September 8, 2010

In the past several months I have had some version of the following exchange several times. I tell a friend that I’ve just finished a book on repentance, and he responds that he finds the subject of forgiveness very interesting. It’s psychologically so much healthier to forgive than to hold on to resentments, he says, signaling that he appreciates the importance of the subject.

Daniel Rope knew the apology to his sister would be the hardest one to make. His mother, after all, was his mother — throughout his drug addiction, starting at age 12, Dan’s mother had stood by him, believed he would somehow pull out of it. She was at all his court appearances, she went to Alcoholics Anonymous to figure out the best way to help him, she implicitly forgave him for stealing from her, for keeping her up at night wondering if he was dead or alive, for wrecking a family already devastated by the death of her husband from colon cancer when the children were 6 and 3.

Hazzan Judy Greenfeld has spent much of her life thinking about forgiveness.