Forgiveness was one of the greatest challenges of my life.
I remember being in the middle of an anxiety attack, shaken by what was unfolding in front of me. A voice in my head kept saying, “You’re going to have to forgive. You’re going to have to forgive.” All the while, I was screaming inside: How can anyone forgive something like this? How?
There was enough rage in me to bring down buildings. I blamed everyone. I fired arrows from a bleeding heart. Nothing helped, and the situation only became more intense. Every attempt to fix it by changing something outside myself left me feeling more defeated, weaker and more shattered.
I was the picture of victimhood. Full-on Les Misérables.
I won’t recount every little thing I tried to fix it, though together they could make a wonderful Netflix script. Use your imagination. I traveled to holy places, lay face down on mineral-rich ground and even buried crystals. I tried everything, and nothing worked.
The change came only when I surrendered. Once I stopped resisting reality and reacting to it, I could finally understand what was happening. When I brought the Creator into it, I could let go of the people involved and of the event itself. Above all, I could understand how it had been for my good.
I once thought forgiveness was something we gave someone else. Today I know it is a gift we give ourselves. The need to forgive others is rooted in the need to forgive ourselves.
Every event in your life, no matter how horrific or how unjust, is for your good. Behind every resentment, there is a revelation.
Episode summary
In episode 52 of The Truth Hurts (HaEmet Ko’evet), Tal and I talk about unity and forgiveness in a week of grief, conflict and deep division in Israel. We ask what unity really means when people disagree, and why demanding that everyone become like us is not unity at all.
The conversation moves from the national to the personal. We talk about resentment, guilt and the roles we each fall into at different times: sometimes the victim, sometimes the person at fault. Forgiveness, as I understand it, is not a favor granted to someone else. It is love in action and a way to release the struggle within ourselves.
We also look at the discipline of turning inward. When I judge a politician, a neighbor or someone close to me, what does that judgment reveal about me? Our hope for the country begins there, with the inner work each of us can do.
Episode notes
The episode is in Hebrew. These notes present its ideas in English.
The test of unity
Tal opens by saying it has been a hard week. I tell her that the upheaval has made me think about how our faith (emunah) is being tested. Wherever we are in the world, and especially here in Israel, our existence depends on love.
The protests, bonfires, rifts, riots and violence are more than arguments happening around us. They can destroy us. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and our cousins in Judea and Samaria are watching us fuel the fire among ourselves. They see the clashes in the Knesset and the degrading way people on every side speak to one another. The worse our internal war becomes, the easier it is for our enemies to tear us apart.
We keep refusing to lift our heads above our own positions, desires and stories. We create another drama, sharpen another knife. If this continues, there will be nothing left here, neither right nor left, secular nor religious.
Tal remembers believing that the war might become an opportunity for unity. I answer that this test did not begin with the war. We have been trying to find unity for four years, through the coronavirus pandemic and everything that followed. I point to Israel’s role as a world leader in vaccination and say that it was no accident. Our only choice is to learn to love.
To love this way, we have to follow the Creator’s example, see the good in another person and act with humility. At the deepest level, we are entitled to nothing. Even what seems most obvious is not guaranteed. The Creator owes us nothing; everything we have is a gift. Only in hindsight can we see how calm and relatively good life was before October 7, even though we were not especially grateful then.
I tell a story about people who asked Rebbe Nachman of Breslov how to help someone who was depressed. His answer was to share verses about humility, saying they would lift the person out of depression. Why humility? I say depression or sadness grows out of the feeling that “I deserve”: I deserve more; I deserved the promotion; I deserved kinder treatment. I say this with an apology to anyone experiencing depression, because I have been there too. My answer is to stop and remember that no one owes us anything.
We often understand only in hindsight. That ability to learn after the fact is built into us. Without it, I joke, women would never give birth again.
Unity does not mean sameness
Everyone says they want unity, but too often what they mean is, “I am willing to unite with you if you become like me.” That is not unity. It is dictatorship.
Few of us are willing to consider the other person’s point of view, let alone loosen our grip on our own story.
We see the same pattern in relationships. Sometimes it seems as if half the practitioners out there have built their work around relationships with people they label narcissistic. But before we define anyone by a label, we should pause. You are not the other person. A relationship built around changing them is doomed to fail. The first step is to accept them as they are. If something about them disturbs you, look for what needs attention within you.
The Hebrew words themselves make the connection: wholeness, shalem, is bound up with peace, shalom. Unity means that I can love you as you are without expecting, or even wanting, you to become like me.
That may sound old-fashioned in 2024. Moving abroad has almost become a trend. Israelis have moved in large numbers to Berlin and Costa Rica; after the rush for Portuguese passports, many settled in Portugal; and an entire community formed in Thailand. But, beautiful souls, we do not want another exile. We do not want to be scattered again. We have to wake up before we are blown away like dust. We are wasting our strength.
Tal offers a hopeful counterpoint. Since October 7, she says, the number of people making aliyah has risen sharply, well above the usual rate. People are coming to Israel out of Zionism. There is a longing for unity here too.
Forgiveness is love in action
Forgiveness is essential on the national level, but it is also deeply personal. Almost everyone has someone or something to forgive, and almost everyone feels guilty about something. We play every role. Sometimes I am the victim; sometimes I am at fault. When we keep judging one another from the same wounded place, the loop never ends. If we continue fighting ourselves, our enemies need only stand aside and let us destroy one another.
I also believe forgiveness is essential to healing. As we discuss psychosomatic illness, which I say now accounts for almost everything, we claim that irritation, nervous tension, judgment, resentment, anger, regret and hostility lie behind every illness. I can testify only to my own experience: when I began forgiving myself and the people around me, my inflammation subsided. Tal reminds me that I had very good reasons to be angry. There is always a reason, I answer. Anyone who looks for one will find it.
