Atonement
It’s Yom Kippur. My family is in shul, but I’m here blogging. I’m also fasting, but that’s because I’m a meta-agnostic: I’m not sure if I don’t know if there’s a G-d.
Yom Kippur is about getting beyond all the crappiness we humans have managed to do to one another in the past year and starting again. It’s not a free pass. You have to make right what you’ve made wrong. But, the relationship isn’t symmetrical: You don’t get to demand justice from those lousy bastards who treated you like dirt. You forgive them. And if you don’t, you are now the lousy bastard.
Forgiveness makes no sense in terms of justice or psychology. Someone broke the rules, and you’re supposed to let it go? Someone hurt you and you’re supposed to act as if they didn’t? Forgiveness only makes sense because we’re so fallible, so flawed. Is there anything we get right all the way? We forgive because we couldn’t share a planet if we enforced all the rules all the way that perfect justice demands. We forgive one another because being human is the price of being human. We forgive because otherwise love would be an other-worldly value.
The Web exalts forgivness, but computers do not. To live on the Web, if you want to connect, you have to let lots slide. And you don’t even notice. You breeze past the typos, errors, disjointed thoughts, half-baked premises, outlandish assumptions, gross manners, inappropriate remarks and eye-burning color-schemes because there’s something to love in what — and who — you’re reading.
Computers, on the other hand, only know from rules. If one bit goes out of order, the whole house of charges can tumble. Computers’ obsessive-compulsive need to manage every bit — it’s what they were born to do — is proving too much of a temptation for us. In our fear-based belief that the perfect order is perfectly rule-based, we are falling prey to creeping Accountabalism, the belief that there’s no harm in tracking every bit. We’re eating ourselves alive.
But, while computers are rule-based, we are not. We need leeway to live together. We need openness to build a world we can’t predict. We need forgiveness so we can love one another or at least not beat each other to death with tree branches.
So, because I live so much on the Web where I can’t know exactly whom I’ve hurt, I know I owe apologies to many of you for not treating you the way you deserve. I can’t apologize in general and if I don’t know I’ve hurt you, I can’t apologize specifically. If I can make it up to you, let me know. I will try to do better.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Xenophanes belonged to a religion of one: unity with all.
I received my mail-in ballot application today. Make sure you get yours. Demand a paper trail. Make sure your vote is recorded properly.
You rock, David. Peace!
I don’t know how this works with the biblical idea of forgiveness, but I think there is indeed a strong psychological and simple spiritual point to it.
For me, to forgive someone is not to diminish whatever may have occured. It might be the only time when the facts of the matter, and their impact on me are told straight out. How I am coming to see forgiveness is as my promise to no longer resent someone and continue to hold it against them. I give up the right to hold onto that resentment or to regurgitate it at some future time. There’s now an opening to create something new.
People heal great family rifts out of forgiveness. I watched my mother finally forgive her sister for some childhood resentment that she clung to most of her life. It was in the last days of her life, and I can’t tell you how relieved, and touched, I was to know she had done that, rediscovering her love for her sister and expressing it while she had the chance.
I don’t think the healing power of forgiveness requires a particular religious commitment. I think it is something we are endowed with as human beings, however that came about, and it is a powerful gift of the human spirit. The benefit is to the forgiver. It is a creative act.
I suppose that one connection with atonement, along with the value of the act for its own sake, is that atonement gives an opportunity for another to forgive.
Thanks for sharing with us your commitment to honor the spirit of Yom Kippur and to make amends with anyone who has been hurt or injured in any way by something that might have been expressed here.
I apologize for making so much of this. I just saw something else in what you said about the connection of justice and having forgiveness be like overlooking something (if I understand you). Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with that. If you’ve seen Forgiving Typhoid Mary, I recall the difference being there. Here’s an example. Suppose someone loses a close family member through murder or other awful incident. The perpetrator is convicted and executed. The relatives still can’t forgive the murderer. The murderer is dead. Holding onto the resentment is cutting them off from their own joy and celebration of the loved one for the time the victim was among them. And the murderer is dead.
I apologize for having nothing but a hypothetical to use. I don’t want to make parables about it, especially for the anguish of others that I haven’t actually experience.
Yom Kippur online
David notes that Yom Kippur is a day for atoning for one’s sins: … So, because I live so much on the Web where I can’t know exactly whom I’ve hurt, I know I owe apologies to many of you…
On Yom Kippur I thought about my Email overload.
Reading your (beatiful) piece I thought to myself “is answering email after a month it was recieved (or not answering at all) is something I should appologize for?”.
Very Nice!
The Web exalts forgivness, but computers do not.
I like this a lot. Computers may have this in common with angels, at least as I understand Jewish tradition sees angels; they have no room for argument or opinion, they’re totally binary beings, they’re literalists. *g*
Hope your holiday was good!
Forgiveness…
Thoroughly misunderstood in our culture. People hold out to their loved ones the offer of forgiveness if they will only apologize, or do it right from now on, or whatever.
In truth, forgiveness is an active verb and can only be done — how to say this with English syntax? — to oneself for oneself. The person who is the ‘target’ of one’s forgiveness is not really part of the equation, just part of the context in which it occurs. The greatest good that forgiveness does is received by the one who does the forgiving. It may have little effect on the ‘forgivee.’ That person may not even know about it; they may not accept it; they may be infuriated by the offer of forgiveness.
However….
When someone forgives someone else, what is really happening? The one is releasing a package of emotion and thought that holds the other person as wrong or guilty. Is that not the essence of forgiveness? And what is the result? With true forgiveness, the forgiver lets go of held energy: thoughts, muscular tension, etc.
The one who forgives is the one whose load is lightened, whose sight is cleared of old bad news.
The ‘forgivee’ then has the option of moving into the new space that has been opened — or not — and, if the person did truly forgive, it does not change that forgiveness. True forgiveness cannot be invalidated by a lack of appreciation on someone else’s part.
Do not kid yourself: Forgiveness is a healing for the forgiver. And sometimes, we mistake our need to forgive ourselves with a belief that someone else needs our forgiveness.
Remember a time when you finally understood some unacceptable behavior on someone’s part? Some old something done to you, that finally made sense. With the aha! may have come a realization that it did not matter anymore and an understanding that allowed you to be OK with that person again.
That is forgiveness and it does not require the participation of the other party. And who feels better? Who is healed?
Atonement
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