Forgiving repeat offenders

One of the challenges with forgiving people is that there is a tendency to forgive but not forget. I forgive you, but I’m not gonna do you any favors; I’ll forgive you, but I won’t invite you for shabbes; I’ll forgive you, but I’m not gonna smile at you, not gonna shake your hand, not gonna go out of my way to do you any favors.
The Talmud defines grudges very strictly.
Torah: prohibitions on revenge & grudge
Revenge: You don’t lend me your shovel; I wont lend you mine
Grudge: You don’t lend; I do because I’m not like you
What is the grudge?
Is it that I say “I’m not like you?” That’s actually revenge: saying anything negative is a way we take revenge
So the grudge is holding a negative attitude in the first place, even though I don’t act on it—I do lend my shovel, and I’m not nasty about it. It’s the fact that I held on to what you did in my mind.
So how do you do this with someone who has hurt you repeatedly? How can you possibly love such a person?
The Torah’s prescription is that we rebuke people-we tell them what they did that hurt us. Hopefully, they apologize, and we forgive them.
But what if they’ve done it before, and apologized before?
The commentators say, on the 13 attributes, that God forgives us repeatedly. Every Yom Kippur, we stand before God, and apologize for the same weakness we apologized for last Yom Kippur. Levi Yitzchak once said to himself, but Levi, you said last year you’d be better, and he answered, but this year I really mean it. And every year God forgives us. So to imitate God means to forgive people repeatedly, even for the same offense.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t protect yourself. Abusers will abuse and apologize in an endless cycle, and the only way to protect yourself sometimes is to remove yourself from an abusive situation.
But even when people mean it, even when they really try, it might take time, even years, for them to change. And our trasdition calls us to have the same patience with them as God has with us.
What if we say it’s no use rebuking them, they’ll never change, they’ll never listen? The Talmud says that in that situation, it’s a mitzvah to be quiet. But it’s still a mitzvah to love them, unless they are a truly evil person. And in that case, we need to forgive them even without an apology, just as God is patient with us, keeping us alive even when we don’t apologize to him.
I invite all of us, over the next few days, to clean up all baggage with people, to forgive people even who don’t deserve it, so we can all enter Yom Kippur with a truly clean slate.