BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
By Rich Barlow, Globe Staff, 1/4/2003
eeking forgiveness has become the rage. Cardinal Bernard F. Law asked for it. So did US Senator Trent Lott. But forgiveness is a complex thing. Some Christians consider it a renewable resource, unlimited in supply. After all, Jesus forgave his killers and left us an aphorism about turning the other cheek. Yet Judaism and Islam, which consider justice as important as forgiveness, teach that there’s no obligation to forgive when a wrongdoer hasn’t repented, says Solomon Schimmel in his new book, ”Wounds Not Healed by Time” (Oxford University Press). Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, once withheld forgiveness from a dying SS officer who’d asked it from him in a wartime concentration camp, notes Schimmel, a professor at Hebrew College in Newton.
His book discusses when to forgive, and how, and what to do when you can’t repent to a victim. He mixes religion, psychology – and poetry. Schimmel reprints a poignant Thomas Hardy work in which the guilt-stricken poet imagines his dead wife addressing him as he visits her grave: ”Now I am dead you come to me/In the moonlight, comfortless;/Ah, what would I have given alive/To win such tenderness!”
