It is hard to forgive, but it is good for the soul

Forgiveness is practised and encouraged in most faiths but I have always found it curious that Jews save it up for a special day each year almost as though we like to carry around a years’ worth of stored guilt and anger.

Yom Kippur is a time where even the most secular are likely to fast, reflect and repent for our sins. Most attend synagogue, in part, I’ve always felt, to ask God for forgiveness for not coming any other time of the year. In the run-up to the day itself, we ask friends and family to forgive us if we have offended them.

“We are supposed to practise forgiveness all the time,” a rabbi told me when I asked him why we save it all up for one big therapy session.

“It’s just that at this time of the year, the gates are open, which means it’s easier to do. God, and we hope others, are more forgiving than at other times,” he explained.

To be able to forgive, I have learned, deepens relationships and strengthens friendships but it also allows you to close chapters and accept things or people that are not for you without harbouring resentment or clinging on to pain.

It is easy to underestimate how hard forgiveness can be when you are feeling disappointed, angry or betrayed. It is these feelings that push us further away from each other or cause us to put up metaphorical walls that protect us from further hurt.

Yet, equally, the following quote, from Irish-American writer Malachy McCourt has always made sense: “Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

This motivates me to think of forgiveness as less about the person I give it to and more about how I treat myself.

I also hope that, when I make mistakes that people forgive me for, they trust that I mean it when I say I am sorry, or that I feel genuine regret if something I have done or said has caused someone else unnecessary pain.

I find it much easier to accept that people make mistakes than I do to hold a grudge, although it is true that — like an elephant —I never forget. Forgiving I can embrace, but forgetting has always seemed counter-intuitive. I need to remember what has happened,  so that negative experiences are not repeated. Forgiveness does not mean giving someone a free pass to offend again.

As another rabbi suggested, we cannot expect to go through life with no one doing us wrong in the same way we cannot expect that we will go through life never wronging someone else.

Of course we can strive not to and the majority of us do well but we are only human. And it is at this time of year that I’m reminded more than ever how little our society, as it is today, accepts this.

This year has been particularly trying for the Jewish community. We’ve been wronged many times by different people. While the rise in antisemitism in public and political life has brought us together as a community it has also pulled some of us apart and forgiveness feels hard.

At a time when our society seems more fractured than it has ever been and politics is more divisive than ever, I can’t help but feel as though forgiveness could help repair the toxicity that has taken hold.

Perhaps the reason that so many of us go to synagogue this week more than we do on any other time is that, in the comfort of being together, we don’t feel so vulnerable in asking for forgiveness or letting go.

And even when Yom Kippur is over, we should still hold the possibility of forgiving, if not forgetting, in our minds.