Episodes
Wednesday Jan 20, 2021
Wednesday Jan 20, 2021
In time for Inauguration and MLK Day Noam and Sheva sit down to discuss the themes reflected in both those American celebrations: Overcoming differences, reconciliation, accountability, and forgiveness.
“How Divine Is Forgiveness”
Marge Piercy
How divine is forgiveness?
It’s a nice concept
but what’s under the sculptured draperies?
We forgive when we don’t really care
because what was done to us brought unexpected
harvest, as I always try to explain
to the peach trees as I prune them hard;
to the cats when I shove pills against
the Gothic vaults of their mouths
We forgive those who betrayed us
years later because memory has rotted
through like something left out in the weather
battered clean then littered dirty
in the rain, chewed by mice and beetles,
frozen and baked and stripped by the wind
till it is unrecognizable, corpse
or broken machine, something long useless.
We forgive those whom their own machinations
have sufficiently tangled, enshrouded,
the fly who bit us to draw blood and who
hangs now a gutted trophy in a spider’s
airy larder; more exactly, the friend
whose habit of lying has immobilized him
at last like a dog trapped in a cocoon
of fishing line and barbed hooks.
We forgive those we firmly love
because anger hurts, a coal that burns
and smolders still scorching the tissues
inside, blistering wherever it touches
so that finally it is to ease our own pain
that we bury the hot clinkers in a mound
of caring, suffocate the sparks with promises,
drown them in tears, reconciling.
Soft Like We forgive mostly not from strength
but through imperfections, for memory
wears transparent as glass with the pattern
washed off, till we stare past what injured us.
We forgive because we too have done
the same to others easy as a mudslide;
or because anger is a fire that must be fed
and we are too tired to rise and haul a log.
“Soft Like a Reed, Not Hard Like a Cedar”
(Babylonian Talmud- section: Fasting, page: 20ab)
Rabbi Elazar was feeling pompous because he had learned a lot of Torah. In so doing he forgot himself and insulted a stranger by calling him, “ugly.” Having received a rebuke from the stranger and recognizing the pain he cause, Rabbi Elazar humbled himself before the stranger, apologized and begged forgiveness.
The stranger was initially reluctant to accept Rabbi Elazar’s apology. However, he eventually did so on the grounds that Rabbi Elazar change his ways and not act in
the same manner again. In agreement RabbiElazar went to the study hall and taught, “One should always be soft like a reed and not hard, or proud, like a cedar.”
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