http://rabbidov.com/anitahill.htm
LEARNING TO LET GO –
AND TO LEAVE JUSTICE TO THE TRUE JUDGE,
AND JUDGMENT TO THE
TRUE JUSTICE
By Rabbi
Dov Fischer
Ginny Thomas and Anita Hill
are at it. This is quite a story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/us/politics/20thomas.html?_r=1&emc=na
Justice Thomas's wife, Ginny, calls Prof.
Anita Hill at her Brandeis University office and leaves a voice mail that
apparently says, according to ABC News:
“Good morning, Anita Hill. It’s Ginny
Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to
consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some
full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some
thought, and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what
you did. Okay have a good day.”
The call apparently is left on the phone
machine at Hill’s office at 7:30 a.m.
Hill reacts by contacting the Campus
Department of Public Safety, which in turn passes along the message to the FBI.
Our synagogue congregation just recently
emerged from the High Holy Day season, a season of forgiveness. During the
weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we learned -- directly in the
text of the Rambam Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuvah (Laws of Repentance) -- the
laws of seeking forgiveness. We considered times when circumstances point
to seeking directly from G-d (as when we have transgressed in terms of ritual
observance), and situations (as when we have wronged another person) when they
point instead, first, to asking forgiveness from the person wronged. There
were, through many of the classes and sermons, intelligent questions: "What if
we don't ask forgiveness -- will G-d forgive us anyway?" “What if we are
asked to forgive, but the wrong perpetrated against us makes it too painful to
forgive?” There were some really piercing and intelligent questions and
some deep discussions. We discussed parameters of forgiveness, even the
very tricky and awkward question of how, or even whether, to ask forgiveness
if the wronged person does not even know what we did hurtfully behind his back.
Sometimes, perhaps in the context of unawareness, it may be best to let sleeping
dogs lie.
Here, we see so much of that teaching and
those questions playing out in a non-Torah context between two ostensibly
accomplished and intelligent women. For our pedagogic purposes, let us
assume that the New York Times report is correct -- even though we know, from
experience, that the New York Times can report incorrectly, too. But let
us assume accuracy here.
Is Ginny Thomas forging a
bond, seeking to move forward from the past? Is she "reaching out" to
Hill, as she has told the newsmedia she is doing? Well, yes, she is
reaching out -- but . . . in friendship? Or with unresolved anger?
Has Ms. Thomas let go of the anger, the resentment of twenty years ago?
What is she hoping to accomplish with her phone call? On the one hand, we
can say that she essentially meant well, hoping finally to bury the hatchet, or
would not have left such a message on a voice machine. On the other hand,
Mel Gibson and
Alec Baldwin also have left relatively recent messages on voice machines. If
they were looking to bury the hatchet, they still -- as Garth Brooks once put it
– were leaving the handle sticking out.
And what of Hill? If you had received
such a message, from a person whose identity you clearly know, someone you know
will not conceivably represent a harm to you -- even if you never liked her and
still cannot stand her -- would you respond to it, particularly if the call were
once in a decade (rather than part of a campaign of harassing midnight phone
calls)? Would you, if you found such a message inappropriate, merely
delete it? Or would you call 9-1-1 and wait for the police, and initiate a
process reaching an FBI that, we would hope, is otherwise busy monitoring voice
messages from Al Qaeda and from local crime mobs?
The story is sad but profoundly instructive.
It is imperative for each of us, little by little, to "let go" of the hurt.
We Jews believe, in one of our core 13 beliefs gathered by Rambam as the essence
of Jewish faith, that G-d punishes those who have perpetrated wrongfully, and He
rewards those who have acted justly. There is no guarantee that He strikes
immediately. Rather, He acts in His own good time, whether dropping a surprise
cash award on someone's door, or miraculously healing someone ill . . . or
otherwise acting. Sometimes he acts a year later, sometimes two, sometimes
ten or twenty years later. But He balances all, consonant with the
teaching of Rabbi Hillel recorded in Pirkei Avot, who said when seeing a skull
floating on the water: “Because you drowned others, you were drowned --
and those who drowned you will themselves ultimately be drowned.”
So it is incumbent on us to
let go of the hurt. It may take time. No one, but no one, has the
moral right to tell someone else in the heat of her hurt exactly when to let go
of it, but it must be let go. Certainly, the hurt and evil may be
remembered. Sometimes, it must never be forgotten. Thus, it even may
be taught to others, as we recount every Yom Kippur what the Romans did to our
rabbinic martyrs, and as a new generation builds Holocaust Musea to teach what
happened in the 1940s. We may hold the memory, refuse to forget, and teach
it to others with a determination that, maybe it will happen again, but never
again with such abject Jewish silence the world over . . . and, maybe just
maybe, if we resist the tendency towards apathy and silence, then maybe it will
not happen again so easily either.
But, even then, we must let go. We
mourn the sorrow of a parent’s death for a year because, sometimes, maybe the
pain is so intense that takes a year to let go. But then we move on.
We ultimately have to let go.
If we fail to let go, we emerge with an
embarrassing dogfight or catfight between people who have attained prominent
positions of achievement in our society. If we fail to let go, we cannot
reach the zenith of our potential. We cannot perfect our souls to their
apex. Warm and loving people around us shy away, while we attract bitter
and vengeful friends who listen patiently to our bitterness in exchange for
enjoying our audience to hear them rant about theirs. No one enjoys the
stereotypically curmudgeonly man or bitter woman. By contrast, as we let go --
yes, remembering and knowing what was done to us and who did it; but moving on
with love, warmth, and humor -- we attract the kinds of people we most would
cherish as friends: people who victories and joys we celebrate, even as they
rejoice in our achievements and great moments. And we leave it to
G-d Almig-ty to reckon accounts with a Perfect Justice that only He can mete.