Some sins are forgiven by God immediately on repentance. For oth-
ers, the sinner will have to wait until the next Yom Kippur. For yet others,
forgiveness follows only after one suffers further tribulation. For some
particularly grave sins, the repentant sinner is not forgiven until death.15
(For sins against other people, as we’ll see, further conditions obtain.)16
The first requirement of teshuvah is confession. Maimonides insists on a personal and specific verbal confession (in addition to the communal
confession recited on Yom Kippur). Confession to God should be done in
private, but it must take an articulate verbal form. Soloveitchik explains
that this is because emotions and ideas “become clear, and are grasped
only after they are expressed in sentences bearing a logical and gram-
matical structure” (91– 92). When the transgression is against another
person as well as God, confession must be public as well as verbal. “For
the teshuvah of one who is so arrogant as to conceal his acts of rebellion rather than disclose them is incomplete.”17 Soloveitchik says that one reason for this requirement is that the sinner must “clear the name of his
fellow- man that has been muddied, and effectively remove the stigma he
applied to him” (80). (He thus appears to hold that wrongdoing is a dimi-
nution of the victim, a position interestingly close to Aristotle’s emphasis
on “down- ranking.”)
But confession is only a first step. The sinner must then take steps
to chart a course that will avoid the sin in the future. This course must
begin with sincere regret and a commitment not to repeat the sin. God
“discerns all hidden things,” and yet the statement of regret should also
be made verbally (publicly if another person is involved, secretly if only
God is involved). Maimonides and Yonah both use a telling image that,
since it appears in both texts, and is so unusual, betrays its origin in a
common source: the person who confesses verbally but does not have
sincere regret is like someone who seeks purification in a mikvah (ritual bath) while holding a vile reptile: he won’t be purified until he gets rid
of the reptile. True teshuvah, Maimonides summarizes, is “no longer committing a sin one once committed, not thinking of committing it anymore,
and affixing to his heart the commitment never to do it again.”18
Extremely helpful in this process is a general attitude of mind that
is “submissive, humble, and meek.”19 Worry is also extremely helpful,
in keeping one fixed on the ease with which sin may be committed.
(Maimonides remarks that the sound of the shofar is a metaphor for spiritual alertness.)20 The culmination of successful teshuvah would be to be in
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the presence of the same temptation with similar opportunities for sin—
and to refrain from sinning.21 However, this cannot be strictly a require-
ment, since one can perform teshuvah and receive forgiveness right up until the moment of one’s death— and there are many sins one can no
longer commit when on the verge of death.22 The constant awareness of
impending death is a great help in the teshuvah process.23
Teshuvah pertains not to wishes or desires but to acts and omissions-
to- act. The inner world is important because it is both a cause of trans-
gression and a valuable part of the teshuvah process. As Yonah puts it, stirring up a tempest in oneself is very useful in distracting one from
pleasure and the evil inclination. And “fences” often address the inner
world: withdrawing from occasions that stimulate desire is part of the
avoidance of sin.24 However, even here it is the related acts and omis-
sions that are of the essence: desire is not itself a sin, but only a cause or an effect of sin. Similarly, where other humans are concerned, only acts
and omissions count, not wayward wishes, except insofar as they tend to
produce bad acts.
Turning now to offenses against other people, we find that human-
human teshuvah has, up to a point, a non- derivative status. Although every crime against another person is also a crime against God, repent-ing before God and receiving God’s forgiveness does not suffice to square
one’s score with another human being. Nor, indeed, does monetary com-
pensation or restitution of the property (in the case of property crime)
suffice.25 Instead, one must approach the other person directly, confess
the fault publicly, express regret and a commitment not to do this sort
of thing again— to change the course of one’s life in regard to that whole
area of sin. And then the victim must accept the apology. “For even after
the transgressor pays the victim what is owed him, the victim must still
become favorably inclined toward him, and the transgressor must ask
him for forgiveness.” Yonah remarks that compensation and restitution
do not reach the victim’s shame and distress: only an appeal for forgive-
ness can do this.
Here we finally arrive at human forgiveness, in something like our
canonical sense: a change of heart on the part of the victim, who gives
up anger and resentment in response to the offender’s confession and
contrition. The teshuvah process contains all the elements of Griswold’s core definition. Even empathetic understanding of the victim’s suffering,
though not greatly emphasized, is present in the account of why restitu-
tion alone is insufficient. And the process culminates in the victim’s will-
ing abandonment of resentful feelings and projects.
