Three times.

            Three times we are supposed to ask for forgiveness.

            And after that?

Lo ratzah m’neecho v’holech lo v’zeh sh’lo machah hu ha-chotay.

            “And if he remains obstinate, he may leave him to himself and pass on, for the sin then rests upon him who refuses to forgive.”  This is the teaching of the Spanish born Talmud scholar,  Moses Maimonides, (1135-1204), in his seminal work, the Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, 2:9.

            It is true that we have to try to seek forgiveness first, especially at Yom Kippur.   Let me take you back  1,000 years before Maimonides, aka The Rambam.  In the Mishna, Tractate Yoma 8:9, the early Rabbis living up in the Galilee, wrote: “For transgressions between adam v’HaMakom, between a person and God, Yom Kippur atones.

However, for transgressions between adam v’chavero, between a person and another, Yom  Kippur does not atone until he appeases the other person.”

            But Rambam puts a limit on it.  Three times.  Why did he have to do that.  Why wouldn’t a person grant forgiveness after three attempts?  Last Kol Nidrei, I presented a sermon on how to give a good apology.  Saying things like: “I’m sorry you feel that way,” doesn’t count.  Nor does giving a zillion excuses, or blaming the other person, as in “well when you say such-and-such, you drive me crazy, and well, I can’t help myself.”  So perhaps an apology is not accepted because there is something fundamentally wrong with the delivery, or the lack of sincerity behind it.

            Or going back to Maimonides’ Hilchot Teshuva, Laws of Repentance, perhaps you were truly sorry, but you did not make restitution.  I can be sorry as anything, but if I hit your car, creating damage, and I do not pay to get it repaired, then I have not made you whole again.  Although I DID apologize beautifully, my teshuva, my repentance is incomplete.

            But, for argument’s sake, let’s say I apologized beautifully, as in, I took responsibility for what I did, I named the behavior clearly, and perhaps I even promised to do my best not to repeat the offense, showing over time through my behavior that I was keeping this promise, AND I made restitution.  BUT you STILL don’t forgive me --- what’s going on?  I think that’s what Maimonides had in mind when after three times, the sin transfers from the perpetrator to the victim.

Why would a person hold back forgiveness?

            I was driving back from Temple Beth El, last June, on my 27-minute drive up the Kirkwood Highway from Possum Park Road, to my home in North Wilmington.  And as I am want to do during this time, I tuned in to my radio friend,  fellow Member of The Tribe, Ira Flatow, host of NPR’s Science Friday. On this particular episode, he was interviewing James Kimmel, Jr.,  lawyer, clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale, and author of the new book, The Science of Revenge-Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It.

 In his book, he studies the evolutionary roots of revenge, the neuroscience behind why it feels so good, and how forgiveness, even imagined-forgiveness can short circuit the addictive nature of revenge, replacing one pleasure with another.

            Why wouldn’t a person grant forgiveness after receiving a sincere and complete apology … THREE times!?  One answer is that when we perceive a real or imagined grievance in our minds, which is a sense of injustice or humiliation, shame, betrayal, victimization of any kind, this activates the pain network inside our brain, the anterior insula. And when that occurs, the brain wants to restore homeostasis. To do that, it needs to add pleasure back into the circuitry.

            And here’s the kicker: the brain then responds to said grievance by inflicting pain upon other people.  And it turns out that this seeking out revenge is addictive, like risky drugs, unhealthy gambling, malicious gossip, or other uncontrolled habitual behaviors which are bad for us.  And it’s EVEN contagious, especially with the rise of social media.

Twenty percent, twenty percent, writes James Kimmel, suffer from addiction, from gambling to alcohol, and that’s the same percentage of people who seek out revenge pleasures and revenge gratification such that their prefrontal cortex is shut down and they are no longer able to control their impulse to harm others.

            If you’ve looked at the face of someone who has not been forgiven after trying multiple times, you know the pain they have experienced.  Here, I speak from experience.  Like most Jewish families, I have what I perceive to be dysfunctional members. 

