I am convinced that a Shiva call is not considered complete until after the Seven Days of Mourning! The Shiva house is full of people, but then it ends. The mourner is left alone. He has to return to life with his entire world changed, without the support of all the friends who came during Shiva. The call after the Shiva has ended, when the people have left and the house is silent, is when the mourner needs a different type of support. The phone call after Shiva completes the comfort offered during Shiva.

I just finished speaking to a friend two weeks after he got up from Shiva, and I realized that there is a long list of “after” calls to make: not to the people who I visited during Shiva; those calls were made. I have to call all the people of whom I asked forgiveness to show that the request for forgiveness was only the first step. I now have to work at rebuilding relationships I have damaged.

I cannot make my “after” call and pretend all is well because I asked for forgiveness, but I must convey the message that I am determined to repair the relationship. It is only now that the real work begins. Is the relationship important enough to put in all that effort? Is the other party interested? How hard shall I try?

One more thought: Is this what our post Yom Kippur work is? Are we supposed to use our Mitzvot as demonstrations of our commitment to repair our relationship with God? Does the real Yom Kippur work begin after Yom Kippur?

Was that Jonah’s issue with the repentance of the people of Nineveh?

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When I was a kid we had a simple but profound way to deal with mistakes; “Do Over!” If only life were so easy.

I want a “Do Over!” I wrote a blog, Careful With My Words, complaining about all the spammers who regularly attack the blog. I was becoming so frustrated and bothered that I decided to take the Uncle Noach approach and ask, “What is God trying to teach me?” I tried to find something good in all the spam. Well, I found it, and now I want a “Do Over” from that blog of complaint.

Practically ever spam begins with words of praise: “I find much 2 lurn frum yur writeengs.” “Yu r grait thinker!” “I was profoundly moved by your insightful words and have decided to religiously follow all your writings. Try Viagra!” “I have shared your essay with all my friends and they are now devoted followers. You can buy all your prescription drugs online.” Of course, there are the many spams with Cyrillic, Chinese and Korean letters, but I am certain that they are equally effusive with their words of praise.

I now love reading the spam. I love the praise. I have no problem pressing “spam,” but their generous words dilute my frustration.

Today I received a different sort of spam: “I thought long and hard about your insight but find I cannot possibly agree. You can find vacations online at …” Can you believe that I actually hesitated before pressing the spam icon? The spammer caught my attention. I even reread the original essay to see if I still agreed with what I wrote!

Praise is a great attention grabber. A respectful disagreement works as well if not better.

Joseph’s brothers perceived that their father was dead, and they said, “Perhaps Joseph will nurse hatred against us and then he will surely repay us all the evil that we did him.” (Genesis 50:15) The brothers catch Joseph’s attention by paying him a magnificent compliment: “He will nurse his hatred against us,” implies that they believed that Joseph did not harbor any hatred against them while Jacob was alive. They acknowledge that Joseph was sincere when he assured them that he only focused on the fact that “The Lord sent me here to feed you.”

Although they did not articulate this, it came through in their words. “Your father gave orders before his death, saying, ‘Thus shall you say to Joseph, ‘O please forgive the spiteful deed of your brothers and their sin for they have done you evil.’ So, now, please forgive the spiteful deed of the servants of your father’s Lord.’ “

Pure genius! “Your father,” is an acknowledgment that Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son. They caught Joseph’s attention with their opening word.

Jacob ordered them to ask forgiveness, but they added, ‘the servants of your father’s Lord.” They are repeating Joseph’s idea that it was the Lord, Who manipulated all the events.

They included acknowledgements of Joseph’s ideas in their request for forgiveness. That really caught his attention.

It is probably even more difficult to grab the attention of someone from whom you must ask forgiveness than it is for a spammer to catch mine. (I’m a sucker for praise and a good argument.) Joseph’s brothers grabbed his attention in a most magnificent manner; their quest for forgiveness began with an acknowledgement of who he was, and what Joseph believed. They couldn’t request a “Do Over” but they could grab Joseph’s attention and repair very old wounds.

