Residue Is Carried, Not Forgiven
Originally delivered on Yom Kippur 5782 at the Princeton Jewish Center
Five years ago, in 2016, the CBS Evening News ran a heartwarming story about forgiveness. Their reporter traveled to southwest Michigan, to a small town called Benton Harbor on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Jameel McGee told the reporter that he was minding his own business the day that a police officer came up to him, accused him of dealing drugs, and then arrested him. “The cop made it all up,” Jameel said.
It turns out that the cop had made it all up. The cop in question was Andrew Collins. Andrew says he was determined to make an arrest that day, even if it meant putting an innocent man in jail.
Jameel served four years of prison time for this crime he did not commit, while Andrew, the crooked cop, was eventually caught and sent to jail too — for a year and a half — for falsifying documents, planting drugs, and stealing.
A while after they were both released, Jameel and Andrew wound up together again, unexpectedly, working at Café Mosaic, a small coffee shop in town. Because of the tight quarters, they were forced to talk about what had happened between them, and they ended up becoming friends — close friends. In part because of their Christian faith, Andrew apologized and Jameel forgave him. Jameel forgave the man who intentionally put him in prison for four years for a crime he did not commit.
It’s not hard to see how this story of a wrongly accused man and a bad cop making amends could become a story worthy of national attention. Because Jameel is Black and Andrew is white, the story had overtones of racial reconciliation as well. News outlets flocked to cover the story — the Steve Harvey show, Megyn Kelly on NBC, Mike Huckabee on Fox. Jameel and Andrew went on the speaking circuit, giving talks about forgiveness at many churches. They even published a book about their story.
But to Lilly Sullivan, a journalist and producer at This American Life, something didn’t seem right about the story. A friend had sent her one of the news reports, and Lilly did some digging. It turns out that Andrew — the bad cop — had falsified so many police reports and warrants, and had lied on the stand so frequently, that because of him 61 other cases were either overturned or thrown out. The town had to pay out 5 and a half million dollars to settle civil right violations. Andrew had intentionally framed dozens of innocent people so he could rise up the ranks of the police department. As Lilly put it, “And then he gets to go on TV and tell his story over and over, because annoyingly, America seems to love this kind of story of forgiveness.”
Lilly decided she wanted to find other victims and hear what they thought about Andrew [and you can listen to the resulting podcast she produced]. She found Rob Walker, who told her — and I’m going to paraphrase here and change some of the words because we’re in synagogue, “How come you didn’t invite me on the Steve Harvey show? Because I woulda told you the damn truth. You’re hyping up this big thing about one person forgiving you. That ain’t the only person that he screwed over…what about everybody else that he done in?”
Rob told Lilly that Andrew was such a crooked cop that people would do crazy things to stay out of his way. For a while, one of the local radio stations warned people when Andrew was on duty. Rob told a story about how one time he was getting pulled over by a cop, and when he saw it was Andrew, instead of pulling his car to the side of the road, he drove directly to the police station, because that was the only place he could think of that he might be safe. Rob quickly got out of his car and asked the other cops to watch Andrew while he searched his car to make sure he didn’t plant something. Rob wasn’t interested in talking to Andrew, let alone forgiving him. There are dozens of these stories.
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During the ten days of repentance we think about, talk about, and pray for forgiveness. The rabbis talked about the different paths to forgiveness for sins between humans and God, and for sins bein adam l’chavero — between two people. But this Yom Kippur I want to look at one of the more difficult aspects of forgiveness.
As children we learn that once something has been done, “you can’t take it back.” Any wrongdoing leaves things in its wake, some form of damage, what we might call residue. That residue could be financial, physical, emotional, or relational. Forgiving someone does not remove this reside that is left behind.
When we forgive someone, we are saying: I have decided that the threat has passed, and I am going to find a way to bear the burden of this injury. Pamela Hieronymi is a philosopher who specializes in moral psychology at UCLA. She studied here at Princeton as an undergrad in the early 1990’s. She writes that when someone who has been wronged decides to forgive, they are choosing “to bear in [their] own person the cost of the wrongdoing and to incorporate the injury into [their] own life without further protest and without demand for retribution.” She says in some cases, this means “creatively incorporating the scars that bear the fingerprints” of what happened into the permanent fabric of our life.
Yotam Benziman, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, takes this idea further. He teaches that when we forgive, we are embarking on a long, dialogical journey together with those who wronged us. The wrongdoer and the forgiver, he writes, will “walk together while they reexamine their relationship, the nature of the wrong, and the reasons why it occurred. The forgiver might become angry again, and the wrongdoer will apologize again.”
Benziman sees in the word “apology” a hint of this journey. The original Greek word apologasmeans “story.” The wrongdoer and the forgiver each tell their side of the story, reacting to the other. These stories are bound up in the identities and the biographies of the wrongdoer and the forgiver. These stories become part of who they are.
Seen in this light, the process of forgiveness, the process of being forgiven, requires us to carry the burden, deal with the residue, tell the stories of what we did and what happened to us, and to integrate them into our lives.
Our liturgy actually has language for this. The 13 attributes of God, which we recited at the beginning of the Torah service and will repeat later at the end of the Avodah service — Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum v’Chanun — words taken from Exodus 34, include the phrase noseh avon — which we usually translate as forgiving iniquity, but the words noseh avon more literally mean “carry the sin.”
In 1969, the Beatles recorded a mini-song for their Abbey Road album, “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight.” But thousands of years before that, our Jewish ancestors understood that forgiveness involves carrying a burden and dealing with residue. Forgiving someone means saying, as my teacher Elana Stein Hain has taught: “I am willing to bear the scars of what you did to me, knowing that I will see you around.” I know that these scars, this residue, cannot be washed away. We are going to bear these scars and carry this residue together.
Lilly, the journalist who went in search of the bad cop’s other victims, eventually went to talk with the bad cop himself, Andrew. Andrew admitted that the news story was always framed as a story about two individuals — he and Jameel — and not about the community. He said no reporter had ever asked him to meet with one of his victims who still hated him. Lilly said she was happy to be the reporter to introduce him to victims who still hated him. She introduced Andrew to Quacy, another innocent person Andrew had framed, and who was still deeply resentful at Andrew for what he did. They talked for a while. Andrew apologized. Quacy said that Andrew got off way too easy, spending just a year and a half in jail for his crimes.
But then Quacy and Andrew started talking about how bad the policing still is in Benton Springs. They started having an insider conversation about other cops, judges and prosecutors they both believe are crooked. Lilly said they actually started to bond. Perhaps, this bond would later allow them to explore how they could carry the burden of the wrongdoing that Andrew committed, and the damage it did to Quacy, together.
I don’t know any story of deep hurt and wrong that isn’t complicated. The wrongs we have done, or that have been done to us, the ones that affect us most deeply, cannot be resolved with a simple process of forgiveness. When damage has been done, no amount of forgiveness can erase it. Showing up on Yom Kippur, striking our hearts, admitting to something we have done, this is not going to move things forward.
But there is a way we can take part in meaningful forgiveness. Meaningful forgiveness is to carry that burden, noseh avon, bear the scar, deal with the residue. It is messy. But it is real. And it can be done.
