[I delivered this sermon at Temple B’nai Shalom in October, 2005.]
Carol’s mother died after a long illness. Carol had cared for her Mom constantly.
Carol was furious. She knew, though, that it was a freak accident. She contained her rage. She didn’t berate Susan. Instead, Carol just said, quickly and quietly, “Oh, that’s OK, don’t worry about it. Accidents happen.”
In the following weeks, however, Carol seethed with anger. She could not talk to Susan about the incident or anything else. They stopped seeing each other. Carol began nursing a grudge. She relived over and over the moment when the photo toppled into the fire. She remained furious at Susan’s carelessness. A close friendship had been consigned to the flames as surely as that photo.
Grudges often happen within families and among friends. They may begin from serious harms that one person has done to another on purpose. They also may begin from what may seem to be minor and unintended slights.
Reflecting today on our own lives, can we think of a time when someone did something to us that caused us harm or that hurt our feelings? Rare is the person who does not have such a memory. Our thoughts today, in this season of forgiveness, may be directed to such an event and we may be asking ourselves, “How can I bring myself to forgive that person? And why should I? That person really did harm me. Why shouldn’t I hold on to my anger about what happened?”
Both our tradition and our understanding of psychology provide the same clear answer. Our tradition tells us that we should not hold a grudge. Psychology tells us that giving up a grudge can be wonderfully liberating.
Figuring out how to do it is probably the hardest part. In a moment we’ll talk about some ideas for how to forgive and give up a grudge. First, let’s consider what our tradition and psychology tell us about grudges.
Leviticus 19:18 includes one of the most widely quoted and universally applicable of the mitzvot: “Vei’ahavtah lereacha camocha - “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The mitzvah just before that one speaks directly to our topic. It says, ”lo tikom v’lo titor” – “You shall not take vengeance and you shall not bear a grudge.” There it is. The Torah directly tells us, do not hang on to a grudge.
These mitzvot are highly unusual. They concern inner emotions, not actions. Most of our mitzvot direct us to take certain actions or to refrain from doing so. They operate in the realm of action, not emotion.
Maimonides, writing in the 12th century, and Nehama Leibowitz, eight centuries later, agree on this point: these mitzvot are unusual in exactly this respect. These two commentators offer a reason why the Torah would depart from its usual emphasis on actions to issue mandates about feelings. They suggest that harboring a grudge may cause us to take actions that transgress another mitzvah. Therefore Torah tells us to avoid these feelings and to rid ourselves of them if they arise.
Our tradition thus clearly wants us to let go of grudges. So does modern science. Listen to this wisdom from a recent article in the magazine Psychology Today by Angela Pirisi, a leading health writer. She summarizes the article this way: “Let go of that grudge: the link between forgiveness and longevity.”
Pirisi explains that holding onto grudges may be linked to high blood pressure that can ultimately lead to stroke, kidney or heart failure, or even death. Her article describes a study showing that those who forgive easily have both a lower resting blood pressure and smaller increases in blood pressure rate than people who hang on to grudges.
Another expert, Dr. Kathleen Lawler, Ph.D., says that forgiving transgressions appears to promote better overall health. People who are able to forgive report fewer physician visits for physical ailments.
Our tradition wants us to forgive. Psychological research teaches us that doing so is good not only for our relationships with others but also for our own health.
This leaves one more big question: how do we do it? And that truly is a very large question. How do we let go of grudges and forgive those who have hurt us?
We must first recognize that it is very difficult to do. Forgiving is never easy. If it seems easy, it is probably not true forgiveness. This is really hard.
We are not talking about forgiving crimes or serious injuries caused by wrongful conduct. Anyone who commits a crime deserves the punishment that the legal process provides. Anyone who wrongfully harms another owes proper compensation. The injured party is entitled to the protection of the courts when that is necessary.
But in cases where there is no legal wrong but still we have been hurt and are angry and resentful, how do we forgive?
Solomon Schimmel, a psychology professor at Hebrew College
This is central to Schimmel’s book; so let me repeat that idea in a little different order. Human evil or human error that hurts us can cause us to feel resentment and rage. We may then feel guilt and shame because of these feelings. The best solution for us to let go of these feelings and get on with our lives is to find the proper balance of three elements.
The first element is justice. In cases where that is relevant, we can turn to a court or some other third party to intervene and help bring about a just outcome.
The second element is repentance. If the person who caused the harm is truly sorry and says so, showing that the same event won’t happen again, that can help us forgive. But we often have very little control over whether repentance happens.
The third element is our topic, forgiveness, meaning that we forgive the person who caused us harm. This last element, forgiveness, is the only one of the three that is potentially entirely within our own control, if only we could learn how to do it.
Schimmel’s book provides one approach. He describes the work of Robert Enright, an academic psychologist. Enright has joined with others in researching forgiveness and applying the lessons of that research to our question: how ever do we forgive? How can we stop being angry? How do we give up a grudge?
Schimmel describes a four-phase process for forgiving that is the work of a psychologist named Enright.
To understand Schimmel’s ideas better, let’s return to Carol and the photo of her Mom that Susan accidentally knocked into the fire, resulting in Carol’s grudge against Susan. That grudge had prevented them from speaking for nearly a year. One day Carol saw Schimmel’s book in a bookstore and the title caught her eye. Wounds Not Healed By Time: The Power of Repentance And Forgiveness. She picked it up, read the back cover, bought it and read it. She wasn’t very confident that anything would help, but she considered trying his methods. We’ll follow her journey through Schimmel’s four phases of forgiveness to see how they work.