So, I’ll use the same strategy: I acknowledge your words of praise, even appreciate them. I’m sorry that I have to put you in the spam file, but thanks anyways.” (Delete)

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Sometimes it seems impossible to forgive, for the act committed was too offensive. Here, Elisabeth Mann could us teach many lessons about tolerance, love, anger, and forgiveness.

Elisabeth has much to be angry about. When she was a teenager, she and her family were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp where the average life expectancy was brief. Shortly after her arrival there, she asked a guard where the rest of her family was, He pointed to the smoke coming out of a massive chimney, saying, “That’s where they are.”

After the camp was liberated by Allied soldiers, Elisabeth found herself in Denmark, waiting for a train to Sweden. There were other survivors with her, but her family was gone. “I was given a cup of coffee that tasted so good, I’ve never had anything to match it,” she declares. A nurse brought in two women and a man, saying they were also concentration camp survivors. “I suspected they were not, for they had bags with them. No one from a camp had luggage, we didn’t even have a piece of cloth. These two women and the man started asking us questions about which camp we were from, how we got here. My fellow survivors shared their stories.

“The next morning the train arrived to take us to Sweden. I was put in a compartment with the two women who had asked the questions, plus three others. There wasn’t a lot of room in the car, especially with the suitcases the two women had brought. The two of them sat on the floor, the three others took a bench, and I climbed overhead, in the place where you normally put the luggage. That night, when they thought everyone was sleeping, I heard a noise. Looking down, I saw that the two women had opened one of their suitcases, and inside were photos of people in SS uniforms. The women were tearing the pictures up and throwing them out the window. You have to understand that no one in a camp would have had, or even wanted to have, pictures of the guards.

“Some officials got on the train at one of the stops and asked us all questions. When he asked the two women and the man where they had been, which camp and so on, they recited the stories they had hard from my fellow inmates the night before. I could have said something, but I was so full of happiness that the war was over. I was convinced that every soul had learned from the war. I thought it was not my place to punish these people. If God wants to punish them, he will. We arrived in Sweden and I never saw them again.

“What I did was not to condone what these people had done. It was to trust God that forgiveness was in his hands, not mine. It wasn’t my place to decide their fate. With all the people who had died, my little brother, my parents, how could I say, ‘It’s okay, it doesn’t matter?’

“But it was important to me to never have the desire for revenge in my heart. I remember, in the camp, we would pass a bakery every morning as we were taken to clean the streets. We were always hungry, and that fresh-baked-bread aroma would hit us. We would say, ‘When we are free, we will run to the bakery and eat up all the bread.’ We never said we would run to the bakery and kill the baker.”

Elizabeth Kubler Ross: Life Lessons Page 201

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During the late 1940s, India was engulfed in religious wars as the nation prepared for independence from Great Britain. A Hindu whose son was murdered by Muslims during the internal strife went to see Mahatma Gandhi and asked, “How can I possibly forgive the Muslims? How can I ever find peace again with so much hate in my heart for those who have killed my only son?”

Gandhi suggested that the man adopt an orphaned enemy child and raise him as his own.

We need to forgive so that we can live whole lives. Forgiveness is the way to heal our hurts and wounds, it’s how we reconnect with others and ourselves. We have all been hurt—we didn’t deserve the pain, but were wounded nonetheless. And, if truth be told, we have almost certainly hurt others. The problem isn’t that hurt that keeps on hurting. We go through life accumulating these hurts; we have no training or guidance in how to let them go. This is where forgiveness comes in.

We have a choice to live in forgiveness or unforgiveness.

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Elisabeth Mann must still forgive herself daily for one of those tragic “what if” situations she was thrust into when she was so young.

When her family arrived in Auschwitz, they stood before armed guards who asked her how old her brother was. She told them that he was thirteen. She said proudly that according to the Jewish tradition, he was not a bar mitzvah, a man.

