Pardon Me

This fall marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most famous, consequential, and controversial pardons of American political history: Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974. As many may know and some may recall, in August of 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace when it became clear that he would be impeached for obstructing justice in the Watergate scandal. Vice President Ford assumed the presidency.

Having begun his term with the promise that “our long national nightmare is over,” Ford issued a “free, full, and absolute pardon” to Nixon for any crimes he may have committed as president. Ford explained that investigations and prosecutions would further polarize and paralyze the nation, in his words, “Ugly passions would again be roused . . . and the credibility of our free institutions would again be challenged at home and abroad.” 

Ford’s hopes to heal the nation were met with fierce backlash. Some speculated dirty politics, that a corrupt bargain had been made between Ford and Nixon. In practice, Ford’s pardon had the opposite effect than he intended. Rather than rebuilding trust in government after Vietnam and Watergate, he undercut it further. Ford’s approval rating plummeted and arguably, fifty years later, has yet to recover. 

I raise the anniversary of Ford’s pardon of Nixon neither to relitigate a dark chapter of presidential history nor, Heaven forfend, to apply its lessons to present-day presidential politics. I raise it because this week we are in Aseret Y’mei Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, and today is Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As long as rabbis have been rabbis, this Shabbat has been devoted to the themes of sin, atonement, pardon, reconciliation and forgiveness. During these days, even more intensely than in the month of Elul, we conduct an audit of our souls, heshbon ha-nefesh, reviewing the hurts we have suffered and the hurts we have inflicted. We want to enter the year fresh, closing the book on the year gone by and determined to write a new one. This is the week we extend pardons and hope to receive them from others. Ford’s pardon of Nixon is a case study, but a negative one. A wrong was committed, and a pardon was granted, but the intended healing never happened. Ford suffered, Nixon continued to be held accountable, and the nation was further divided. It is a cautionary tale to consider as we think about the interpersonal work we face in the week ahead.

So what does our tradition say about granting pardon? There is no straightforward answer. Best as I can tell, there are at least two different, very different, positions in our tradition. For the purposes of today, I will call them the anti-pardon and the pro-pardon position. 

The first position, the anti-pardon position, is best represented by the twelfth-century rabbi, physician, and philosopher, Moses Maimonides, known as Rambam. In his Laws of Repentance, Maimonides identifies the steps by which a person performs sincere and authentic repentance. I am not going to list each and every step, but they include acknowledgement that one has done wrong, confession of one’s wrongdoing, expression of remorse, resolution not to offend again, compensation of the victim, sincere request of forgiveness from the victim, avoidance of the conditions that caused the first offense, and acting differently when confronted again with the same situation in which the original offense happened. 

Each of these steps is worthy of a sermon of its own – but for the purposes of today, there are two key takeaway points. First, Judaism absolutely believes in forgiveness – in seeking forgiveness and in granting forgiveness. It is not easy, it is a multi-step process, but when seeking forgiveness is done right – with integrity and with sincerity – people can and should be forgiven. In fact, if an individual engages in all the necessary steps of contrition, and asks for forgiveness three times, and the offended party still refuses to grant forgiveness – then that person becomes the sinner. The universe, the rabbis teach, cannot be sustained without forgiveness.

The second take-home point from Maimonides’s laws of repentance is that if an individual has not engaged in the above steps thoroughly and with sincerity, then we do not grant pardon. A pardon is not forgiveness, and it is certainly not reconciliation. Be it a pardon from a president, a governor, or the person whose toe you just stepped on, the violation still stands; only the punishment for the offense is curtailed. A pardon is a legal act; forgiveness is a moral one. Insofar as it applies to Ford and Nixon, the pardon fell short on several fronts. To the best of my knowledge, Nixon never admitted to his offense, never mind showing remorse. If anything, he was emboldened. For lack of an apology, the aggrieved party – the American people – lacked the instrument by which forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation could follow. In our own lives, we have all received, and perhaps given a non-apology apology. “I am sorry if you were offended.” “I was just doing what everyone else was doing.” “Mistakes were made.” Non-apology apologies come in a million forms, but their lackluster and inadequate effect is one and the same. To take a current example: the all-time hit leader of baseball Pete Rose. With Rose’s passing last week, the question of whether he will ever be admitted into baseball’s hall of fame is now a posthumous one. With his having denied the allegations that he gambled on baseball for so many years, the impediments to his receiving pardon for his offenses were, I believe, in large part self-created. No admission, no confession, no remorse, no stated resolve to reform – and thus no healing. Maybe God, being God – and we will get to this point – can pardon human shortcomings, but according to this first view, human beings do not pardon. Rather, we grant forgiveness, when, and only when, forgiveness is earned.

