Guilty (Korakh)

My mother has been dead for three years, and I think I just forgave her for the ways she hurt me. I say, “I think,” because, you know how these things are; you had an opening, you feel like you’re over it, but then angry feelings come up again.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved my mother very much, and I appreciated a lot of things about her, as a person and a mother, and about our relationship. She was a really good mother in so many ways, and I give her credit for teaching me good mothering skills. But she also held me back in many ways, and caused extra friction in my marriage for some thirty years as I was trying to figure things out for myself.

Here’s how angry I was: After trying and trying, I ultimately didn’t see or speak to her during the last year of her life. I don’t advertise this. It was very hard for me; I’d always prided myself on being a really good daughter and I’ve felt very, very guilty about withdrawing from her.

I know that whatever she did, she did out of fear, but knowing something intellectually is not the same as forgiving someone in your heart, especially when they’ve caused you so much pain. Also, forgiveness is a process.

I’ve been reading a book called The Sunflower, by Simon Wiesenthal. Perhaps you know it. It’s a true story by a Holocaust survivor who tells how, while still a prisoner, he was put into a situation with a very young, dying SS soldier, maybe 20 years old, who has asked to speak with a Jew—any Jew—to unload the burden of a crime before he dies.

The young man tells of throwing grenades into a building and killing entire families that have been stuffed and locked inside with hundreds of others. He remembers one particular couple who jumps from a window with their young child. This memory haunts him, and he wants absolution for his crime. Wiesenthal is forced to sit and listen for hours as this bandaged man talks. After hours of sitting at the edge of this young man’s bed silently, Simon walks away without offering any words of consolation.

After the war, Wiesenthal goes to find the mother of this young man and, like in a movie, she’s living alone in the rubble that has become her house and surrounding neighborhood in Stuttgart. She confirms that she and her husband had not been Nazi supporters, and they were ashamed of their son becoming a Nazi Youth. She seems to need some absolution as well.

Though Wiesenthal challenges her thinking somewhat about individual guilt and responsibility, he still chooses not to tarnish her memory of her son as a “good boy,” the one last possession she has. He feels compassion for her and the challenges she’d had in the choices she’d made; she’d had to protect her family.

Wiesenthal is haunted by his decisions for years afterwards. Should he have absolved the dying young man, in spite of his rage and disgust? Was he too harsh with the boy’s mother about her responsibility? Was it wrong that he had even an ounce of compassion for the man after all the sadistic acts he had experienced and witnessed in the camps and on the street—a lifetime of open, violent, sanctioned antisemitism and hatred?

Also, does he, a random Jew, have the right to absolve someone of a crime that was not directly committed against him? And how are murderers made? How does one get to forgiveness, and should he be pressured to it as quickly as he was? Will we forget if we forgive?

Finally, he ponders the question of collective vs. individual guilt.

In this week’s Torah reading, Korakh, such a question came up for me. Korakh leads a rebellion against Moses and things do not end up well for him and his followers. Though Moses is our hero, I was able to find compassion for Korakh when I read his chief complaint: How come you get all the credit? What about the rest of us? Aren’t we holy, too?

Obviously, Korakh was feeling left out, unnoticed, neglected. And his followers were scared; they keep repeating their fear of dying in the desert, which is so great that their memory of Egypt is warped and they call it “The Land of Milk and Honey.”

But what resulted was a mob mentality. God punishes the mob. He holds everyone accountable, not just Hitler—I mean, Korakh; each is responsible for their own decisions and participation.

A similar mentality is true for violent Trump supporters: neglected and ignored for decades by our government, they are scared. And they were enveloped and influenced by a mob mentality: a feeling of safety in the mob.

Another example of mob mentality is what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, as you can hear in fascinating detail on the podcast Blind Spot: Tulsa, Burning: government-sanctioned racism, hatred, destruction, massacre—and then kept a secret, by both victims and the offspring of the perpetrators, some of whom felt guilty, all of whom were too afraid to speak out or speak up, thinking only to protect their own families.

It’s one thing to hold hatred in your heart against those one deems inferior to oneself. It’s another to keep silent in the face of what you know is wrong—yet we know that everyone does it when it comes to staying alive and keeping our loved ones alive, even if we want to be on the “right” side of history.

My father used to say that guilt is a useless emotion. His therapist had told him that.

I disagree. I think guilt one of the best human emotions out there. It’s a feeling of guilt that keeps us in check; it’s what makes us at least try not to continue to hurt others.

Collective guilt; collective responsibility. None of us is innocent. We’ve all done things we need forgiveness for, and if we forgive too quickly, then we’re letting others and ourselves off the hook.

I have compassion for my mother’s fear. She inherited it. She learned it. And I can forgive her for it. And it was a huge release and relief to finally feel able to write her a letter telling her I forgive her, and how much I loved her and missed her for the good she gave me in my life. I miss the good parts more and more, which I think is a good sign. It means the pain is receding.

It’s supposed to be freeing to forgive someone, which is why we are encouraged to jump to it. Wiesenthal talks about how Holocaust survivors were pressured to put it all behind them quickly—to forgive and forget—for their own sake.

But I don’t want to forget the pain my mother caused me altogether, and the pain of all the massacres in history should not be forgotten, because every “good boy” is capable of joining in the “mob mentality” or becoming a murderer.

I have inherited my mother’s patterns, and they challenge me, but it’s the memory of the pain and the guilt I feel when I inflict it on those I love that helps me strive not to repeat it.