After realizing that most young children and often their mothers were immediately sent to the gas chambers while the others were spared, she feared that her comment had marked her brother for death.

“Maybe if I hadn’t said his real age, he would be alive; maybe if I hadn’t said anything, he would have survived. I often feel like I sent him to his death.”

To this day, Elisabeth misses her little brother and wonders “what if.”

She must continue to find forgiveness in her heart from the misplaced sense of responsibility.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross: Life Lessons Page 204

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The afternoon before Rosh Hashanah, I was waiting on my cousin Joel’s front porch for him to come home. After sitting there for 10 minutes, he drove up with some groceries. We went inside and he put the groceries in the kitchen. We then sat in the living room talking to each other. At one point he reminded me of the following story, told to him by his father:

When Joel was three years old he was visiting my house. I was not there, I was in school. Joel wandered into the kitchen where he saw a Milky Way candy bar. Joel picked it up and ate it, leaving chocolate all over his mouth.

Right after he had finished, my mother and grandmother came into the kitchen. My mother looked at her mother and asked, “Did you eat the Milky Way”? “ “I did not”, replied my grandmother. Then my mother asked herself, did I eat the Milky Way? No, she replied. Then she asked Joel if he had eaten the Milky Way. Joel replied, “remarkable!’ My mother burst out laughing.

Why had the Milky Way been there? Because my mother had bought it for me to eat when I came home from school. Obviously, I never got the Milky Way. Nor did I know about it.

When Joel finished telling me this story, he went into the kitchen and brought back a Milky Way. He told me that when he was shopping he was wondering if I would be at his house when he came home. As he was thinking about me he found himself in front of a Milky Way. This story flashed before him, and he bought it to give me in place of the Milky Way I not had 55 years ago.

I was pleasantly surprised. I did not know that the Milky Way had ever been there for me. But remembering the story made Joel decide to make amends with me. I took the Milky Way and broke it in two, giving Joel one half. A nice way to come into Rosh Hashanah.

While thinking about this story over Rosh Hashanah, I asked myself a couple of questions. Should you go to someone who does not know you did something wrong to that person and admit it? I ran this by my Rabbi, Rabbi Weinberg. He said that depends on how the person might respond. If it leads to a closer relationship then it is okay. He reminded me that the idea of asking for forgiveness is a means to an end. The end is to forge a stronger and happier relationship.

However, sometimes the person does not want to know. In this case the relationship stays strong because the person is not told. If you are in doubt as to what to do, err on the side of not upsetting the relationship.

But there is a second lesson to be learned from this story. Even small things matter. On Yom Kippur we focus on bigger types of ways we interact with people. But we need to feel that little things matter.

According to my Rabbi, what Joel did was a spectacular thing. On Yom Kippur we need to remember that forgiveness is about the small things because they add up. Those small things say you matter to me.

There is a midrash asks the following question. What is the most important verse in the Torah? One Rabbi says it is “Hear Oh Israel. The L-rd is G-d, The L-ord is One”. Another says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. A third says, “Bringing the sacrificial lamb offering in the Temple in Jerusalem in the morning and the evening in the temple… forever.”

We can understand the first rabbi’s verse and the second rabbi’s verse. But what about the mundane chore of sacrificing a lamb every day? The answer is that the small things we do every day for someone builds a relationship and trust. And trust is the glue that holds a relationship together. If someone is sporadic in paying attention to you and then not paying attention to you, you don’t know whether to trust that person or not.

Indeed, it is the solid friend who is there week in week out year in and year out with the so-called small things that trumps one or two big things over a few years.

On Yom Kippur, apologizing for the small things is a big deal. It says, ”I value you too much to think a small slight is OK. So on Yom Kippur, also reflect on the little things you need to repair.

What is the candy bar named for? The Milky Way. A constellation of stars. When we look skyward, we see all those little dots. We know they are really stars. All the small things you do on a constant basis. And an apology for a small slight counts as one of those stars. Together they form the mosaic of a marvelous relationship.

