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Q: Regarding the woman who is having a difficult time forgiving the group of people who hurt her daughter, I recently ran across this statement: “Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.” In other words, all of that woman's anger and unforgiveness are doing nothing to hurt the people who hurt her daughter, but they are hurting her. And that’s not fair. As an old Buddhist saying puts it: “carrying around resentment in your heart is like carrying around hot coals in your hand, hoping that someday you’ll be able to throw them at the person who hurt you. In the meantime, you only end up burning yourself.” Or: “holding onto anger is like swallowing poison and hoping that the other person dies." I hope that this woman can find a way to release her anger and resentment to God, and free herself from them. Perhaps it would help to counsel greater faith in God? Because: no worldly justice could be good enough in this case (or in many others). So, either one believes in an unjust God and an unjust universe, or else one has faith in an omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving God who will assure perfect justice on His (or Her) own schedule, even if it doesn’t suit our own personal timetable. – (From N in Port Washington, NY)

A: Thank you, dear N, for your compassionate and kind thoughts about forgiveness. You are a healing soul and I am certain that those you contact in your life are blessed to have your life woven into theirs.

Your first insight that forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves has, I believe, its limits. If forgiveness is a gift at all, it must be, I believe, a gift we give to the person who has wronged us and not a gift we give to ourselves. We are forgiven by God and therefore we forgive others. That is the essential dynamic of forgiveness. We are not worthy of forgiveness and yet we are forgiven. That is the essential dynamic of God’s love. So if what we are doing when we forgive is really just making our own life easier, it is not a gift at all but an act of spiritual selfishness.

Yes, it is true that feelings of resentment and anger erode our spiritual core, but letting go of those feelings just so that you might feel better is, for me at least, far too self-centered. I prefer to see forgiveness as an unearned gift to an unrepentant sinner. Just as we receive God’s grace despite our sins, so too do we extend to those who have wounded us our forgiveness as an act of our personal grace.

Your last point interests me greatly. You write:

Either one believes in an unjust God and an unjust universe, or else one has faith in an omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving God who will assure perfect justice on His (or Her) own schedule, even if it doesn’t suit our own personal timetable.

I agree absolutely. The belief in forgiveness leads directly to a belief in Heaven. One of the most spiritually powerful ways we summon up the courage to forgive others is our belief that God will even out the scales of justice for all of us in Heaven.

We will talk more about Heaven in future columns but for now it is enough to say with the deepest conviction that somehow and some way evil is punished and goodness is rewarded in the life our soul enjoys after death. To believe otherwise, as you have correctly noticed, is to believe that the moral balance that so often seems askew in our embodied life also remains unbalanced after death when our soul lives a disembodied life in Heaven. God must set things right that are set wrong here and now. That is one of the most important functions of Heaven and one of the core beliefs that sustains our faith in God.

You are correct that the timetable for God leveling out the scales of justice is not our timetable. We must wait and be sustained by our faith until that day when the Lord shall be one and his name shall be one.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)

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