True Forgiveness is a Prerequisite to Becoming Holy

 

Parashat Acharei Mot/Kedoshim
True Forgiveness is a Prerequisite to Becoming Holy

True Forgiveness is a Prerequisite to Becoming Holy
When I became a Ba’alat Teshuva in 1980, I found it easy to take on the external mitzvot such as covering my elbows and knees, keeping kosher, and even keeping all the laws of separation from the other sex. I found it much more difficult to actualize the internal mitzvot such as serving Hashem with joy, being happy on the holidays, and feeling love for those people whose energy irritated me. Most difficult is the mitzvah to remove grudges by totally forgiving others for the deep hurts they may have caused us. As known, the resistance of ‘the other side’ is always in proportion to the holiness involved. Therefore, it seems that precisely the most challenging mitzvot, are the most essential.  Based on this principle, I believe that the internal mitzvot are most vital, and especially the mitzvah of not bearing a grudge. Having negative feelings, remembering someone did something to us that we hold in our heart, is unhealthy and can cause us to focus solely on the negative. It has been scientifically proven that taking revenge or harboring grudges is destructive not only to victims but also to the perpetrators. People who are more prone to holding grudges tend to be sicker than their peaceful peers. The mitzvah not to bear a grudge is written in Parashat Kedoshim, which means “Holy.” This parasha opens with “…You shall be holy because I am holy” (Vayikra 19:2). If we strive to be truly holy, we must rid ourselves of even the tiniest tinge of grudge towards anyone. Thus, for me, removing any vendetta from our hearts, to truly love, is the most important principle in the Torah. As Rabbi Akiva teaches, “The greatest principle in the Torah is to ‘Love your fellow as yourself’” (Vayikra 19:18); (Bereishit Rabbah 24:7). This implies that feeling positively toward someone else and to care for that person we must also care for ourselves.  But how will we be able to truly love others as well as ourselves without letting go of old grudges and resentments?

The Mitzvah of Love and Forgiveness Starts with Ourselves
One of the many interpersonal mitzvot in Parashat Kedoshim is the mitzvah to love others feel like we supposedly love ourselves:

ספר ויקרא פרק יט פסוק יז-יח לֹא תִשְׂנָא אֶת אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָ הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת עֲמִיתֶךָ וְלֹא תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא:

לֹא תִקֹּם וְלֹא תִטֹּר אֶת בְּנֵי עַמֶּךָ וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ אֲנִי הָשֵׁם:

“You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely rebuke your fellow Jew, and not bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your fellow Jew as yourself: I am Hashem” (Vayikra 19:17-18).

To truly love we must let go of all grudges not just against others but primarily against ourselves. People who understand the necessity of taking responsibility for their choices and actions are always harder on themselves than on anyone else. We often hold ourselves accountable to a much higher standard. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can become damaging when we are unable to forgive ourselves. When we work on forgiveness, self-forgiveness is the starting point. We cannot give to others what we do not have ourselves. How can we give love if we harbor self-hate? How can we forgive others if we haven’t forgiven ourselves? When we forgive, it is not about validating the act, but about letting go of the power that act has in our lives. This is particularly important when it is our own actions that we must forgive. I find that women who had critical mothers have a harder time with self-love and being able to forgive themselves.

Eight Steps to Complete Forgiveness
Forgiveness is not always a neat or linear experience. It is more like peeling an onion. The following steps can help you peel back new layers of the onion. Each step can help you experience deeper levels of divine compassion and healing. As time passes, you may find that additional layers with new emotions surface. You can then repeat the steps, and it may also be helpful to share your feelings with a soul friend and continue the process of forgiveness with an EmunaHealer.

1. Accept Your Pain by Looking for G-d within Every Painful Experience
Blaming others is an ingrained instinct carried over by Adam and Eve in the Garden. Rather than becoming upset when someone wrongs us, we can practice looking inwards and gain valuable lessons from the pain or irritation we endured. There is a deeper reason why this thing was done against you, which you may or may not be aware of. Look for the benefits of the interpersonal transgressions you have experienced. Accept that in whatever way you have been hurt by others, it was meant to be, as a wake-up call and a lesson to learn from. It may also be a cleansing and subsequent atonement for something you have done in this reincarnation or in prior incarnations.

2. Emulate Hashem’s Tolerance and Forgiveness
“Who is a G-d like You, who pardons iniquity, and forgives the transgression of the remnant of His heritage?... (Michah 7:18). Just as you desire Hashem’s forgiveness, so must you grant it to others. Receiving Hashem’s forgiveness helps you to forgive others, and extending forgiveness to others helps you to ask for the forgiveness that you need. A simple prayer begins the journey.