(Prof. August is just such a friend. He pays attention to all the little things that add up and make all the difference.)

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“The blessing was from a young child’s lips, but it was the first that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles and sufferings, and troubles and changes, of his after life, he never once forgot it.”

“In fact, if it had not been for a good-hearted turnpike-man, and a benevolent old lady, Oliver’s troubles would have been shortened by the very same process which has put an end to his mother’s; in other words, he would most assuredly have fallen dead upon the king’s highway. But the turnpike-man gave him a meal of bread and cheese: and the old lady, who had a shipwrecked grandson wandering barefoot in some distant part of the earth, took pity upon the poor orphan, and gave him what little she could afford—and more—with such kind and gentle words, and such tears of sympathy and compassions, that they sank deeper into Oliver’s soul, than all the suffering she had ever undergone. “ – Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

I believe that these two paragraphs afford us insight into how Oliver was able to maintain his sunny attitude and sweetness despite his life in a poorhouse, his being sold as a slave, and his dealings with Fagin and Bill Sykes: It was not the child’s blessing, nor the old lady’s pity.

All of us experience both beautiful and ugly dealings with others. Many hold on to the negative experiences or “Affect,” and allow them to darken their lives. “My cheder rebbi was such a monster that I decided I would not live as a Jew!” “My parents never had time for me, and I still feel unimportant.” “I once did business with an Orthodox Jew, and it was such a miserable experience that I will never have anything to do with someone who is Orthodox.”

Others, as Oliver, choose to remember the beautiful gestures. Their lives have all sorts of magnificent colors expressed in the way they deal with others.

I have found that when someone asks my forgiveness that I am presented with Oliver’s choice: Will I hold onto the negative? Or, will I choose to remember the positive and grasp all the beautiful moments I have shared with others?

I choose Oliver’s path. I treasure all the small acts of kindness and love I have been privileged to receive. I happily shed the negative. I hold onto the goat that goes to God. I let the other goat be tossed far way from my life and memory.

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Let us keep in mind what Thrasea, the mildest of men and for that reason also the greatest, often used to say: “Who hates faults, hates mankind.”

- Pliny the Younger, Letters 8.22.2-3

Especially our own faults!

I picture the moment when Chana stoop up to Eli, and defended herself from his confused accusations, as the moment when she stopped hating her failings, and ceased to hate herself.

Her prayers were heard only once she stopped hating herself.

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He had faced all sorts of battles in his life, but never one such as this: Some people spread terrible lies about him, seriously damaging his reputation and carreer. Many friends and supporters came to assure him that they refused to believe the false stories and “obvious lies,” but he felt as if they did not look at him as they had in the past. This was not the most difficult battle.

A few months later, just before Yom Kippur, three of the people who had spread the lies came separately to ask for forgiveness. “For what?” he asked.

“Just in case I did anything to hurt you over the past year,” was the response of two.

“Did you do anything to hurt me?” our friend asked.

“Not that I can think of. Do you forgive me or not?”

“I am willing to forgive anything but Motzi Shem Ra (Libel).”

“Well, I have nothing to worry about.” This was not his most difficult battle.

The third person approached him in front of a crowd of people and said, “I should not have waited until Yom Kippur, but I ask your forgiveness for spreading lies about you, hurting you and damaging your reputation. I cannot undo all the damage but I will speak to everyone I know and tell them that I lied about you.”

“I forgive you,” he answered, and felt as if the third person had given a gift to him.

Almost twenty years later, he applied for a fabulous job. Everything was set, except the contract signing, when the head of HR called to say that the company had withdrawn the job offer: He had mentioned to a friend of his that he was hiring our friend, and the person recalled what he had heard from the third man who had asked for forgiveness many years earlier, and urged the HR person not to risk that the stories were true. Our friend pleaded with the HR head to call the original source of the story, but he refused; “I can’t afford the risk.”

