Can We Forgive People For Crimes Committed Against Others?
Rabbi Heschel on Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower
In his response to Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower—a novel about a Nazi who asks a Jew to forgive him for his crimes—Rabbi A.J. Heschel tells a story/parable about a rabbi who refuses to forgive a man who wronged him. The reason he refuses to forgive the man is that the man wronged him, thinking he was a nobody and only apologizes when he discovers he is an important person. The rabbi says the man owes an apology to “the common man” and not to the rabbi. The rabbi has no right to forgive, since the offense wasn’t committed against him.
I’m intrigued and compelled by the concept that we can only forgive others for transgressions committed against us, but not for transgressions committed against others. (Many of the Christian responses to the novel disagree, emphasizing that the Jew can forgive the Nazi on behalf of God by playing the role of priest). Herbert Marcuse goes further than Heschel, saying that the Nazi’s sheer act of asking the Jew to forgive is an insensitive assault on him, as it instrumentalizes him, tokenizes him, and, worst of all, repeats the anti-semitic stereotype of the Jew as a supernatural force with extra-human power.
If we extend Heschel’s story, we might say that every transgression involves a transgression against someone other than the victim. In psychological terms, all crimes are committed against the perpetrator’s projection. How can the actual victim forgive on behalf of the projection?
One resolution to the problem is to reject absolutism. One can forgive on the individual level, but not on the larger level. The Jew can forgive the Nazi only for what was done to him, not for what was done to others, or to God. It is wrong to forgive as a representative of others.
Yet, in reality, the self is always seen—and always sees itself—as a representative of many forces. Nietzsche defines the self as a “parliament of drives.” To acknowledge the multiplicity of drives that constitute the self is to know that both the offering and the refusal of forgiveness can never be definitive.
To riff on Groucho Marx, we can only forgive on behalf of groups that would not have us as members.
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