Forgiveness, the Jewish tradition holds, is a virtue. The victim
should not bear a grudge, but should be readily appeased and slow to
anger. (Maimonides remarks that Gentiles are always holding grudges: a
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Anger and Forgiveness
forgiving disposition is the hallmark of the Jew.)26 If, however, the vic-
tim is initially obdurate, the transgressor should come to him with
three friends and implore him for forgiveness. If the answer is still no,
he should come with a second and a third group of (different) friends,
all making persuasive arguments. At that point, the shoe is on the other
foot: the obdurate victim becomes a transgressor. An exception is made
for the teacher- pupil relationship: if the victim was the transgressor’s
teacher, he will have to go back “as many as a thousand times.” (There is
apparently no point at which an unforgiving teacher becomes culpable.)
Special rules obtain for apology to someone who has died, and for res-
titution to people whom one does not know personally.27 On the whole,
however, the process is ritualized and quite coercive: either forgive, or
you become the transgressor.
In the discussions of human- human teshuvah there is no explicit men-
tion of worry, abasement, or humbling oneself. These attitudes are appro-
priate to the relationship with God. It would not be difficult, however, for
them to become endemic to the human- human encounter too— given that
every offense against another human is also, at the same time, an offense
against God and thus an appropriate occasion for these attitudes. At any
rate, given that anxiety and abasement are supposed to be ubiquitous
features of each person’s life, they are bound to be pres
ent in human rela-
tions, whether or not they are clearly directed toward the other person.
And anxiety is likely on the victim’s side as well, since he is commanded,
on pain of sin, to change attitudes that can be very difficult to change.
When one compares this structured account, fixed by tradition over
many centuries, to Griswold’s philosophical definition, one gains new
understanding, and this new angle of vision is the purpose of genealogy.
In Griswold’s contemporary account, a structure that is initially at home
within an all- encompassing religious way of life has been extracted from
it whole, so to speak, as if it could and should remain exactly the same
even in the absence of those life- permeating commitments. Whether this
is so or not would appear to require detailed argument, but the famil-
iarity of the whole idea makes people feel that they can dispense with
argument.
Let us continue, however, pondering the structure in its original con-
text, asking what it promises for both personal and political relations.
The more we understand the tradition, the better will be our ability to ask
questions about the truncated version.
In Jewish teshuvah, both personal and political relations are reduced to a very small part of life. The relationship to God is primary, suffusing everything. The political as such is not even mentioned, and the per-
sonal either occupies a very small space in the text (as in Maimonides and
Yonah), or virtually no space (as in Soloveitchik). And it is not simply that
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human relations occupy very little space in canonical texts on teshuvah.
It is perfectly clear that the result, and indeed the purpose, of the life-
suffusing process is to sideline them, rendering them secondary. Even if
human forgiveness cannot be fully achieved by squaring one’s account
with God, the whole transaction takes place in the context of a primary
commitment to God that fills up the whole of life, structuring it in its
most intimate details. The combination of the large number of positive
and negative commandments, including the many “fences,” with the
injunction to constant worry and mindfulness means that there is sim-
ply not much room to look at or care for another human being as such,
and certainly no space at all for spontaneity, passion, or play. Indeed, the
life this process organizes seems remarkably anxious and joyless, albeit
within a tradition whose capacity for joy and humor is so clearly one of
its great virtues.
Particularly striking, in the light of our Aeschylean starting point,
is the absence of any sense that the political makes a difference. Unlike
personal relations, which are at least mentioned, political relations are
not mentioned at all— not even in Soloveitchik’s contemporary treatise.
Anger is not transformed by political justice, since it is God’s anger and
God’s justice that really matter. Even in a just and law- governed society,
then, the wrongdoer bears exactly the same burden of worry, confession,
and potential divine wrath as in a pre- legal society.
How, in this tradition, is a human victim’s anger allayed? Not by any
active generosity on the part of the victim, who is instructed to wait for
an apology and supplication accompanied with protestations of change
and non- renewal, as well as restitution where this is appropriate. At this
point, the victim is to be non- grudging, but not before. Indeed, there is
a strong suggestion that preemptive generosity on the part of the vic-
tim would be a great error, short- circuiting the mandated work of the
teshuvah process. Certainly God demands of us the full procedure, constantly iterated, and human beings are not encouraged to be more care-
less or frivolous than God. If eventually yielding, victims are encouraged
to be initially quite tough, and to that extent the transgressor is forced
into postures that are extremely elaborate and uncomfortable: imagine
rounding up a series of three distinct groups of three friends, all of whom
must know the intimate details of the transaction and be prepared to
intercede in it.