3. Sooth Yourself and Acknowledge Your Hurt
Usually, when you’re upset or aggravated you feel hurt, loss, disrespect, or rejection. By self-soothing, we can control some of the anger and fear and lessen any subsequent unforgiveness. Self-soothing includes listening to our own pain, acknowledging the hardship we experience, and sending self-love and compassion to our hurt feelings. Years ago, I was upset with an old neighbor (no longer my neighbor) who kept dumping garbage in our garden. If I repressed my feelings, it would make me depressed and cause me to accumulate resentment. If I’d make an irritated remark, I’d offend her and feel worse myself. Instead, I listened to my emotions and kindly acknowledged them. When I was able to pray, I deeply realized that the offense was quite unintentional and certainly not targeted against me. Then I was able to speak lovingly without any hint of irritation and kindly request of the neighbor to make more effort to ensure that none of their garbage would end up on our plot.

4.  Set Boundaries
If you reflect on your past and present relationships, perhaps you will find a pattern of repeated mistreatment in similar ways. You may have a blind spot or a way that you’re inadvertently enabling others to disrespect or hurt you. It’s important to set wise boundaries on your expectations and interactions with others. Sometimes you need to keep your distance, say no, or hold back your vulnerable emotions and needs. True reconciliation depends on both sides acting with honest and responsible love for one another without compromising their own basic emotional needs.

5.  Relieve Your heart to Hashem and to Mentor
For your emotional healing and to gain the insight and strength you need to forgive, it’s important to find someone safe to verbalize your pain with, as it states, “If there is anxiety in a man’s mind let him speak of it” (Mishlei 12:25). Don’t forget to speak with Hashem in hitbodedut specifying to Him all the details of your pain. This will bring you the greatest relief. I have made it my practice to recite the forgiveness prayer, which is part of the bedtime prayer, to avoid going to sleep without first having done my best to forgive everyone.

6.  Lessen the Injustice Gap and Entrust the Negative Behavior into Hashem’s Hand
It’s important to view the scenario from a different and more positive perspective and lower your expectations about the ideal outcome. Your EmunaHealer may facilitate this and suggest what might be working, even to a small degree, trying to magnify that positive perspective. Ultimately, forgiveness means letting G-d be the true judge to handle what you have gone through with the other person. Praying certain Tehillim that describe dealing with enemies can help you to feel your emotions, share with G-d, and leave justice in His hands (see Tehillim 10:15, 18:6-15, 31:17, 35:1-28, 54:5, 56:5-7, 58:6-8, 69:19-28, 70:13).

7. Open your Heart to Find Sympathy and Pray for Your Offender
Whenever possible try giving the benefit of the doubt and empathize with your offender. Sometimes this is simply impossible, particularly in the case of unexpected betrayals or heinous harm. A realistic goal in such cases is to simply cultivate sympathy. Your EmunaHealer can facilitate you to search for reasons and ways in which you can feel sorry for the person who inflicted the harm. You can practice thinking of what kind of help the offender might be given and what nice things people could do to help this person. Although not easy, this way we can learn to feel even the smallest amount of compassion toward the transgressor (Worthington & Scherer, 2004). Whenever you feel hurt or upset with anyone, practice blessing and praying for her. At first, it may be hard, but eventually, this practice softens the heart and helps us to forgive.

8. Repent for your Own Tinge of your offender's Sin
The Ba’al Shem Tov teaches that if it happened that you saw, heard, or experienced someone else’s wrong, understand that you yourself have a tinge of that same failing. Hashem makes you experience the offense to motivate you to rectify yourself completely. When you realize that the main reason you came to witness the misdeed, is to rectify it by removing yourself completely from this kind of behavior. Since all of Israel is considered as one person, when you repent you will include the offender within yourself by means of this unity. Thus, the offender will be transformed to repent as well, and you will achieve the character trait of “seek peace and pursue it” (Tehillim 13:15); (Based on Toldot Ya’acov Yosef, Parashat Lech Lecha).

Three Tools for the EmunaHealer to Facilitate Forgiveness

1. Emotional Replacement
The EmunaHealer can facilitate the person in treatment to replace negative unforgiving emotions gradually with positive other-oriented emotions by experiencing other self-forgetful positive emotions. This emotional replacement can be facilitated by helping the person in treatment give an altruistically motivated gift of forgiveness. We can use a memory described by the victim to motivate altruism through humility in realizing that she too has offended. This leads to the feeling of gratitude for having been forgiven. We can instill hope in the victim that when we do something good for others, even those who have hurt us, we will be blessed in return. When it is difficult for the person we treat to reflect on her past and recall times when she offended another but was forgiven, the EmunaHealer can give prompts such as: Think of whether you offended a parent, teacher, romantic partner, friend, or coworker. Usually, with these prompts, people can recall many experiences where they wronged someone and were forgiven (Worthington & Scherer, 2004).

