Forgiveness, Yom Kippur, and Arendt
It’s Erev Yom Kippur, and I’ve been talking, a lot, about Arendt.
So via Amy Schiller, who is my student at the Graduate Center, come these perhaps more appropriate words from a perhaps more appropriate text for the holiday, The Human Condition.
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility is the faculty of forgiving….forgiving relates to the past and serves to undo its deeds…Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell….In this respect, forgiving and making promises are like control mechanisms build into the very faculty to start new and unending processes.
Happy New Year. And have an easy fast.