At the conclusion of the process, moreover, there is also no room for
generosity or spontaneity: forgiveness is a requirement of religious law
and should not be freely given.
Interpersonal relations, then, are doubly burdened: first and fore-
most, by constant preoccupation with transgression against God, which
takes most of life’s space; second, by the demands of the public teshuvah
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process within these relations themselves. Given the large list of ways in
which one person may offend another, the demands of interpersonal tes-
huvah are themselves extremely onerous, taking space that might otherwise be taken by happier things. These burdens are the sort of thing that
Athena was keen to remove; the teshuvah process does not contemplate
their removal, but intensifies them. That is no mistake: it is its purpose.
Section VI will present some alternative voices from the Jewish
tradition that (like some biblical texts) suggest a different viewpoint.
Now, however, continuing the narrative of what I’ve called transactional
forgiveness, let us turn to the main lines of a related Christian tradition.
III. Christian Transactional Forgiveness: Score- Keeping
in the Inner Realm
The Christian tradition is many things. So too, of course, is the Jewish tra-
dition. But in that case, at least when we are dealing with the philosophi-
cal texts of Orthodox Judaism, there is remarkable constancy over time.
Christianity was heterogeneous from the start, with a plurality of found-
ing texts and increasing diversity over time and space. A genealogy of
our sort cannot exhaustively delve into all relevant scholarly disputes
about the authors of the Gospels, or about differences between Jesus and
Paul, or even, except very generally, about differences between Catholic
and Protestant doctrines of forgiveness, and among various types of
Protestantism. Instead, my genealogy of transactional forgiveness aims at extracting, as with Judaism, a familiar structure of remarkable ubiquity
and persistence, recognizable across time and space, and formative of
modern culture in ways of which we are often unaware. It will focus on
the organized church, which may well have departed from its origins, as
so often happens with organized religion. But it is the organized church
that overwhelmingly influences daily life and culture. After describing
schematically a mainstream Christian transactional version of the teshuvah process, I shall turn to two alternatives within this tradition, prominently
attested in the biblical text, which offer attractive possibilities.
To begin with, we must dispense with the erroneous but ubiquitous
view that the Jewish tradition is punitive while the Christian tradition
is merciful. As we have seen, the Jews said just the opposite: the goyim
hold grudges, whereas Jews have a principled way of laying anger aside.
Both claims of superior mildness are equally false. The Christian tradi-
tion has enormous resources for pun
itiveness (one need only consider
the book of Revelation), and the Jewish tradition certainly encourages
strict accounting and laborious penance. Indeed, as we shall see, there
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is, not surprisingly, great continuity between the two traditions, with
Christianity on the whole going further in a similar direction.
Transactional forgiveness is surely not absent from the Gospels,
although it is not as prominent as the organized church would lead one
to expect. A major statement is Luke 17:3– 4: “if your brother wrongs you,
reprove him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he wrongs you seven
times a day, and seven times a day he turns to you saying ‘I repent,’ you
shall forgive him.”28 Another authoritative text is Acts 3:19: “Therefore
repent, and be converted, so that your sins may be blotted out, when the
times of refreshing come from the face of the Lord.” Moreover, the entire
practice of baptism initiated by John is characterized as a “baptism of
repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4, Luke 3:3). This phrase
is plausibly construed as meaning that there is no baptism without
repentance:29 in Matthew 3:8 John upbraids the Pharisees and Sadducees
who come for baptism because they had not already repented. Baptism
is probably not meant to be sufficient for God’s forgiveness: only Christ’s
death on the cross will achieve that; but baptism does seem to be neces-
sary.30 Thus forgiveness, while involving Christ’s free act of grace, is also deeply transactional.
These ideas are not the only ones we find in the Gospels, as we shall
see. But they shape the early rituals of what became the Christian church,
and it is not surprising that, much later, the organized church codified
them and made much of them. Thus, whatever baptism was in the early
church, it quickly became an entry condition for promised salvation. And
the forgiveness of sins it offers was, and still is, envisaged as transac-
tional through and through: the child’s sins are remitted conditionally
on an expression of contrition and renunciation by the parents and/ or
godparents.31
But since transactional forgiveness, though present in the Gospels, is
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