Wounds Not Healed by Time
The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
How should we respond to injuries done to us and to the hurts that we inflict on others? In this thoughtful book, Wounds Not Healed By Time, Solomon Schimmel guides us through the meanings of justice, forgiveness, repentance, and reconciliation. In doing so, he probes to the core of the human encounter with evil, drawing on religious traditions, psychology, philosophy, and the personal experiences of both perpetrators and of victims.
Christianity, Judaism and Islam call for forgiveness and repentance in our relations with others. Yet, as Schimmel points out, there are significant differences between them as to when and whom to forgive. Is forgiving always more moral than refusing to forgive? Is it ever immoral to forgive? When is repentance a pre-condition for forgiveness, and what does repentance entail? Schimmel explores these questions in diverse contexts, ranging from conflicts in a marriage and personal slights we experience every day to enormous crimes such as the Holocaust. He applies insights on forgiveness and repentance to the Middle East, post-apartheid South Africa, inter-religious relationships, and the criminal justice system.
In Wounds Not Healed By Time, Schimmel also provides practical strategies to help us forgive and repent, preparing the way for healing and reconciliation between individuals and groups. "It is my belief," Schimmel concludes, "that the best balm for the resentment, rage, guilt, and shame engendered by human evil lies in finding the proper balance between justice, repentance, and forgiveness."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schimmel, a professor of Jewish education and psychology, brings a high level of scholarship, a deeply personal tone and an accessible writing style to complex questions of repentance and forgiveness. Taking his cue from the now classic collection of essays entitled The Sunflower (in which Simon Wiesenthal asks Jewish and Christian scholars for their thoughts on his denial of forgiveness to a young, dying SS officer), Schimmel revisits Wiesenthal's anguished questions by taking seriously perspectives and resources from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Indeed, in lifting out real differences among the three Abrahamic faiths on the relationships among forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation, Schimmel draws out moral ambiguities with which all three traditions grapple. He brings these religious debates to a diversity of sociopolitical questions: Can a religious or political leader repent (or forgive) on behalf of a group or a nation? If the "sins of the fathers" really are visited upon the next generation, then how should we determine who our "fathers" are? For example, are immigrants responsible for the sins their adopted country committed before they arrived? And can reconciliation begin even among groups that disagree about who should be forgiving whom (e.g., in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)? Most admirably, Schimmel adds his own voice in a way that seems to come less from books than from the heart.