I’ve done my share of forgiving and even more so have been forgiven but I haven’t thought much about forgiveness as such. To the extent that I have, I’ve thought that for the significant wrongs done to us, there is never really any “closure,” even after we give forgiveness. They linger in our subconscious and aren’t really that difficult to trigger.
In principle, I’ve thought, forgiveness roughly follows the model of a contract. For a contract, A makes an offer and B accepts it. Performance is vouched by legally enforceable rights; breaches are grounds for suit. In forgiveness, A apologizes and B accepts it. Performance is vouched by the mutual assumption of relationship normalcy. Breaches are grounds for righteous recrimination.
I have my doubts about public forgivenesses or people making public pronouncements seemingly aimed at expiation. “My doubts,” nah, no doubts: it’s generally unredeemed horseshit. Public apologies, public acts of contrition are too tainted in their nature with calculation and insincerity to be genuine and anything other than symbolic gestures that are usually tendentiously fatuous, and then if not that, nothing more than symbolic, which I grudgingly suppose can have some ritual efficacy.
Forgiveness, even if never absolutely redemptive, is meaningful in close relationships whether in friendship or in love. I’d think this is where forgiveness operates best. We, imperfect, sinners, with darkness and evil in us, half angel, half beast, are prone always to hurt whom we love and like very much. So, in this realm, apology and forgiveness can be profoundly efficacious.
Clear self knowledge here is facilitative: we may be able to discern what in us holds us back from apologizing when we should and why we don’t forgive when we should. It’s at these points that the Rabbi’s psychological analysis and insights are illuminating. But if good faith in the apologizing and in the forgiving is assumed, then much of what he says gets swept away.
An old friend once wisely said, “The emotions have a mind of their own.” I’ve found this to be true my whole life. You wake up one morning and what has been eating away at you for days or weeks is gone, your hurt over a break up is gone, and, to the point here, you’re ready to apologize or to forgive.
I get your point to a point about no such thing as forgiveness. It’s my point too about there being, not ever, no perfect wiping the slate clean. That’s—a 100% cleansed slate—a piety. But within that, and here I depart a little from you, and as noted, apology and forgiveness can be real, can be a real thing. The imperfect need not be an enemy of the good for it to be so.
Of course I agree that we oughtn’t bow to some notion of forgiveness as an imperative. Simply, some things are unforgivable. I think of that church shooting—I think in Atlanta, maybe some other town, I think it was in a black church—killing many attendees and in the aftermath the members of the church sought to forgive the killer. That seeking was a reflex of their religious belief and I thought it, and I think all like forgivenesses of such egregious wrongs, to be inhuman, and impossible, at least for me, to take seriously. Another example was a white woman, I forget in which state, Texas?, walking into the wrong apartment and shooting its black male inhabitant. At the trial—the result of which I can’t recall, I think it was guilty—the victim’s brother forgave her. If I recall rightly, they embraced. But that was another one that confounded me.
Refusing to forgive in the right circumstances can be positive, emotionally healthy, righteous and life affirming.
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