When Forgiveness Is Impossible

By RABBI MORDECAI FINLEY

I get the same question every year, and I give the same answer every year. I get better at the answer every year because I believe in my answer more every year.

“Evil people exist.” This is the beginning of my answer when congregants ask about forgiveness. I talk about forgiveness, and I try to talk with precision. Some people hear another speaker address the topic and "remember" my saying that they should forgive in order to let go of anger and resentment. But I never say that. I do say that one reason we should forgive is to rid ourselves of toxic and intoxicating feelings and emotions that come with carrying a grudge. Anger and resentment make us feel high, with the attendant sense of righteous indignation (as though there were any other variety of indignation), and then anger and resentment become character habits. Our inner lives can become stooped and brittle, our moral marrow desiccated by the price we pay for cultivated rage.

So when a person apologizes, even if only symbolically, when the offense is not life deforming, when it involves keeping something of value intact—a family, a community—we should try to find our way to some level of forgiveness. Solomon Schimmel teaches, in his Wounds not Healed by Time, that forgiveness ranges from simply giving up the desire for revenge, to willingness for minimal social contact, to willingness for a cordial social relationship, to willingness for a close social relationship, all the way to true forgiveness: authentic reconciliation and the reestablishment of intimacy.

All are levels of forgiveness, and we should only do what is psychologically and morally authentic and healthful.

And then I get the question and hear the story. A person is stuck in a job because she needs the money, the health benefits, can’t get out for one reason or another. Or stuck in a family. Or stuck in a marriage. Or there is a person in authority who delights in causing our interrogator misery.

Sometimes there is a case of professional malfeasance, a harm discovered only years later. And this person causes life-deforming harm and is unrepentant. And I'm asked (the voice asks but the eyes scream): How am I supposed to forgive? How can I rid myself of this rage?

I start by saying: “Evil people exist.” In her book, The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Dr. Martha Stout tells us that one in 25 people suffer from a variously termed disorder which means bottom line—they don’t have a conscience. They can’t feel remorse. I would add to that figure those who might have a simulacrum of moral sentience, but choose not to act on it. They mute the voice of conscience. I think about one in five people will do what it takes to get what they want, if they can get away with it. And sometimes what they want is to cause misery, pain, loss, humiliation to someone for whom they have it in. They mostly live morally untransgressive lives, until you touch the node that awakens the beast.

They don’t deserve forgiveness for the damage they cause. They don’t repent. They don’t repair. And then, as we come to this holy time in the Jewish calendar, those of us whose lives have been scarred by the four percent, or the wider penumbra of moral pathology, feel stuck.

So after I say that there are evil people out there, I add this:

Life comes at a risk that we will be hurt by others. Lives that can be so filled with meaning and beauty and joy and truth and love and righteousness can be pummeled by the dissolute behavior of an evil person or a person gripped, even if only for a short time, by an irresistible evil urge.

So if you think you have an exemption from having your life clawed at by these people, tell me where you got it because I know a few flayed people who definitely need a break, and you should transfer your exemption to them.

So how do we let go of the anger and resentment for what these people do? First, we have to grieve. Grieve that something good, something important to us—our money, our good name, our health, a relationship, a job, a future—was taken unjustifiably, and that we are not likely to get justice. We grieve in the deepest meaning of grief: letting go of our attachment to something good because it is gone. This is difficult and it takes a while, but hopefully not longer than one lifetime.

The grieving never stops, but we move on into wisdom. This is the way of the world, we say (the Kabbalah tells us why this is the way of the world, but more on that another time). We Jews know this very well. Savages arise and destroy. Small-time savages, too. It is the way of world. We have to become sad and philosophic. This takes time, too, and this work never ends.

And then we become compassionate. Compassionate for the four out of five who have some sense of moral restraint, who won’t do whatever it takes to get their way. We listen to each other’s stories and we try to be present and help each other heal. We forgive each other and we apologize. We don’t let the occasional schmutz that arises get in the way of the potential for love and grace and moments of joy.

And with this compassion we become vigilant. When we see the four percent operating, we make sure not to stand idly by. When we see the 20 percent unable to restrain themselves, we throw a stumbling block at their moral blindness.

The High Holidays celebrate, among other things, the Sovereignty of the Divine, the sovereignty of the world of values over the morally blind will of the ego. There are evil people out there, and others who are not evil but who can’t restrain themselves, and they would strip mine the Garden of Eden if they had the chance. The rest of us need to learn how to heal, and how to heal each other, from their depredations. And we have to learn how to protect ourselves and each other.

And in our moments when we can safely huddle around the fire—the fire of the camp in the middle of the night or the fire of Torah shedding a light from a world beyond and deep within—we can taste something of beauty in this wisdom and this struggle.