2. Empty Chair Technique
One of the most effective ways to help a person in treatment experience empathy is to use the empty-chair technique. The person victim imagines sitting across from the offender, who is imagined to be sitting in an empty chair. The victim describes her complaint as if the offender were there. She then moves to the empty chair and responds from the point of view of the offender. The conversation proceeds with the person in treatment moving back and forth between chairs. The objective is to allow the person to express both sides of the conversation personally, and thus experience empathy. In doing so, the person might imagine an apology or at least an acknowledgment of the hurt that was inflicted.

3. Naikan Therapy
Naikan therapy is a Japanese practice of self-reflection relatively unknown in the Western world. It focuses on three questions:
What have you received?
What have you returned?
What trouble have you caused?
According to this therapy, we first focus on the person’s relationship with the mother and from there we expand outwards to other relationships. A simplified form of Naikan therapy involves asking the participants to journal daily for one week answering the three Naikan questions after a brief version of loving-kindness meditation (Ozawa-de Silva, 2006). During the sessions, we listen to the participant allowing her to put into words what she has discovered.

EmunaHealing Exercise for Facilitating Complete Forgiveness for Yourself and Others
(Based on A Meditation for the Anniversary of 9/11 Spiritual Practice by Jack Kornfield and Exercise: Revenge and Forgiveness by Louise Hay)
1. Sit quietly and peacefully. Allow your eyes to close and your breath to be natural and easy. Let your body and mind relax. Breathing gently into the area of your heart, let yourself feel all the barriers you have erected and the emotions that you have carried because you have not forgiven – not forgiven yourself, not forgiven others.
2. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or condoning the suffering caused by others or yourself. You can do everything in your power to prevent more harm. Forgiveness is the release of any bitterness and hatred in your own heart, so you are free to move on. Let yourself feel the pain of keeping your heart closed. Then, breathing softly, begin asking and extending forgiveness, letting the feelings that come up grow deeper as you repeat them.
3. Asking Forgiveness of Others
Recite: “There are many ways that I have hurt and harmed others, have betrayed or abandoned them, caused them suffering, knowingly or unknowingly, out of my pain, fear, anger, and confusion.” Let yourself remember and visualize the ways you have hurt others. See and feel the pain you have caused out of your own fear and confusion. Feel your own sorrow and regret. Sense how you can finally release this burden and ask for forgiveness. Picture each memory that still burdens your heart. Then repeat to each person in your mind: “I ask for your forgiveness, I ask for your forgiveness.”
4. Offering Forgiveness to Yourself 
When you have cleared as much as you can for now, turn your attention to self-forgiveness. Recite: “There are many ways that I have hurt and harmed myself. I have betrayed or abandoned myself many times through thought, word, or deed, knowingly and unknowingly.” Feel your own precious body and life. Let yourself see the ways you have hurt or harmed yourself. Recall them and picture them. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this and sense that you can release these burdens. Extend forgiveness for each of them, one by one. Repeat to yourself: “For the ways I have hurt myself through action or inaction, out of fear, pain, and confusion, I now extend full and heartfelt forgiveness. Say out loud to yourself, “I forgive myself for ___________.” Do this for another five minutes or so. I forgive myself, I forgive myself.”
5. Think of the people who are hardest to forgive. What would you really like to do to them? What do they need to do to gain your forgiveness? Imagine that happening now. Get into the details. How long do you want them to suffer or do penance?
6. Offering Forgiveness to Those Who Have Hurt or Harmed You
Recite: “There are many ways that I have been harmed by others, abused or abandoned, knowingly or unknowingly, in thought, word, or deed.” Let yourself remember and picture these many ways. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this past and sense that you can release this burden of pain by extending forgiveness whenever your heart is ready.
7. Now we are ready to forgive. Say to yourself: “I now remember the many ways others have hurt or harmed me, wounded me, out of fear, pain, confusion, and anger. I have carried this pain in my heart for too long. Recite loudly: “The person I need to forgive is ___________ and I forgive you for ___________. To the extent that I am ready, I offer them forgiveness. To those who have caused me harm, I offer my forgiveness, I forgive you.”
8. Do this over and over. You will have many things to forgive some for and only one or two to forgive others for. Imagine the person you are forgiving saying to you, “Thank you, I set you free now.” Do this for at least five or ten minutes. Search your heart for the injustices you still carry. Then let them go.
9. Gently repeat these directions for forgiveness until you feel a release in your heart. For some great pains, you may not feel a release but only the burden and the anguish or anger you have held. Touch this softly. Be forgiving of yourself for not yet being ready to let go and move on. Forgiveness cannot be forced; it cannot be artificial. Simply continue the practice and let the words and spiritual practices work gradually in their own way. In time you can make forgiveness meditation a regular part of your life, letting go of the past and opening your heart to each new moment with a wise loving-kindness.
10. When you feel complete, let it be over forever. These are powerful exercises and good to do at least once a week to clear out any remaining rubbish. To indulge in this every day would be too much. Some experiences are easy to let go and some we must chip away at until suddenly one day they let go and dissolve. Usually at this point, you feel lighter and freer.