Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5767

Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman
Congregation Shaarei Shamayim
September 23, 2006

In April 1995, a 23-year-old woman by the name of Julie Marie Welch was killed in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. "Three days after the bombing," writes her father, Bud Welch,

"as I watched Tim McVeigh being led out of the courthouse, I hoped someone in a high building with a rifle would shoot him dead. I wanted him to fry. In fact, I'd have killed him myself if I'd had the chance.

"Unable to deal with the pain of Julie's death, I started self-medicating with alcohol until eventually the hangovers were lasting all day. Then, on a cold day in January 1996, I came to the bomb site – as I did every day – and I looked across the wasteland where the Murrah Building once stood. My head was splitting from drinking the night before and I thought, 'I have to do something different, because what I'm doing isn't working.'

"For the next few weeks I started to reconcile things in my mind, and finally concluded that it was revenge and hate that had killed Julie and the 167 others. Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols had been against the US government for what happened in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and seeing what they'd done with their vengeance, I knew I had to send mine in a different direction. Shortly afterwards I started speaking out against the death penalty.

"I also remembered that shortly after the bombing I'd seen a news report on Tim McVeigh's father, Bill. He was shown stooping over a flowerbed, and when he stood up I could see that he'd been physically bent over in pain. I recognized it because I was feeling that pain, too.

"In December 1998, after Tim McVeigh had been sentenced to death, I had a chance to meet Bill McVeigh at his home near Buffalo. I wanted to show him that I did not blame him. His youngest daughter also wanted to meet me, and after Bill had showed me his garden, the three of us sat around the kitchen table. Up on the wall were family snapshots, including Tim's graduation picture. They noticed that I kept looking up at it, so I felt compelled to say something. 'God, what a good looking kid,' I said.

"Earlier, when we'd been in the garden, Bill had asked me, 'Bud, are you able to cry?' I'd told him, 'I don't usually have a problem crying.' His reply was, 'I can't cry, even though I've got a lot to cry about.' But now, sitting at the kitchen table looking at Tim's photo, a big tear rolled down his face. It was the love of a father for a son.

"When I got ready to leave I shook Bill's hand, then extended it to Jennifer, but she just grabbed me and threw her arms around me. She was the same sort of age as Julie but felt so much taller. I don't know which one of us started crying first. Then I held her face in my hands and said, 'Look, honey, the three of us are in this for the rest of our lives. I don't want your brother to die and I'll do everything I can to prevent it.' As I walked away from the house I realized that until that moment I had walked alone, but now a tremendous weight had lifted from my shoulders. I had found someone who was a bigger victim of the Oklahoma bombing than I was, because while I can speak in front of thousands of people and say wonderful things about Julie, if Bill McVeigh meets a stranger he probably doesn't even say he had a son.

"About a year before the execution I found it in my heart to forgive Tim McVeigh. It was a release for me rather than for him…"
(www.theforgivenessproject.com)

I have a great deal of admiration for Welch, and I find his work extremely compelling. He provides a striking example of someone who is able, in the midst of anger, grief, and despair, to open his heart to forgiveness. He does not deny the pain that Julie's loss created for him. But he is able to find the strength to reach out beyond himself in order to create relationships and foster connections with other people instead of isolating himself in bitterness.

If I had the opportunity, though, I would like to ask Welch what it means to him to forgive Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh never sought forgiveness from all of the people devastated by the massive destruction he caused. He never even expressed remorse for the horrendous crime he committed. Indeed, he was defiant until the very end. It is one thing for Welch to speak out against the death penalty. Before the bombing his daughter had been outraged by the numerous executions in neighboring Texas, and Welch himself came to understand that the execution of McVeigh would never bring Julie back, nor would it give him the solace he yearned for. But there is a difference between speaking out against the death penalty and even reaching out to other bereaved families including McVeigh's father and sister, and forgiving the person who murdered his daughter.

