentance and forgiveness in networks of interpersonal relationships, and I pored deeply over the chapters that directly addressed these while skimming over the chapters on institutions, nations, and justice systems. (I'm very interested in those topics too, so I'm going to dig into those soon!) The point here is, this book helped me immensely in clarifying my thinking, and I now feel equipped to figure out a way forward where before I was wallowing in confusion.
Let me see if I can explain where the clarity comes from. It mostly has to do with untangling concepts that have become, at least in my mind, enmeshed with each other.
(By the way, speaking of clarity, I'm going to use the term "perpetrator" to mean someone who has done a specific harm to a specific person, and "victim" to denote that person, just to make the identities of whom I'm talking about very clear. The choice of those terms is not a statement of the permanent status or identity of either.)
First off, Rabbi Ruttenberg separates the concepts of "the perpetrator's repentance" and "the victim's forgiveness." The work that the perpetrator must do is not dependent on the victim's ability or willingness to extend forgiveness. The victim's decision to forgive or not forgive may take place whether the perpetrator ever repents or not. The two processes can inform one another but they are not the same process and they do not require the perpetrator and the victim to have contact or an exchange of any sort of information or messages with one another.
That divides our discussion into two bundles of concepts: one about the perpetrator's work, and one about the victim's process. In a subsequent post, I'll write about how Rabbi Ruttenberg has clarified my thinking about the victim's part. For the remainder of this post, I'll take up the perpetrator's bundle.
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Ruttenberg explains that Maimonides set forth a five-step task list for the perpetrator who desires to become a penitent. The five steps help us to separate and distinguish parts of the work. They may remind you, as they did me, of the steps taught to Catholic children leading up to the sacrament of confession.
Step one: Naming and owning harm; comprehending it, facing it, confessing it in an appropriate venue, whether private or public.
Step two: Starting to change. Says Ruttenberg,
Translated to our own time, the work of transformation might include tearful grappling with one's behavior in prayer, meditation, and/or some other practice; making financial sacrifices that have meaningful impact both on one's own wallet and the world; changing one's self-conception and self-identity in appropriate ways; putting oneself in new situations both to consciously avoid the opportunity to cause harm and perhaps to experience what it's like to not have control or power—someplace where one might get some practice in the virtue of humility.
These days the process of change might also involve therapy, or rehab, or educating oneself…a concrete action plan….grappling with the root causes of the harm. Some of these things may be necessary even before the confession stage, some may be appropriate at this point in the process, and in many cases the answer might be both.
Step three: Restitution and accepting consequences. "Repair work isn't really repair," says Ruttenberg, "if the only thing that's changed is the perpetrator."
Step four: Apology. Notice how late in the process this step is! "I think he was trying to tell us," says Ruttenberg about Maimonides, "that apologies, and even amends and reparations, don't truly have the needed effect if the work to become different isn't already underway." Maimonides says, she tells us, that the perpetrator has an obligation to "'pacify [the person harmed] and to beg their forgiveness. Even if they only offended their fellow verbally, they must appease and implore until [the harmed party] forgives them.'" And she notes that "the focus is the mental and emotional state of the victim, not the boxes that a perpetrator needs to check in order to be let off the hook."
Step five: Making different choices.
The critical fifth and last stage of this process is that the perpetrator must, when faced with the opportunity to cause similar harm in the future, make a better choice. This can happen only if they've done the deep work of understanding why the harm happened, stayed out of situations that would make the harm easy to perpetrate again, and reoriented themselves and their life….[T]he choice will happen naturally because the person making it is a changed person in the ways that matter.
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So what we see here is that the following threads, actions, can all be successively separated from one another and deemed individually necessary parts of repentance:
- owning up to the harm one has caused
- forming a firm purpose of amendment
- repaying the debt, literally (restitution) or figuratively (accepting punishment)
- making a sincere apology to the victim and possibly also to other affected parties or the public
- transformation of the self into a person who does not do that harm anymore
Besides these, there is another. Rabbi Ruttenberg reserved for the very last chapter in the book a sixth distinct concept, atonement, which she says is more about the perpetrator's relationship with God. But, she says, it's "the last step, after everything else is complete":
[A]tonement works only if you've done the necessary work of owning harm and undergoing transformation—repentance. And if that harm has an interpersonal dimension, atonement is entirely impossible without repair, amends, and in most cases, apology.
Catholic readers may note that for us penitents, absolution at least (our personal wiping-clean of the slate, since the atonement in our tradition has been accomplished by Another) is available on the making of a good confession, and doesn't necessarily depend on us already having completed the transformation, repaid anyone, or apologized. However, it's not unreasonable to argue that in order to make a good confession, one must be wholly ready to do these things insofar as we can. If we are not ready to apologize, make restitution, or reform ourselves, do we really have the firm purpose of amendment that the "good confession" requires? And indeed the priest is empowered to withhold absolution, or to call upon us to make restitution as part of our penance. Part of examining our conscience is to discern whether we indeed have the will to do better.
Should we stay away until we are sure we can do all those things? I think it's better to approach the sacrament even with imperfect contrition, and the fear of having to do all that necessary work. The sacrament is there to give us grace and to strengthen us to do better, and we can come back again and again as needed. I think that for Catholics, bringing the harm to confession happens first somewhere in the first two steps, and can be repeated as we gather strength to move through steps three, four, and five.
More on the other side of the coin—forgiveness and its allied concepts—in the next post.
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