One such cousin, someone I adored since childhood, refused to forgive me because I would not side with her by rejecting the friendship of a sibling who she felt had done her wrong.  She quoted Holocaust survivor and author Elie Weisel, comparing her sibling to Hitler, and me to someone who was guilty as the Nazis, by not condemning the evil.  Whew.  But I loved the cousin, so I tried again, and again, to ask forgiveness. I tried to explain that though I did not cut off her sister, I still loved and cared about her, and the pain she experienced.  And I think the more I begged for her forgiveness and to restore our relationship, the more pleasure it gave her to deny me. 

            I think that’s what Maimonides found sinful. By the way, James Kimmel says that accepting forgiveness, whether the trespasser deserves to be forgiven or not, does three things for the victim:

            First, it shuts down the pain network, the anterior insula. So instead of just covering up that pain of your grievance for a few minutes with a dopamine high, it actually stops the pain.

            Second, it also shuts down the pleasure and reward circuitry of the addictive cycle. So you’re no longer craving revenge.

            And third, forgiveness reactivates the prefrontal cortex so that you now have self-control again. 

            And still, some people refuse to forgive because they don’t understand the brain science of forgiveness, and the dopamine high they get from bearing the grudge is just too addictive and pleasurable to abandon.

            What on earth are we supposed to do when they just won’t forgive us? A congregant recently saw me bending myself in knots over someone who was upset with me, and she gave me a book to read as a homework assignment and perhaps preparation for tonight’s sermon.

The book? The LET THEM Theory, by self-help guru, Mel Robbins.  They don’t want to forgive us?  In two simple words: LET THEM! 

            Mel Robbins spends three hundred pages saying we are deluding ourselves to thinking we can control the thoughts and feelings other people.  We simply can’t.  And when we try, over and over again, we are simply squandering our power and our own happiness.  She gives many memorable examples from her own life, to bring the point home. I will share two.

            The first, involves a devastating FaceBook (remember – beware of social media my friends), experience on her couch, where she sees wonderful photos from a vacation taken by her neighborhood girl friends to which she was not invited. 

“Brunch. Dancing. Shopping. Laughter. Swimming. Cocktails.”

First, those FaceBook photos made Mel was SO mad.  How could they have been so nasty to exclude her?!  Then she began to think, what did she do to make them exclude her, and how could she make it up to them?  Then, upon further reflection, she realized that the friendships she had were from a time when all their kids were younger.

As their children had grown up, Mel Robbin’s speaking and traveling schedule had made interactions with these neighborhood friends less frequent.  She had grown apart, while these other women had remained friends.  And she finally came to the conclusion: “let them.” 

Let them enjoy their time together.  Let them get away from their household duties and have some fun. You’re not giving up or walking away by saying let them. Rather, you are making an active, empowered choice to release control you never really had. Of the hurt she felt being left out, she reasoned: “no matter how much I tried to analyze the situation or how many ways I could try to control or fix it, nothing I did would change what had happened.”

            With those two words, “let them,” the knot in her chest began to loosen. The pressure to fix the situation faded, and she realized something that changed everything: Their weekend away had nothing to do with her.  It wasn’t personal.  They weren’t plotting against her. They weren’t making a statement about her worth.  And even if they were? LET THEM!

            The other story Mel recounts in her book, which stuck with me personally, a kid who has lived his life trying to please his mother, was the time Mel met her future husband, Chris.  Mel was ecstatic and madly in love.  And when he proposed she was over the moon.  At the time her mom, one of the most important people in her life, was NOT as excited as Mel had hoped.

So, Mel had this conversation with her where she told her mom that she wanted her to be excited for her. And, get this, Mel asked her mom to act as though she was the one who chose Chris for her.

And Mom said: “But I didn’t choose him for you, and if it were up to me, I wouldn’t have, so I am not going to act like I did.”

Ouch!