His story makes me wonder whether forgiveness is appropriate under all circumstances. And if it is, what does it mean to forgive someone who in fact is not sorry? And if it is not, where does that leave us? Are there alternative paths to drowning in our despair, lashing out at those around us, or choosing the path of revenge?

Hopefully, most of us have not been confronted with whether to forgive a person who murdered our child. But all of us have been wronged by others in some way, and we have had to make decisions about whether to forgive, how to forgive, and how to move past the hurt.

Jewish tradition teaches that when a person wrongs us, it is that person's responsibility to ask us for forgiveness. Furthermore, she has to make amends as best as she can and make a commitment to change her behavior in the future. If this does not happen, we are under no obligation to forgive.

If a person does follow this process of seeking forgiveness, according to Jewish law we are indeed obligated to forgive. As the twelfth century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides explains,

…When asked by an offender for forgiveness, one should forgive with a sincere mind and a willing spirit. Even if one had been much vexed and grievously wronged, he is neither to avenge nor bear a grudge. (Mishneh Torah: Laws of Repentance, 2:10)

So important is forgiveness that there is a specific procedure to follow if someone refuses to forgive. Maimonides writes:

If the person against whom one had sinned did not want to forgive, then one has to ask him for forgiveness in front of three of his friends. If he still didn't want to forgive, one then asks him in front of six, and then in front of nine, of his friends, and if he still didn't want to forgive him one leaves him and goes away. Anybody who does not want to forgive is a sinner…
(Mishneh Torah: Laws of Repentance 2:9)

Perhaps this somewhat elaborate process for asking for forgiveness exists because forgiving another person is so difficult. When one person harms another a sacred trust has been broken, and it is not easy to move on. Holding on to the past can be less challenging than facing the present or looking towards the future. Harboring grievances can make us feel that we are more righteous than the one who hurt us. It is easier to demonize the other, to see that person as morally inferior, or even evil. Yet this is the path of bitterness and isolation. To hold on to the injustice done to us so tightly that it paralyzes us hardens our hearts and drives us away from the very people we love.

In the Hebrew Bible, when one person forgives another, the prevalent word used is nasa, meaning "to bear" or "to carry." The one who forgives shares the burden of the wrongdoing. But it need not be a heavy burden with the weightiness of sin. Perhaps sharing the burden can simply connote relationship, a connection forged between ourselves and the one who hurt us. Forgiveness changes our relationship with the person who hurt us; the person is no longer a demon but a human being who committed a grave error. Regardless of whether forgiveness can lead to a deepening of the relationship, it does unlock us from the bonds of victimhood. The one who committed the wrongdoing no longer holds as much power over us.

Are there ever times when a person sincerely apologizes for a past action and forgiveness is still not possible? Simon Wiesenthal explores this in his classic work, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. As a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, he was summoned to the deathbed of a young man named Karl, who was a member of the SS. Karl was haunted by the crimes he had committed, and he wanted both to confess and to obtain absolution from a Jew. Wiesenthal listened to the confession, which did feel sincere, and struggled with what to do. He ultimately responded with silence—he neither condemned the man nor forgave him—and quietly walked out of the room. But for years afterwards he wondered whether he had done the right thing. In The Sunflower he asks fifty-three intellectuals from diverse backgrounds what they would have done if they had been in his place.

One of the themes that many of the Jewish writers expressed is that it is impossible to forgive by proxy. If a person wrongs you, you can decide whether to forgive that person. But if a person wrongs someone else – Karl, for example, had participated in a massacre of Jews who were now dead – a third party cannot forgive you. As Wiesenthal writes, "the dead have not authorized you to grant that person forgiveness on their behalf." (The Sunflower)

It seems plausible that forgiveness would not be appropriate, but I feel uncomfortable with Wiesenthal's silence. By no means do I wish to judge Wiesenthal, nor predict how I would have acted in his position, but in a theoretical sense, I would like to say that I would have responded differently. In this situation, forgiveness does not make a great deal of sense to me, because forgiveness connotes a relationship, and the victims of the massacre are dead. But nevertheless, if I were to stand before a dying man who is repentant, who wanted to confess to me, a Jew, in his last hours, I would like to think that I would have responded with compassion. I would like to think that I would sit down next to the man, listen to his confession, and explain that I could not forgive him but that I would sit with him in his suffering. Forgiveness might not always be possible, but if the person is sincerely repentant, I have to believe that compassion is.

