Dear Friends,
Recently I received a call from an old friend. After filling in the decades-long blanks about our careers and our families, he took a deep breath before telling me that he was calling to apologize. “I didn’t realize that what I said to you when we last spoke would cause a rift that would last almost thirty years. I haven’t been able to forgive myself since then, and I’ve missed you, so I thought I’d call to ask you to forgive me.” The catch in his voice spoke both of sincerity and regret, which was made all the more profound since I had no memory of the grave injustice that he thought he had inflicted on me. Our relationship was cemented at a common critical juncture of our lives. Admittedly, I am not good at sustaining friendships. I’ve never much liked talking on the phone; I’m much better over a meal or strolling through a park. For me, a change of location or of circumstance often results in a loss of a relationship. I hadn’t spoken to him because I had successfully lived past the life situation we had shared and had gone on to new challenges. He had moved far away – all the way to Westchester County, I think. So while he hadn’t spoken to me because of what he thought to have been a deep wounding, I had stopped speaking to him simply out of neglect.
But what to do about my friend’s regret and his wanting to make amends? Not to accept his apology because I no longer had any memory might cause greater pain for my long-lost friend. And, perhaps, what he had said was wounding. Because of impaired hearing, I don’t always catch what people are saying to me especially on the phone. And then there’s my misunderstanding rude comments for clever sarcasm, something at which I am quite adept. In addition to all this, I am not an injustice keeper, in part because of poor memory. Then there was my sin, my carelessness in having let the relationship go. Did I not owe him an apology?
Fed by curiosity, it didn’t take long for annoyance to ambush me. What could he have said that was so grievous? Why did he let the heavy load roll around in his emotional knapsack for so long? And why was he calling now after so many years? There had been twenty-six Yom Kippurs [sic.] since the time of his imagined wounding. Maybe there was an element of malice in his reaching out to me. Perhaps realizing that his response was to something that I had said or done, he might have thought the time had come for me to carry the pain he had suffered for a while. Or just maybe his self-examination in anticipation of the Jewish season of coming-to-terms shook loose the stone of all-but-forgotten remorse?
I defaulted to my approach to visiting people with dementia in addressing his request. I crossed over to his side of the looking glass. “I am so sorry that you have been plagued by regret on account of me. Please believe that however you feel you have wronged me I have erased even from my memory of it. I forgive you.” We ended the conversation promising one another to keep in touch.
I waited just long enough for my two-cup pot of coffee to brew before calling my friend back. “I am calling to ask for your forgiveness,” I told him. “I sacrificed our friendship allowing a quarter-of-a-century pass between calls, and, as a consequence, I caused you to suffer. I am so sorry.”
In her poem “How Divine is Forgiving?” Marge Piercy lists several reasons for why we forgive none of which would be in the category of being ‘divine.’.\ We forgive “when we don’t really care” We forgive because “memory has rotted through.” We forgive when the wrongdoer has suffered, or because “anger hurts” those we love. And we forgive because we, too, are imperfect, and because “anger is a fire that must be fed and we are too tired to rise and haul a log” to feed that fire.
Our tradition speaks little about why we forgive, but command that we forgive ‘Tis the season. We have until Yom Kippur to do what we must do to cleanse ourselves by doing what we can to let others go free.
I hope each of your journey forth go forgiveness. Wishing you courage and strength,
Rabbi Lee
