Forgiveness and the Scent of a Violet

I'm thinking about forgiveness tonight. I wonder what it means and whether it's possible. I've thought about it before, talked about it with my students in the context of collective tragedies. It's an idea that distresses me, one over which I have been known to agonize as I consider, at times, asking someone for forgiveness, and at others being asked for forgiveness.

What if we cannot forget?

Forgiveness--at least, what we understand to be forgiveness--can occur only in the case of two people. One person who is wronged has the option, or the opportunity, to forgive the person who violated the friendship (or acquaintance or relationship) in some way. I cannot, in other words, forgive the woman who spoke unkindly to my sister; only my sister can forgive that woman.

It is in this sense that, in Judaism, the only unforgiveable sin is that of murder. Why? Because the person who has the grievance is no longer here to offer forgiveness. This is, of course, why all of the talk that surfaced in the post-1945 years about Jews needing to "forgive" the Nazis for atrocities they committed during the Holocaust is ridiculous. The witnesses to these atrocities--the drowned, as both Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben would say--are absent.

I have found that it is so easy to talk about forgiveness in this context--in the great big context that trumps all others. There is a formula: perpetrator + no victim = no forgiveness. It is not so simple when it comes to, well, the simpler things--the daily betrayals that we enact and receive, sometimes without thinking twice.

When I was very young, I remember reading out of some book of sweet little sayings that I had discovered in one of my mother's bookcases. I remember coming across one little saying that seemed to speak to my unsophisticated little self: "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that crushes it." I loved that saying for some reason. I took a pair of scissors and, when my mother wasn't looking, snipped that little passage right out of her book, pressing my neat little paper square of wisdom between the pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which I was also reading at the time.

I named my favorite doll Violet. The one who has been crushed. One day I looked at Violet, the homemade rag doll, and I took those same scissors and cut off all of her mahogany yarn hair. I cut it down to the scalp. And then I laid down next to her and took a nap, yearning for her sweetness.

As I grew older, I remember time and time again finding that little square of paper in various books. Each time I discovered it, I would move it to a new book, never understanding why I kept it. The last time I disovered it, I was in my senior year of college. Suddenly my eyes took in its silliness, and I felt embarrassed about having loved those words for so many years. I had saved it because of the sweetness I had perceived in it--I could virtually smell that crushed flower's scent in my nostrils.

Did it give me some unconscious license to metaphorically smash others, expecting that they would reward me with sweetness?

But there is no sweetness in betrayal, nor in the forgiveness of betrayal. And yet we are compelled to make everything sweet. We don't want to consider that the heel that crushes the violet will keep walking, smashing everything it comes into contact with, until the sweet scent of forgiveness is no longer discernable.

If this thought becomes debilitating, I revert to thinking about forgiveness in the context of responsibility, something that we see emerge throughout the Talmud. Is it my responsibility to forgive someone who betrays me? And what if I betray someone else--is it their responsibility to forgive me if I am penitent? And if they don't? Must I forgive their incapacities? One wonders how many layers make up the bittersweet bread of forgiveness.

And, of course, one also wonders what happens to love in all of this.