I turned 43 this year and I have always been told I need to “forgive and forget.” It’s a remarkable phrase, is it not? The idea behind this phrase subtly suggests that we should feel okay about the person and it is possible to really mentally forget what the person did to us.
The word order is important in this phrase. If we practice forgiveness, eventually, we will forget what happened. We will forget the pain and the hurt heaped upon us by someone else’s actions.
But do you know the origins of the this phrase? As best I can tell, the phrase as we have it is a transposition of a phrase that was found in both Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote de la Mancha.” The original phrase is “Let us forget and forgive injuries” in “Don Quixote de la Mancha” and “Pray you now, forget and forgive” in “King Lear.”
Do we have the order wrong? Is it really that we must forget so that forgiveness is complete?
Forgetting
First, we never really forget. Neuroscience is teaching us that we have so many different pockets of memory that in a normal, healthy brain, we do not forget. It stays there, though sometimes we just can’t bring it to our conscious memory. In that way, our forgetting is similar to our attempt to delete a file on a computer hard drive; unless special actions are taken, you never really delete it. File information is maintained in a directory so your operating system can find it. All that “delete” does is erase the file’s reference information. Your operating system can’t find it, but the data is still there. You have to use a special tool to completely erase the file from your hard drive. Only then is it completely unaccessible. And only then is it completely “forgotten.”
What that means for our memories is that something may happen to us and it gets stored in one or more of those memory pockets. We may block the event out of our conscious memory, but it could remain, for example, in our emotional memory. If it is, every time we find ourselves in a similar situation, or every time we we find ourselves in the same room with the person, our bodies react out of our emotional memory. We may not really understand why we have cold sweats or our eye starts to twitch or we get that uneasy feeling in the pit of our stomach. It just happens. That’s because no matter what we think has happened, we have not forgotten the event.
And regardless of how much we try to forgive, unless we are intentional, we will never forget, when the impact of the act no longer affects us physically, mentally, or emotionally. In fact, I am coming to the conclusion that complete forgiveness is only possible when we forget. So maybe we have the order wrong. Maybe it’s forget and forgive, and I think we can see this worked out in the purification ritual found in Leviticus 16.
The Day of Atonement
Leviticus 16 describes the Day of Atonement, the Day of Purgation, or as it is now known, “Yom Kippur.” The significance of this day is so great and it’s implications so important, that I will use multiple posts to look at its impact on forgiveness. In this first post on this, let’s look at the background of this Jewish Holy Day.
Every year, the sacrifices at the Tabernacle (and eventually the Temple) removed sin and physical maladies from the people. Forgiveness occurred. As that happened throughout the year, the sanctuary within the Tabernacle itself would routinely need to be cleansed itself or God would abandon it. So once per year, in the seventh month and the 10th day, the high priest performed a series of complex rituals to cleanse the sanctuary.
The High Priest would offer two different sacrifices. He would sacrifice a bull on behalf of the priests and a goat on behalf of the nation of Israel. As he began to sprinkle the blood, he would start in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctuary, where he would sprinkle the blood once on the cover of the ark of the covenant. Then the High Priest would sprinkle blood seven times in front of the ark cover. He would then move outside the inner sanctuary and dab blood on the horns at the incense altar once and then sprinkle blood in front of the incense altar seven times. Finally the High Priest would move to the outer altar, where he would dab blood once on the horns of that altar and then sprinkle blood seven times on the outer altar.
He would then use a live goat, a scapegoat, as a moral garbage truck to symbolically take the sins outside the community. Representing the nation, the High Priest would lean both his hands on the head of the live goat. While he was in this position, he would confess “all the culpabilities of the Israelites, and all their transgressions, as well as all their sins (Roy Gane’s translation).” In doing so, he transferred them to the goat.
This part of the ritual was unique. It was the only time when hand-leaning on the goat was performed with two hands. In all other rituals, only one hand was used. Also, this was the only time confession happened simultaneously with the hand-leaning. This really becomes an elimination ritual that transfers the evils away from the people and disposes of them.
After that, a man would lead the goat away into the desert, now the property of “Azazel.” He would be taken to a place from which the goat could not return. Though he was not killed, likely to keep it from being considered a sacrifice, in the Second Temple period it was shoved off a cliff to make sure it would not bring the nation’s sins back to haunt the people.
The priest would then take off the plain linens used in the process, bathe, and then put on his ornate priestly clothing. Finally, he would perform supplementary burnt offerings for the priests and others at the outer altar.
The community would also participate. They would rest from work, and engage in what most scholars believed was a day of fasting and prayer.
In the next post, I will look at the evils mentioned in Leviticus 16 to see what was purged.
