All religious holidays have an aspect of separating sacred from secular time. Most have specific value and significance. Today is the Jewish Yom Kippur. Jews on Yom Kippur confess their sins, beat their chests, a sort of spiritual defibrillation, but the holiday demands serious, sustained reflection in trying to change who we are. Some reflections:
How can we cope with offense, foster forgiveness, let grudges go. There will always be things we cannot fully forgive and forgiving someone does not necessarily mean readmitting that person to our life.
In this tradition, first, we apologize to those we’ve hurt, sincerely, as many as three times. The apology should not come weighed down with justification, but rather should acknowledge the other person’s hurt and express sincere regret.
If I forgive someone, truly forgive them, then I must restore moral parity; I am no better than that person. Accepting that steals the satisfactions of resentment, but it is essential: Once someone has been forgiven, you must never remind the person of that fact. To do so is to re-establish a hierarchy that true forgiveness disavows.
All of us seek to be forgiven — for we are imperfect, striving and in need of love.