On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World

by Danya Ruttenberg

There’s a difference between saying you’re sorry because you realize that a thing you did had a bad consequence, and doing so because you really understand that you hurt someone—and that person’s feelings, experience of the world, safety, and self all matter profoundly.

Your apology is a manifestation of genuine remorse. It demands vulnerability, and it is a natural by-product of all the work of repentance and transformation that you’ve been doing up until this point.

It is forbidden for a person to be cruel and not appeased; instead, a person should be satisfied easily and get angry slowly.

It’s not about being willing to return the relationship to what it had been before the harm, and it’s not even about returning to any kind of relationship. Once again, that would be reconciliation, a whole other ball of wax. This mechila is also not about offering absolution, atonement, to the penitent—only God can do that. But just as we ask the perpetrator to actually see the hurt person in front of them, we also ask the victim to try to recognize the hard, sincere repentance work that has been done, and to allow it to mean enough to settle accounts.

someone once told the writer Treva Draper-Imler that sometimes forgiveness is about “wishing that rotten SOB peace and getting on with your life.”

If the person asking for forgiveness hasn’t done all of this? The victim has no obligation. None. Bupkes. Nada. Zilch. This is where we often see forgiveness weaponized. In the wider secular culture, in Christian culture, and yes, even in Jewish culture where we use Maimonides and really should know better, there is often pressure on victims to forgive even when the perpetrator hasn’t done all of the work, or even any work at all.

When the victims are primarily white, the question simply doesn’t come up. As

“Forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America.”

There should never be pressure on victims to forgive. Ever. When people try to force a victim to forgive, they can even cause additional harm, additional trauma.

This is important, so I’ll say it again: If someone hurts you in a way that causes irreparable damage, you are never obligated to forgive.

Sometimes healing can come only by allowing oneself to not have to forgive, by understanding that there is no sin in not closing accounts with those who can never, ever repair the harm they have caused.

First of all, “everyday states”—often translated as “ritual impurity”—is an ancient concept that’s hard to communicate clearly in English. A person acquired this everyday state through things like being near a dead body, menstruating, ejaculating semen, contracting certain diseases, and other things that were generally part of people’s normal experience. It wasn’t bad, and it wasn’t a moral concept, despite what people often infer from translations that use the words “purity” and “impurity.”

as I hope you can see, kapparah, in Leviticus, isn’t about unification, or reconciliation, or forgiving and letting off the hook. It’s a purification. A wiping clean. A sort of spiritual disinfectant.

Yom Kippur’s power as the day that wipes clean the spiritual slate is not infinite; there are things that it cannot do. The Mishnah teaches, “Yom Kippur atones for transgressions between a person and God, but for a transgression against their neighbor, Yom Kippur cannot atone, until they make things right with their neighbor.”

See Jesus words on anger in Matt 5

For interpersonal harm—the subject of this book and all the stories we’ve seen up until now—you can show up to services on the Day of Atonement and pray and weep and pour out your heart, but it’s not going to do a dang thing until you’ve actually done the work we’ve been discussing all this time.

We don’t have to get all the way there. We just have to start walking.

Prodigal Son

The Talmud teaches, in the name of Rabbi Hama Bar Hanina, “Great is repentance, for it brings healing to the world.”17