Once a divorced friend of mine, about to get married a second time, asked me what the secret was for sustaining a marriage. I said: “Forgiveness.” By that I did not mean to say that everything is forgivable or that one is always required to forgive. Only that without forgiveness no relationship can last.
In our series of monthly columns we have arrived at the next blessing in the Amidah prayer. It is a prayer for forgiveness:
“Forgive us, our Parent, for we have sinned. Pardon us, our Ruler, for we have committed crimes. For You are One Who Pardons and Forgives. You abound in blessings, Eternal One, the Compassionate One, Who forgives more and more.”
The plea for forgiveness is not limited to the High Holy Day season. It is a prayer recited every day, multiple times a day. One might see this as an expression of “Jewish guilt,” calling on us to continually beat ourselves up for sins, real or imagined, never letting up, never going forward. But I think that such a view would be profoundly wrongheaded.
This prayer does not condemn our sinful natures. It seeks to do the opposite from harping on our guilt. It seeks to put before us a generous landscape of forgiveness, in which forgiveness – whether as something asked for or as something granted – is found in abundance.
This is an important and difficult image to grasp because it flies in the face of our current situation in so many ways. All around us we are witnesses to intensified polarization in ever expanding arenas of our life. Those who do what we deem to be wrong are deemed guilty of unforgivable evil. Those who hold viewpoints that oppose our own are guilty of unforgivable hubris, or hatred, or stupidity, or selfishness, or …
I have written about this before (- see my column in the March 2016 issue of Kol Emunah). Because of our legitimate fears, we are at risk of succumbing to a hardening of our spirit. If every argument and every struggle is a zero-sum game, a matter of life or death, then how can we imagine losing the argument or the struggle? But, in the real world, we almost never attain pure and complete victory for our side. That would seem to make failure guaranteed. But if we fail, how can we avoid a sense of total failure? So, paradoxically, we prefer to feel wronged and put upon, attacked and victimized, because we gain thereby a sense of self-assurance. We draw strength from our resentment and outrage, for it is better to feel such blood-boiling emotions that to feel depressed, defeated and hopeless. In a world where issues are absolute, recognition of any merit to the opposing side is impossible. And any compromise with the other side is an unthinkable betrayal. In the broken world in which we live we would rather be right than effective. And we would rather nurse our wounded sense of resentment than be effective.
In such a world of absolutes we are all guilty of intransigence of spirit. We are all in need of a change of heart and mind – offered by this blessing – so that we may attempt to believe in the constant need for forgiveness and its potential fulfillment.
God is described in this blessing in a special way. God is not only called Compassionate and Forgiving. The blessing goes further in calling God “the One Who forgives more and more – ha-marbeh lislo`ah.” This word – “ha-marbeh” – is also found in the traditional haggadah text that some of us recited at our seder. There the sentence is – “Whoever tells the story of the Exodus more and more (kol ha-marbeh l’sapper) is praiseworthy.” The haggadah tells us that we can increase our telling. But this is not simply a quantitative matter. The haggadah seeks to encourage us to increase our involvement in the story-telling of the seder. It urges us to find new ways to engage in our story-telling. We can do more than we originally thought, more than what is already set down for us to tell, more than we told last year. We can exceed ourselves.
And so we picture God in this blessing . God overflows God’s own forgiving Self. Given how we are doing in this world, it is a good thing that this is so. But, the point of such imagery is always to call us back to our own selves, as well. If we are created in the Divine Image, then we, too, can exceed ourselves in acknowledging our need to seek forgiveness, in finding the right ways to forgive and in imbuing our approach to our world with increasing forgiveness. Then we would be right – and effective.
Image(s): You, hold my hand, by my side © Cher Vernal used with permission via Creative Commons License
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