How Religious Ritual Makes It More, Not Less, Meaningful to Seek Forgiveness

Oct. 16 2017

In Anger and Forgiveness, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum criticizes Judeo-Christian notions of repentance and forgiveness on the grounds that they for place excessive emphasis on formulaic statements and rituals. Shalom Carmy, although acknowledging the merit of “some of the pitfalls she sees in the standard framework of forgiveness and atonement,” takes others of her assumptions to task:

[W]hen Nussbaum calls religious repentance “anxious and joyless,” I don’t recognize the experience as my own. To be sure, the classical Jewish texts she [cites] are prescriptive or hortatory. They set down formal requirements for contrition, repentance, and atonement, devoting relatively little attention to particular interpersonal dynamics. If this is all there is to it, one is left with mere ritual; abrupt, often sullen apologies; and perfunctory, compulsory grants of pardon, like the shallow remorse expected of small children. But when we put away childish things, we discover that legal requirements create the room for a variety of fine-tuned realizations. . . .

Ritual, in fact, provides a structure for the sorts of deeply human encounters Nussbaum cherishes. People who are graceful in apology and, even more so, people who are gracious in forgiving devote enormous attention to preparing encounters of reconciliation, seeking the right words and the right moment for those words, trying to anticipate obstacles and unexpected sensitivities, working hard to minimize the unavoidable pain, embarrassment, and awkwardness on all sides. . . . As with music, the moral and spiritual beauty of genuine reconciliation looks effortless because this difficult and often painful feat is the result of relentless preliminary work.

Is this dependence upon ritual, formulas, and law “anxious”? Yes, in the sense that all creativity that really matters is anxious, precisely because we cannot predict the other person’s response or even micromanage our own. Anxious, because the risk of failure is inseparable from the task of getting it right. Anxious, because the difficulties Nussbaum warns about may doom to failure our efforts to apologize and to forgive, no matter how punctilious our conformity to the law.

This is all the more true today. Our therapeutic and politicized society preserves only jumbled fragments of religious practice. Alienated from their roots in man’s relationship to God, apology, confession, and other instruments of healing and redemption are more and more likely to succumb to the flaws she detects.

Read more at First Things

More about: Atonement, Forgiveness, George Eliot, Judaism, Religion & Holidays

Expand Gaza into Sinai

Feb. 11 2025

Calling the proposal to depopulate Gaza completely (if temporarily) “unworkable,” Peter Berkowitz makes the case for a similar, but more feasible, plan:

The United States along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE should persuade Egypt by means of generous financial inducements to open the sparsely populated ten-to-fifteen miles of Sinai adjacent to Gaza to Palestinians seeking a fresh start and better life. Egypt would not absorb Gazans and make them citizens but rather move Gaza’s border . . . westward into Sinai. Fences would be erected along the new border. The Israel Defense Force would maintain border security on the Gaza-extension side, Egyptian forces on the other. Egypt might lease the land to the Palestinians for 75 years.

The Sinai option does not involve forced transfer of civilian populations, which the international laws of war bar. As the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other partners build temporary dwellings and then apartment buildings and towns, they would provide bus service to the Gaza-extension. Palestinian families that choose to make the short trip would receive a key to a new residence and, say, $10,000.

The Sinai option is flawed. . . . Then again, all conventional options for rehabilitating and governing Gaza are terrible.

Read more at RealClear Politics

More about: Donald Trump, Egypt, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula