Save "After a Bad Breakup, Must I Ask Forgiveness From My Ex? - Episode 41"
After a Bad Breakup, Must I Ask Forgiveness From My Ex? - Episode 41
Rav Avi: Ethan, did you hear that we were named in Moment Magazine as one of the top ten Jewish podcasts?
Rav Eitan: I did, this was, like, my proudest moment as a Jewish son, showing that article to my mother.
Rav Eitan: I was gonna say, I actually found out from my mother, who texted me to say, did you know you are in Moment Magazine?
Rav Avi: Very exciting. So now we've gotta do 'em proud.
Rav Eitan: It's true, we've really made it in the world.
Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, and I'm here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. If you enjoy listening to Responsa Radio, please consider making a donation to Mechon Hadar at www.mechonhadar.org, or Jewish Public Media at jpmedia.co. Alright, this is a timely question. "With the month of Elul nearly upon us, I have begun to think about the work of teshuva ahead, and specifically about those people I have harmed over the past year from whom I would like to ask forgiveness. One person in particular comes to mind: a partner I broke up with recently. I'm no longer in contact with him after our traumatic break-up. There was hurt and fault on both sides. In the future, I have no intention or desire to open the lines of communication. Am I obligated to apologize to my ex-partner? Are there any exceptions that take the circumstances of the relationship or the context of the apology into account?"
Rav Eitan: That's a tough question. It sounds like a sad and difficult situation too. If I'm reading between the lines right, it sounds to me also like there's some sense that the other party didn't necessarily fully apologize for things they did wrong, and part of the concern here is a sort of like emotional reciprocity question of can I come forward, they haven't come forward, et cetera. So it sounds very tough. I mean, I think the questions that rise up out of this are how much, you know, when you're in a complicated relationship where both sides have done something wrong, how much are you obligated to kind of forgive that other person, and how much are you obligated to apologize for the things that you've done before you feel like they have apologized for what they've done. And particularly the way the questioner formulates it here, where there's a sense of opening myself up to even having an exchange at all is potentially scary and exposes me to some kind of hurt.
Rav Avi: Yeah, I think there are a lot of layers to this question. I see in this question an issue of do we actually have to do this work of teshuva with people we don't want to have an ongoing relationship with, or can we cut our losses and go the other way? I think there's also an element here of wondering if making an apology is in and of itself offering forgiveness in some sense, that it sounds like this person is not ready to do, to say is there a way for me to ask forgiveness without offering forgiveness on its own, when that person hasn't reached out to me?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think that's right. I think, you know, as I was thinking about this question, one of the things I think is fair to say is that the entire point of reconciliation, of apologizing, of forgiving people, all of this stuff which is supposed to happen before Yom Kippur, and we'll get to that in a second, is to come to a place of greater healing and wholeness. And I think we can say as an overarching rule that I want to dig down on in a bit is to the extent that an apology will only lead to a place of greater brokenness, then it's hard to say that it makes sense to actually mandate that at that moment. But I think we have to kind of take that apart a little. This is one of those questions where I think, you know, a lot of the questions that we take up, you can sort of go through various codes and legal opinions over the ages and yeah, you're distilling the values, but you can sort of have a kind of clear legal discussion of what's going on. This is one that strikes me that it might benefit even more from a little bit of a narrative analysis. That is to say, could I find various Talmudic stories or other sort of rabbinic narrative efforts to take on a situation like this that might inform me to how to proceed?
And so here, I thought that there was one story from the Talmud in Tractate Yoma, which I think is potentially helpful, and I thought maybe we'd kind of learn it together and talk about it. It's a story about Rav, one of the most famous sages. And he is sitting in front of his teacher, Rabbi, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, and he's doing some kind of work with, like, teaching verses from the Bible. It's not clear if it's from the Prophets, from Nevi'im, Ketuvim, but he's sitting there and basically giving some kind of Bible lesson. And various sages come in in the middle, like five minutes in after he's started -- Rabbi Chiya comes in, and Bar Kappara then comes in five minutes later, and Rabbi Shimon v'Rabbi comes in five minutes later. Anyone who's ever taught a class knows exactly what this is like.
Rav Avi: I was gonna say, apparently it's an ancient problem!
Rav Eitan: It's an ancient problem, and you're always kind of trying to figure out, okay, do I, like, start all over again because now everyone's here, or do I just let the people who have come in, it's too bad for them, they came late, they'll have to pick up what they missed? And the first three times this happens, Rav starts over, he begins the whole lesson over and is like, okay, fine, we're all here. The fourth time, Rabbi Chanina bar Chama comes in, and Rav basically exclaims, what is this? Am I gonna go back to the beginning again? And he doesn't. And Rabbi Chanina gets extremely angry, and it's very clear that there's a total breakdown in the relationship between Rav and Rabbi Chanina. We're then told that Rav, 13 years in a row on erev Yom Kippur, goes to Rabbi Chanina to try to ask for forgiveness, and Rabbi Chanina year after year refuses to forgive him.
Rav Avi: Wow.
Rav Eitan: Alright? That's the story. Now, the Talmud then picks a few things apart here of what happened. First of all, they're surprised at Rav. They say, how could Rav have gone 13 times? Don't we have this other tradition that if you ask someone for forgiveness you shouldn't go more than three times?
Rav Avi: Right, he added a decade.
Rav Eitan: Exactly, it's amazing, right, it's a great point, right, it's not just 13 times, it's 13 years. It seems so way over the top. And then the Talmud gives this marvelously ambiguous answer where it says Rav shaneh, Rav is different, which Rashi reads as the man Rav was different, he went way above and beyond the call of what was expected from him. It's true, normal people we only expect three times, but Rav just felt he had an extraordinary obligation. And Rambam reads Rav as one's master or one's teacher, one's rav is different, and says no, Rabbi Chanina was actually one of Rav's teachers, and therefore Rav had this sort of over-the-top obligation to go even 13 times, the notion is almost no limit for how far you have to go in the context of that relationship.
Rav Avi: Ah, so the power dynamic there, even though in the moment Rav was the teacher and Rabbi Chanina was the student, in life it was reversed.
Rav Eitan: Exactly. So, okay. We'll leave that ambiguity, but that accounts for Rav's behavior in one way or another, why he went to such lengths for 13 years to ask for forgiveness. Then the Talmud says, how could Rabbi Chanina have done this? How could he have rebuffed him for 13 years? And we know from other statements that one of the character traits that a person is supposed to have is to be ma'avir al midotav, to let things go. Basically to let things slide, and not sort of have, you know, wrongs that other people have done to you, remain with you indefinitely. So then the Talmud says the following: well, this case is actually different. Rabbi Chanina had a dream, had had a dream, where he saw Rav on the top of a date-palm tree. And it's well-known, says the Talmud, that anyone who is seen on the top of a date-palm tree, seemingly in a dream, is destined for some kind of leadership or greatness. And Rabbi Chanina said to himself, from the fact that I've seen this image, it's very clear that Rav is going to come into a position of power, and the commentators all add here, and what's the position of power? It's my current position as the leading rabbinic authority in Eretz Yisrael.
Rav Avi: Ooh!
Rav Eitan: And Rav is gonna come up and replace me.
Rav Avi: It's very Macbeth-esque.
Rav Eitan: Very much so. And Rabbi Chanina, therefore, refused to be placated, refused to mend the relationship, not because he was emotionally incapable of letting go, but because he wanted basically to chase Rav out of Eretz Yisrael and have him pursue his rabbinic career in Bavel, in Babylonia. Now, there's actually two readings of the story: one reads that as Rabbi Chanina doing it for self-protection, he's afraid basically of being replaced by his student; the other is that he's doing it in the interest of his student, which is to say he realizes that he'll never be replaced, in his own lifetime, and if Rav is forced to grow up as a scholar in his shadow, he'll never reach his full potential, so wanting the best for his student Rav to become the real mara d'atra, the real master of the place where he is, he essentially drives him away, knowing that Rav will never voluntarily leave, but if he's emotionally estranged from Rabbi Chanina, maybe he'll go and chart his own course in another place.
Rav Avi: That sounds like very passive-aggressive mentoring to me.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and a clear breakdown in communication, or a sense that honest communication wouldn't work.
Rav Avi: Yeah.
Rav Eitan: Alright, so as I said, this is not like a legal text with some clear codification, but it does have, it's a fantastic story that I think has a number of things which maybe we can pick apart in a way that's helpful for this questioner. First of all, what I love about this section is it shows a kind of complex web of relationships and a kind of cycle of inconsiderateness. That is to say, Rav does something wrong in this story, perhaps, when he slights Rabbi Chanina, but he's also being kind of disrespected by the three previous scholars who walked in late to his session and didn't really show him the proper honor. And you can easily see how he would feel I'm not even the baddest actor in this scene that's being cast here, and, you know, that's part of what he may be sort of initially prompted by when he acts in the way that he does. It also shows that Rav goes very far out of his way to request forgiveness, and suggests that there's something laudable about that, while at the same time acknowledging that that is perhaps idiosyncratic either to his personality or to this specific relationship of teacher-student, and that maybe it's not generalizable to everyone else to expect that degree of solicitousness.
Rav Avi: Yeah, although I think one of the things that's most moving to me as I'm listening to this story is actually that timeframe of 13 years. It feels actually much more realistic to me for real pain and real interpersonal conflict than the idea that after three apologies we'll be over it. I think there are many people in the world who have decades-long complicated feuds that sometimes go back even to a single incident or moment, you know, I would venture to guess that probably the person who sent in this question, you know, not only is she not gonna be ready to be over this and completely whole this year; it may take many, many years to get over, you know, what she describes as a traumatic break-up, and that that actually feels very real and very human to me, that very long timeframe that it could take for two people to rebuild. I guess maybe what's unique is that they sort of seem to be like actively working on it, or at least Rav is actively working on it in this story.
Rav Eitan: Right, and that I think is the tough question that really this questioner is asking, which is even if it's the case that we don't always expect that the moment is quite ripe for a full reconciliation, which is what you're pointing to in terms of the length of time here, and this story affirming that, what's the sort of obligation in the interim to begin to hack away at it, and is there sort of an excuse, a legitimate reason for actually just stepping away from it and not, you know, not engaging in that moment? And that's where Rav is not helpful in this story, in the sense that Rav is a pretty clear example of saying yeah, year after year, even after I've been rebuffed 12 times by this person, I still have to go back. But Rabbi Chanina might be helpful, because one of the things that's striking about Rabbi Chanina is his role in this story shows that it's legitimate to think about the ways in which forgiving someone might hurt you or might actually be to their detriment, depending on how you read the story, and that that's a reasonable reason not to forgive them, right? The Talmud fundamentally says, well in this case with this dream and this set of circumstances, but we could come up with others, it can imagine times and places where actually the reasonable thing to do is to say I actually cannot let this go, certainly not at this moment.
And what I might suggest is, I think you can potentially extend that to apologizing as well, not just to forgiving. To the extent that you're worried that apologizing is either going to lead you to be attacked in ways that you can't handle at that moment, like you won't be able to bear the criticism you know will come if you apologize, or to the extent that it's going to lead you to kind of be pressured into accepting an apology from the other person in a kind of, you know, reciprocity of the moment, that you will not feel okay in accepting, and to the extent that those pressures mean that the fear of all of that playing out when you approach this person means that you are not actually coming with a full heart to that moment of really letting it go, because what you're really saying is, well, I might be willing to apologize to this person if they don't say anything that might hurt me, and if they don't ask for an apology in turn, that may actually indicate that you're not actually ready to apologize. And one of the things we know is, right, the Mishnah, when it talks about Yom Kippur is not effective until you've sort of reconciled with your fellow person, until you actually somehow appease and make good with them, that is not fulfilled by just doing a kind of pro-forma I am sorry declaration or note; it has to come from a place of genuine wholeness, of really being able to turn over that page.
And not knowing the full ins and outs of the emotional background of this questioner, it nonetheless sounds like part of the pathos in this question is not really being prepared for come what may in a moment of reaching out to this person, and that may indicate that actually yes, the moment is not yet ripe, and when the moment is not yet ripe, I think it's fair to say that that's not the kind of thing the Mishnah's talking about when it says don't you dare go into Yom Kippur thinking that you can make up for the faults you had in human relationships by just beating your chest a bunch of times; that's meant to apply to cases where you're really ready to move on, you just want to avoid the other person.
Rav Avi: Yeah. I do think what you're saying about having a standard of not apologizing unless you would be able to forgive that person that you're talking to is actually really profound and probably something that relates to almost every, you know, active, conscious teshuva conversation that we're having. Because there are very few instances that are truly one-sided, and usually when you're hurting someone, there was some reason. And even in this, you know, in this Talmud story that you're bringing us the example, it seems clear, you know, in some ways that you are each embarrassed by the situation and maybe the blame shouldn't really have fallen all on Rabbi Chanina who, you know, was just the last straw and not really the, maybe the seed of the problem, but to really hold ourselves to that standard of could we forgive before we apologize. You know, the other end of the scale is, you know, are we gonna eliminate all apologies? Like do we really have to say, I'm gonna be totally emotionally reconciled before I go to talk to someone? Because that seems also a little prohibitive to me.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So I think that concern is real and legitimate. I don't think we want to go to a place where people don't have to work on their own piece of a broken relationship just because they're not fully ready to completely let go the other side of the broken relationship, but the question is, can you find a way to essentially say a person is not obligated to go into what they are afraid will be a kind of abusive interaction of reconciliation, while nonetheless insisting that they work on something to make the situation better. And here one model I'll offer is I think it is appropriate to say to someone in a situation like this, you have an obligation to try, to the extent that you can, to let go of your anger at this person, not carry that around -- actually I think that's also the healthy thing to try to do in terms of one's own wellbeing -- and if you can do that, if it's at all possible, to forgive them ultimately for what they did wrong, even if you are not in a place where you feel you can open up the direct line of communication with them to either apologize or accept that from them directly.
And here we have a really interesting model, which is the thing that many Jews say before they go to sleep at night as part of the kriat shema l'hamita, the, you know, the recitation of the shema at night, which is accompanied by all sorts of closing-of-day prayers. And one of the traditional opening paragraphs there has the person declare before they go to sleep every night, hareni mochel l'chol mishehi chis v'chitnitoti. I completely absolve anyone who today -- because this is traditionally said daily -- has angered me or offended me in any way. And one of the things that's striking about this declaration, which then goes on to enumerate all kinds of ways that might have happened, is that it of course happens in the privacy of your own bedroom, not in dialogue with the other person, not in the fullness of relationship which is ideally where reconciliation happens, but it sort of says we can't let the ideal and the perfect here of reconciliation be the enemy of the good, which is that people on a daily basis should find a way to be able to say I am trying to move on from the ways in which I was hurt, I am prepared to create the space for other people to do that, and that then in the fullness of time, ideally that can happen face-to-face, whether the day before Yom Kippur or some other time during the year.
Rav Avi: Yeah. So there's one other parallel with this story that I want to pick apart a little bit, which is it seems to me that these rabbis -- and especially from the dream that Rabbi Chanina has -- these two are destined to be in relationship with each other, and it sounds maybe from our questioner like she really believes she can cut ties with this individual, this ex-partner. I wonder if that makes a difference also that in some ways, you know, they allow their 13-year feud to go on in the way that many siblings allow 13-year feuds to go on, it's like there's no escaping each other, and that can feed the problem in a way that maybe if you don't have to stay in relationship with someone you can just step away?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, that might be. Of course, I think the rub here is the person asked the question, which indicates they're still carrying it around with them. In a theoretical case where really someone moved on, and in that sense I would say implicitly they -- not forgiven in the sense of absolved the person for what they did wrong, but they were able to say, yeah,that no longer makes any kind of claim on me, do they have an obligation to reopen that relationship at that time? Probably not, certainly to the extent there's a sense of it being potentially an abusive or difficult reopening. But here's where I think therés perhaps maybe a feedback loop, where the more one has actually moved on and the more one feels kind of reconstructed as a person and no longer encumbered by the difficulties of that earlier relationship, the more it may be possible to actually acknowledge or engage in some sort of passing way, I feel bad about x or y thing that I did, and you won't be as vulnerable or as fearful of what may happen. But that's obviously very delicate, and the more abusive a relationship was, the more, you know, potentially lifelong scarring it leaves, and I think it's very important to emphasize no one is in a position of being obligated, you know, to subject themselves to pain in that way, that's one of the things we learn from the Rabbi Chanina story. But the question is, can one, if there's a healthy possibility of doing so, nonetheless work on one's own piece of it without being dependent on what happens from the other side?
Rav Avi: Your bringing up the daily prayer also makes me wonder if part of the problem in this story that it takes 13 years is because he only apologizes once a year. You know, in some way we have a culture of oh, it's Elul, time to do all my apologies that I've been keeping a list of from the year, as opposed to a more daily practice of working on a relationship, you know, maybe as a reminder that you can't, you know, procrastinate your relationship rebuilding and then hope to pick it up in Elul and suddenly have it fall into place.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. The Arukh Hashulkhan actually says exactly what you say, erev Yom Kippur is a great time to do this, he says, but you shouldn't wait, because who knows mah levadei d'yom, what's gonna happen on any given day, and none of us knows how much time we have left, not just on this earth but with the possibility of communicating with various people.
Rav Avi: Alright, thanks.
Rav Eitan: Thank you.
Rav Avi: Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at halakhah@hadar.org. You can also leave us a message at (215) 297-4254.
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