On a certain level, our analysis could end here, and for many of us, it does. But there is another dimension to the question, represented not by Maimonides but by the Talmud itself. On more than one occasion, our rabbis teach that a person who overlooks another person’s shortcomings, ma’avir al midotav, will have their own shortcomings overlooked. It is an approach to wrongdoing that is a bit more realpolitik than the first – perhaps less than a full act of forgiveness and reconciliation but still courageous and, sometimes, altogether necessary. The ability to identify and acknowledge the failings of another and then to move past them. It does not mean excusing or condoning a misdeed, but it does mean making the willed decision to not define a life or a relationship by that one act. It means to let the future reign over the past. As one congregant said to me the other day: “In golf, as in life, it’s the next shot that matters.” I don’t play golf, but I think I get the point. You can spend your whole life replaying the gaffes and grievances of the past, or you can decide to move forward and get on with the business of living. 

As human beings, we are by definition imperfect. As sure as we are that others have fallen short of our hopes, we can be doubly sure that we have fallen short of other people’s expectations. There are times, undoubtedly, when the sins and shortcomings of others are dealbreakers, a wrong so hurtful or so revealing of a person’s character that it simply cannot be overlooked. But sometimes that shortcoming serves to reveal that a person – like all people, like yourself – suffers from the shared condition of being human. The Talmudic teaching reminds us that we should treat others, and thus forgive others, as we ourselves would want to be treated and forgiven. Besides, when we hold onto that grudge, that slight, that resentment, it is we, not they, who are suffering. In the words of the late, great Rabbi Harold Kushner, “Forgiveness is not a matter of exonerating people who have hurt you. They may not deserve exoneration. Forgiveness means cleansing your soul of the bitterness of ‘what might have been,’ ‘what should have been,’ and ‘what didn’t have to happen.’. . . There are,” continued Kushner, “perhaps no sadder people than men and women who have a grievance against the world because of something that happened years ago and have let that memory sour their view of life ever since.” 

In other words, in simpler words, there are times when we just have to let it go. We are, by definition, the central character of the tales we tell: the email that wasn’t returned, the party to which we were not invited, the thank-you we never received, the exchange that bruised our feelings. We walk this earth believing that we are party to the whole truth, when we are really in possession of only one viewpoint – our own. Our interactions with other people are like two globes that touch at only one point and ever so briefly. None of us know what is going on in another person’s universe or another person’s soul. Most of us, myself included, aren’t entirely sure of what is going on in our own souls. But rather than making an allowance for the other side, an allowance for another person’s imperfections, an allowance that there is more about the story that we don’t know than we do know, we write that other person off because they have fallen short of a standard of perfection which we ourselves could never attain. We allow our hearts to become cluttered by the petty grievances of the past, losing sight of what really matters, where our focus really should be, and the fresh start that is our due. In short, we should aspire to treat others not just as we would want to be treated, but the way we pray that God will treat us during this time of year. We atone, we repent, we apologize, but in the divine viewfinder none of us stands without blemish. Knowing that we are not entirely deserving, we seek God’s merciful pardon, asking that our shortcomings be weighed against our virtues and our misdeeds against our merits. The least we could do, it would seem to me, is to extend like-minded pardons to others – for their sake and for ours.

On this Shabbat Shuvah, if there is a relationship of yours in need of repair, I urge you to set aside time in the week ahead to pick up the phone, have that coffee, share that beer, go for that walk. Seek to understand, seek to be understood. Admit failing, ask for forgiveness, and if asked to do so, consider granting forgiveness. And should it be the case that forgiveness is neither sought, nor necessarily deserved, then I ask you to ask yourself the simple question of for whom you are holding your grudge, and to what end you are carrying around your resentment. If nothing else, this season is meant to remind us that life is just too delicate and too fleeting to journey through it weighted down by past bitterness. May we greet and treat this new year with the sweet promise of release and renewal, judging people with generosity and mercy, as we ourselves would ask to be judged by others and by our God in heaven.