A question raised in The Sunflower, as well as in other challenging cases, is whether forgiveness is possible when justice is not served. This issue arose in the post-apartheid era of South Africa under the auspices of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach tells the story of having participated in a live forum on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. According to the Commission's rules, it would grant amnesty to people who had committed crimes under the apartheid regime if they confessed and provided detailed information about their crimes. Boteach writes about listening to a white police officer confess to the crime of ordering two houses in a black township to be set on fire, which killed seven adults and five children. The police officer expressed remorse and was granted complete amnesty. Moved by his testimony, audience members began to weep and gave the officer a standing ovation. Aghast at what was happening, Boteach called out, "I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. You can't sadistically murder 12 innocent people by burning them alive and just say 'I'm sorry!'" (Moment magazine, "A Time to Hate," October 2000)

I agree that forgiveness is dependent on some sense of justice. That does not mean taking revenge or imposing harsh and destructive punishments like the death penalty. But it does mean creating a system whereby the perpetrators are forced to take real responsibility for their actions. Simply confessing does not seem to be enough. As one study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found, the sentiment of many victims was "No Reconciliation without Reparation." There was a sense that without justice, reconciliation was false and the process favored the perpetrators over the victims. ("Survivors' Perceptions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Suggestions for the Final Report" compiled by The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation & the Khulumani Support Group)

I find Boteach's argument compelling, but much of his writing is shrouded in a hatefulness that I find not only problematic but detrimental to the person who has been harmed. In an article entitled "Moral People Must Learn How to Hate" he writes,

How many times have we heard that the problem with the world today is that there isn't enough love, when precisely the opposite is true? Evil currently stalks the earth because there isn't enough hate. Moral people, afraid of being poisoned by hate, are becoming indifferent to evil.

While forgiveness may not always be possible or appropriate, and justice must be a central component of forgiveness, our answer cannot be to turn to hate, no matter how egregious the crime. We must stand up to evil, but allowing hatred to boil up within us is exactly the wrong path, both as individuals and as a community. With the case of Karl, the Nazi, we can set limits on whether to forgive, and in the case of reconciliation in South Africa we can argue that justice must be served. But in both cases we must stretch ourselves to let go of the bitterness that corrodes our souls. Perhaps we can reach a place of compassion or understanding, but at the very least we must find a way to move past the destructive animosity that can paralyze us.

Hans Habe, a Jewish Austrian author and journalist who wrote an essay in The Sunflower writes:

One of the worst crimes of the Nazist regime was that it made it so hard for us to forgive. It led us into the labyrinth of our souls. We must find a way out of the labyrinth—not for the murders' sake, but for our own. Neither love alone expressed in forgiveness, nor justice alone, exacting punishment, will lead us out of the maze…Exercised with love and justice, atonement and forgiveness serve the same end: life without hatred. That is our goal: I see no other. (The Sunflower, p. 124)

Our task, in Habe's words, is to "find a way out of the labyrinth." We must figure out how to live a life without hatred, a life with compassion. We can accept that we have been deeply hurt but refuse to give that pain a prominent place in our lives. We can loosen our grip from painful memories, not forgetting them, but redirecting our attention to the present and the future. We must find a way to let go of the hatred, anger, shame, guilt, and desire for revenge and instead choose a path of wholeness and peace. On this Rosh Hashanah, let us open our hearts to the possibilities of forgiveness, to the possibilities of reconciliation, and to the possibilities of compassion.

L'shanah tovah.