At the time, Mel was SO angry but she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to cut her mom out of her life, but she didn’t know how to handle the situation.   Mel went on to marry Chris, build a family with Chris, AND she continued to have a relationship with her mom. But it was impossible for Mel to let go of that conversation.

Don’t worry, this story is going to have a happy ending.

It was hard for Mel to simply apply her “Let Them” theory to her own mother. “Let my mom disapprove of my life mate.”  That’s a tough pill to swallow. Happily, over the next 30 years, things definitely improved.

Mel’s mom used to joke, saying: “Chris, you’re my favorite son-in-law.”  In truth, Chris was her only son-in-law.  But the change Mel was seeking came from, you guessed it, from Mel herself.

Mel used a technique called “Frame of Reference.”  she put herself in her mother’s shoes.  You see, Mel was from the Midwest.  Chris was from the East Coast and marrying him meant that she would probably settle in the East, raise her kids there, and never move back home to the Midwest or live near her mom and dad ever again.

And that’s exactly what had happened to Mel’s mother.  She left the family farm in upstate New York when she was 17 to attend college in Kansas, where she met Mel’s future dad. They fell in love, and by the time she was 20 and had completed two years of college, they were married. They had Mel, Dad started medical school, and they made their lives far away from where Mel’s mom had been raised.  And now history had repeated itself with Mel and Chris.

From Mel’s mother’s perspective, of course she would not have chosen East Coast Chris for Mel.  She would have chosen a fellow Midwesterner.  Understand, nothing changed outwardly for Chris, Mel, or Mel’s mother.  But by Mel taking time and effort to understand her mother’s Frame of Reference, Mel came to understand her mother’s reaction from “Mom doesn’t support me” to ”Mom’s scared of losing her daughter.”

            Sigh.  It’s hard to say LET THEM.  Especially in the face of parental disapproval. But perhaps by adding the Frame of Reference exercise to LET THEM, it becomes possible to make our peace with people whose opinions we cannot change.

A lot of the work of Yom Kippur is about coming to a place of inner peace so we can face the New Year with renewed strength and resilience. Which brings us back to people whose good opinion we cannot seem to win.

            And so it is with people who refuse to forgive us.  It is important for us to keep in mind what is really important and what is NOT really important.  In the thick of a disagreement, including an apology that is rejected, we can lose perspective, and feel that this acceptance of our apology is the most important thing.  But even at Yom Kippur, it’s not the most important thing.  Teshuvah is something we do for us, and for God, not just for other people. And more important still, we cannot control how other people think.  Again, our tradition says you need to try to ask for forgiveness, you have to try to make restitution.  But after you have sincerely done the best you can --- you cannot let their rejection rob you of your own self-worth.

            Inspired by the Let Them theory, let ME provide you with a Mel Robbins inspired Viddui confessional prayer for Yom Kippur:

            For the sin of wasting our brain space on the million tiny things that don’t matter.

            And for the sin of letting the fear of what people might think paralyze us.

            For the sin of tiptoeing around everyone else’s emotions

            And for the sin of letting other people’s success devastate us.

            For the sin of making our social life everyone else’s responsibility.

            And for the sin of trying to change people who don’t want to change.

            For the sin of trying to rescue those who will not accept help.

            And for the sin of wasting our time trying to get people to love us.

And let’s conclude with a modern version of Ha Yom – today!!

            Ha Yom: It’s time to use every second of your day for all the amazing things you know you are capable of.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to go after your dreams boldly, relentlessly, and unapologetically.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to fiercely protect your own peace.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to get to work.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to build the most incredible friendships you’ve ever had.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to let adults be adults.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to let others heal how they need to heal.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to choose the love you deserve.

            Ha Yom: It’s time to reclaim your power and reclaim your life.

In summary, by agreeing to say Let Them, you can then say Let Me.  Please God, in this New Year 5786, may you enjoy a better life.  A life that makes you proud.  A life that makes you happy.  A life where you use your precious, God-given energy and talent to enjoy every single moment you will have.

            V’nomar, and let US say, amen.