He considers this the most challenging battle of his life: Twenty years later he still carried the wounds. He could not escape the lies. He couldn’t find a job. “I find myself wishing that I had not forgiven him! I think that the only way for him to earn forgiveness would be for him to tag along with me for the rest of my life and witness the devastation he caused.”

“If a man marries a wife, and comes to her and hates her, and he makes a wanton accusation against her, spreading a bad name against her, and he said, ‘I married this woman, and I came near to her and I did not find signs of virginity on her.’ Then the father of the girl and her mother should take proofs of the girl’s virginity to the elders of the city, to the gate. The father of the girl should say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man as a wife, and he hated her. Now, behold! He made a wanton accusation against her, saying, ‘I did not find signs of virginity on your daughter’ – but these are the signs of virginity of my daughter!’ And they should spread out the sheet before the elders of the city. The elders of the city shall take that man and punish him. And they shall fine him one hundred silver shekels and give them to the father of the girl, for he had issued a slander against a virgin of Israel, and she shall remain with him as a wife; he cannot divorce her all his days.” (Deuteronomy 22:13-19 – Mitzvah 540 & 572) The slanderer must remain married to his wife. (Concept #134) He may never divorce her. (Concept #135) -Rambam, Hilchot Na’arah Betulah – The Laws of Young Maidens

These are quite complex laws, however, the two actual Mitzvot address our friend’s battle and comments: The only way to realize the extent of the damage we cause to another’s reputation is to forever remain with that person, just as the husband must forever live with his wife! He may never divorce her. He must face his libel everyday for the rest of his life. He must remain married to her to prove to the world that he lied. Imagine the punishment of being married to a woman you have slandered and never be allowed to divorce her.

The Torah wants us to understand that there is no other way to fully appreciate the pain and damage we cause to another when we slander or libel them.

As we examine the past year through the lens of Elul Teshuva, we must carefully reflect on anything and everything we have said about others: Was it true? Did it hurt them? How much damage did I cause? How can I repair the damage?

This is why Motzi Shem Ra is the only sin we are not expected to forgive! May God protect us!

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This Kinah is based on the story of Nevuzaradan and the boiling blood of Zechariah, a prophet and Cohen, murdered on the Temple grounds on Yom Kippur by people who did not want to hear his prophecies of impending destruction. The aftermath of this story raises the important issue of forgiving our enemies:

R. Hiya b. Abin said in the name of R. Joshua b. Korhah: An old man from the inhabitants of Jerusalem told me that in this valley Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard killed two hundred and eleven myriads, and in Jerusalem he killed ninety-four myriads on one stone, until their blood went and joined that of Zechariah,2 to fulfil the words, “Blood touches blood.”

He noticed the blood of Zechariah bubbling up warm, and asked what it was. They said: It is the blood of the sacrifices which has been poured there. He had some blood brought, but it was different from the other.

He then said to them: If you tell me [the truth], well and good, but if not, I will tear your flesh with combs of iron. They said: What can we say to you? There was a prophet among us who used to reprove us for our irreligion, and we rose up against him and killed him, and for many years his blood has not rested.

He said to them: I will appease him. He brought the great Sanhedrin and the

small Sanhedrin and killed them over him, but the blood did not cease.

He then slaughtered young men and women, but the blood did not cease. He brought school-children and slaughtered them over it, but the blood did not cease.

So he said; Zechariah, Zechariah. I have slain the best of them; do you

want me to destroy them all? When he said this to him, it stopped.

Straightway Nebuzaradan felt remorse. He said to himself: If such is the penalty for slaying one soul, what will happen to me who have slain such multitudes? So he fled away, and sent a deed to his house disposing of his effects and became a convert. (Gittin 57b)

Nebuzaradan’s is not the only story of an enemy who converted:

He [the Emperor] sent against them Nero the Caesar. As he was coming he shot an arrow towards the East, and it fell in Jerusalem. He then shot one towards the West, and it again fell in Jerusalem.

He shot towards all four points of the compass, and each time it fell in Jerusalem.

