The Work of Forgiveness
Tonight, Jewish folks will mark a Day of Atonement.
A central theme of Connected Capitalism is thinking strategically about the spiritual work of forgiveness. Within the ancient Jewish spiritual tradition, there are a number of explorations of the topic, along with related discussions around atonement, absolution, and forgiveness granted from God.
Selicha, freeing the party who has wronged us from an emotional obligation operates at the intersection of meaning and connection. Mechila, wiping the slate clean, is situated at the intersection of connection and wonder. Here, the spiritual work is putting the relationship back to the level it was at before the offending incident. It involves empathy, rooted not in a selfish desire to make ourselves feel better by releasing our anger, but born of work and reaching the conclusion that human frailty is forgivable. This is the forgiveness of renewal.
As I discussed with my friend Rabbi Tzvi Freeman in Fifteen Paths, the very notions of repentance and forgiveness are wild social innovations. Every society constructs for itself a script of how to be “good.” In religious societies, this script is viewed as a revelation — we follow the script and we’re good.
But one of the truly radical ideas that we find in ancient Judaism is that humanity following the script gets kind of boring to God. The Torah is full of stories of the major characters messing up. And when they mess up, God says, “Well, it’s not in the script. So I guess you’re going to have to write your own script. You wrote yourself out of the script, write yourself back into the script.”
The penitent has to do that. And when they do, God says, “It’s amazing! Deep down inside my vision, that’s what was really there. And I didn’t even know it.”
Can we forgive those who have exploited their economic power? Might we consider a new transformative cooperative relationship with them? Can we forgive those at our own company who made unethical decisions and tarnished all of us who work there? Can we forgive those on the other side of our political divide, those who we believe supported immoral political positions in order to enter a deep and trusting relationship with them? Can we forgive those who once subscribed to or benefited from discriminatory practices?
In our highly polarized times, where civil discussions between people who disagree with each other is a near impossibility and deplatforming has come to replace civilized debate, the question of how to forgive is of the utmost importance. What cannot be in question is the possibility of forgiveness.