In the first phase, which Enright and Schimmel call the “uncovering” phase, we fully acknowledge the hurt done to us by another. We must make ourselves fully aware of what the offender has done and how we have been hurt by it. We must not minimize the hurt, but we also must not exaggerate it. We could simply describe this so-called “uncovering” phase one of becoming more aware of exactly what happened and how we felt about it.
To apply the first phase, uncovering or becoming more aware, Carol thought hard about the moment when her Mom’s photo had burst into flame. She allowed herself to feel fully the sadness that she had experienced seeing the picture burning in the fireplace. She also felt fully the anger she had suppressed at that time toward Susan for causing the accident. She thought about the fact that Susan had been her best friend. Susan knew how much Carol had grieved over the death of her mother! Susan should have been more careful! She shouldn’t have walked so close to the mantel! She shouldn’t have tried to reach out to catch the picture as it fell! She should have apologized more fully!
As Carol thought about the incident, and allowed herself to feel her feelings about it more fully, she cried and felt angry. As she dried her tears, however, she also felt better, having allowed herself to begin to uncover the feelings surrounding the incident and become more aware of those feelings.
The second phase, deciding, may be the most difficult for some of us. It requires that we realize there has to be a better way, one that will help heal our own psychic pain. Only after committing ourselves to a full exploration of the alternative of forgiving can we proceed to do the psychological work necessary to forgive.
Carol was inspired by the book to try this next phase as well. She thought about how good a friend Susan had been. She very much missed their friendship and the long talks they used to have that mattered so much to both of them. Gradually, after a lot of reflection, she made a decision. She said to herself, ”I’m going to give this a chance. I’m going to see if I can forgive Susan.”
This led her to the third of the four phases, the work phase. Here we need to work at understanding the situation of the offender. We try to view the offender’s actions in the context of that situation. We try to be empathetic and compassionate toward the offender. This phase requires us to be more objective about what happened and try to see it from everyone’s viewpoint, not just our own.
Carol thought some more about the day Susan had visited her. She remembered that Susan had been upset about Susan’s son, who was going through a difficult illness. She recalled that Susan had been anxious about the results of some medical tests her son was about to receive. Maybe Susan’s clumsiness in knocking the photo off the mantel and then having it bounce off her hand had been a result in part of Susan’s anxiety about her son. Carol also realized that, because her grudge had kept her from calling Susan, she didn’t know how Susan’s son was doing. She thought to herself, “Maybe Susan is also missing our friendship.”
The fourth phase described in the Enright research is what Enright calls the “deepening” phase. In this phase we may search for meaning for others and ourselves in the suffering and forgiving process. We may realize that we need the forgiveness of others for our own conduct. We use this phase to pay attention to the effectiveness of the process of forgiveness. Is the process reducing our negative feelings? Is it increasing our positive feelings? Maybe we need to dig deeper to uncover reasons for our anger or resentment that may not have been obvious at first. Some reasons might not be related directly to the action of the offender.
Carol tried applying this idea of deepening to her understanding of her own feelings. She gradually came to see that the accident in its own terms might not be the only issue. Maybe her rage at Susan arose partly from unresolved issues Carol had about her own mother. She had loved her mother very much. She did not, however, always feel adequately loved by her mother. She had very willingly and selflessly cared for her mother during the long final illness. She didn’t realize until her mother died how much that effort had interfered with other aspects of her life. When her mother died, Carol felt sad but she also felt relieved from the burden of caring for her. Then she felt ashamed and guilty about those feelings of relief.
Carol asked herself why it had been important to her to keep her Mom’s photo on display in her living room. She found one answer: she was trying to prolong the leave-taking from her mother. She was doing this partly to try to relieve her unconscious guilt feelings. Her irrational wish to reverse her mother’s death went up in flames when the photo burned.
She saw that she had been much more angry with Susan than the incident warranted; the anger was to some extent about something else. Her anger was in part what psychologists call a displacement for other powerful emotions that she had hidden from herself. Once all this was out in the open, she found that her feelings of anger at Susan gradually receded. Maybe now she could truly consider forgiving Susan.
Schimmel emphasizes that forgiveness is a multi-stage process. It is influenced by many factors and can extend over a long time, with advances, retreats and diversions. We should not think of forgiveness as an all-or-nothing matter in which we forgive or we don’t. Rather, there can be degrees of forgiveness, and some is better than none, as long as it is done in relation to the four-phase process we have discussed.
Carol made the same discovery. The psychological work she had done helped her feel better about Susan. She finally called her and asked her about her son. It turned out to be harder than she thought, however, to establish again the friendship the two had previously enjoyed.
That renewal began only slowly and tentatively. Carol was ready to forgive Susan in her heart, but she wasn’t immediately ready to tell Susan that she forgave her. Later on she not only told Susan that she forgave her but also let her know what she had discovered about her own feelings.
Susan was then also able to let Carol know that she had been hurt and angry that Carol had not asked her about her son’s progress in his illness. Her son had gotten better, which helped Susan to let go of her own anger at Carol. Only then could their friendship begin to resume.
We should not hold on to grudges, for two reasons. Our tradition urges us to let them go. Psychology teaches us we will be healthier if we do so.
We may agree that we should forgive but we may not be sure how to do it. Research points to one way and Carol has shown us how to apply that way. We can try to follow the four phases of Uncover, Decide, Work and Deepen. Or we may find our own ways to apply these psychological insights, not necessarily in that order or with that exact terminology. But however we go about it, we will be better for it if we can succeed in this difficult but very valuable effort.
May we, each of us, find the courage to consider whether we are bearing grudges and to embark on a journey of forgiveness.
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