He said to a certain boy: Repeat to me [the last] verse of Scripture you have learnt. He said: “And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom (Rome) by the hand of my people Israel.”

He said: “The Holy One, blessed be He, desires to lay waste his House and to lay the blame on me.” So he ran away and became a proselyte, and R. Meir was descended from him. (Gittin 56a)

In The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal writes of an incident that occurred during the time he was a concentration camp inmate. One day, he and his work detail were sent to clean medical waste at a converted army hospital for wounded German soldiers. On the way, “Our column suddenly came to a halt at a crossroads. I could see nothing that might be holding us up but I noticed on the left of the street there was a military cemetery . . . and on each grave there was planted a sunflower . . . I stared spellbound . . . Suddenly I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb.”

Simon’s work group arrived at the hospital. As they worked, a nurse came up to Simon and asked, “Are you a Jew?” When he answered “Yes,” she took him into the hospital building, to the bedside of Karl, a 21-year old dying Nazi soldier. Karl’s head was completely covered in bandages, with openings only for his mouth, nose and ears. Karl wanted to tell Simon his story.

He began,

”I know that at this moment thousands of men are dying. Death is everywhere. It is neither infrequent nor extraordinary. I am resigned to dying soon, but before that I want to talk about an experience which is torturing me. Otherwise I cannot die in peace . . . I must tell you of this horrible deed – tell you because . . . you are a Jew.”

Karl talked about his childhood and described himself as a happy, dreamy child. His father was a Social Democrat and his mother brought Karl up as a Catholic. Karl joined the Hitler Youth and later volunteered for the SS. That was the last time his father spoke to him.



Karl went on to tell Simon about being sent to fight in Russia, and about coming, one day, to a village.

”In a large square we got out and looked around us. On the other side of the square there was a group of people under close guard . . . The word went through our group like wildfire: ‘They’re Jews’ . . . An order was given and we marched toward the huddled mass of Jews. There were a hundred and fifty of them or perhaps two hundred, including many children who stared at us with anxious eyes. A few were quietly crying. There were infants in their mothers’ arms, but hardly any young men; mostly women and graybeards . . . A truck arrived with cans of petrol which we unloaded and took into a house . . . Then we began to drive the Jews into the house . . . Then another truck came up full of more Jews and they too were crammed into the house with the others. Then the door was locked and a machine gun was posted opposite . . . When we were told that everything was ready, we went back a few yards, and then received the command to remove safety pins from hand grenades and throw them through the windows of the house . . . Behind the windows of the second floor, I saw a man with a small child in his arms. His clothes were alight. By his side stood a woman, doubtless the mother of the child. With his free hand the man covered the child’s eyes . . . then he jumped into the street. Seconds later the mother followed. Then from the other windows fell burning bodies . . . We shot . . . Oh God! I don’t know how many tried to jump out of the windows but that one family I shall never forget – least of all the child.” 

After that event, Karl’s division moved on to the Crimea.

One day, in the middle of a fight, Karl climbed out of his trench, and 

”In that moment I saw the burning family, the father with the child and behind them the mother – and they came to meet me. ‘No, I cannot shoot at them a second time.’ The thought flashed through my mind . . . And then a shell exploded by my side. I lost consciousness . . . 

”It was a miracle that I was still alive – even now I am as good as dead . . . So I lie here waiting for death. The pains in my body are terrible, but worse still is my conscience . . . I cannot die . . . without coming clean . . . In the last hours of my life you are with me. I do not know who you are. I only know that you are a Jew and that is enough . . . In the long nights while I have been waiting for death, time and time again I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. Only I didn’t know whether there were any Jews left . . . I know that what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.”



Simon left the room without a word. When his group returned to the hospital the next day, the same nurse came to Simon and told him that Karl had died.



Over the next years of the war, time and again, through all his suffering, Simon thought of Karl and wondered if he should have forgiven him. 

”Ought I to have forgiven him? Was my silence at the bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong? This is a profound moral question . . . The crux of the matter is, of course, the question of forgiveness. Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition . . .”

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