But being right does not set us free. We can forgive only when we let go. Most people think forgiveness is something they must give someone else. I see it as something I give myself, because the stress created by anger, resentment and the story of “poor me, look what they did to me” directly affects the immune system and leaves the body open to infection and illness. Even when your grievance is justified, giving your life to it gives someone else the power.
So what is forgiveness? It is love in action.
The essential ingredient is willingness. You may not know how to forgive, but if you sincerely want to, you have already come most of the way. I believe anyone who truly wants to forgive can do it. Forgiveness does not mean you have to like someone or feel close to them. No one can force that. We can, however, love people we do not like if love means wishing them health, happiness, peace, calm, joy and all the blessings of life. It is not easy. What matters is that the wish be sincere.
This is where the principle of unity comes in. I believe everything exists within one unified field. I point listeners to quantum theory and to the work of Dr. Nassim Haramein, whom I describe as one of the world’s leading physicists. I say his numerical research proves that the universe is one field. If that is so, then my neighbor and my partner’s annoying children are also manifestations of me.
For me, this idea takes us back to the foundation of who we are as the Jewish people: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It is not enough to put those words on a sticker on your vision board. We have to understand them at their core.
In that sense, forgiveness is not generosity. It is almost selfish. What I wish for another person is what I wish for myself, because the thoughts and feelings I direct toward someone else enter me too. There is no separate “him” and “me.” We came here to reveal the Creator in His many faces.
Understanding that idea does not mean living it is easy. Tal says that even when she understands it, she can fall back into familiar reactions. I tell her that those reactions are exactly what keep us trapped in the loop. Do we want to remain inside our suffering and unforgiveness, continually justifying the terrible things done to us, or are we willing to aim higher?
I am not pretending to love every human being. There are still a few people on my list who make me want to reach for a machete. On a good day, I may even manage an act of kindness toward them. We are aiming for a higher level: understanding that every person reveals another face of the Creator, another version of me embodied in the world. It is difficult to grasp because we live so deeply inside the illusion of separation. But there is no “them” and “us.” There is all of us.
Who are you angry with? Your brother. Who are you fighting? Your own home, your own country, the people who want what is good for you. Again and again, the Creator gives us the opportunity to return to unity, and again and again we waste our strength.
The familiar saying “Our strength is in our unity” is not an empty slogan. Imagine a parent showing a child an open hand. One finger can be broken easily. Close the hand, and it becomes a fist. Who can break the fist? When we each live only for our own egos and needs, unable to see or acknowledge another person’s pain and fear, we leave ourselves exposed.
The work begins within
Psychological warfare is already exploiting that exposure. Tal and I mention Liri, a young woman still being held hostage, whose parents received a funeral wreath. This is not war as we once understood it. Since October 7, it has worked by influencing people, sowing disagreement and widening the rift in Israeli society. Our enemies draw strength from that rift, and our anger, rage and frustration make us participants in it.
The next day, I was due to lead the one-day Releasing Guilt, Resentment and Anger workshop (in Hebrew). No one is free of the need to forgive someone or something. If you think you must fix the world first, you are mistaken. If you still carry anger, whatever its cause, still want revenge or cannot look at others and see that they belong to the whole, there is work to do within.
The workshop included powerful processes and meditations to release pain all the way down to the cellular level. That inner release matters because this is a brutal period. We are being struck again and again, and sometimes our hearts skip a beat in the face of a reality that feels impossible. We need to remind ourselves gently that we are a beautiful people: whole, warm and loving.
We have survived so much across the generations. Perhaps this time, in this terrible round, the unity we create and the force of redemption can rise to meet the cruelty of the disasters, the grief, the darkness and the pain. I believe the Jewish people can bring the world a message of unity, and that this is our role.
If we continue fighting, splitting and tearing at one another, we divide our own strength. It will not matter whether the person in power has a name beginning with B, G or D. The work begins with each of us, because the belief that “I am fine and everyone else is the problem” is delusional. The one tool we have is to clean and repair what is within us.
When I see politicians serving themselves, even now, protecting their personal interests instead of looking beyond themselves and understanding that we are one, I may go out and protest. There may be good reason to protest. But my deeper work is to sit with myself and ask: Gili, where are you acting from pure ego? Where are you serving your own interests without seeing anyone else? If selfishness is what I see outside, I have to ask where it lives in me.
Every person is a whole world. Change begins by bringing all the parts of myself into unity, meeting them with love and acceptance. It can begin with something as small as seeing my neighbor go out in red lipstick and a crop top. I may click my tongue and decide she is desperate for attention.
Then I have to stop myself: Gili, what are you seeing? You have interpreted this woman as someone crying out for attention. So where are you crying out for attention yourself?
That question may help me judge and criticize her less. I might look at her more generously instead: how lovely that she is going out, dressing up, bringing beauty into this world, enjoying herself and loving the way she looks. Dial down the judgment. Then dial it down again.
Holding a vision of return
We want what is good for everyone. Even in the inferno, that means holding on to hope. We pray for good news by the end of the week and ask everyone listening to hold that vision with us and keep hoping.
We can focus our consciousness in many directions. It is human to engage with another person’s pain, but I have to limit how long I stay there if I am no longer doing any good. If I want to live in abundance, I do not need to dwell on poverty. If I want to focus on healing, I do not need to dwell on illness. If I want unity, I do not need to dwell on evil and division. It may seem more humane to keep looking at poverty and illness, beautiful souls, but I do not believe it is right. I want to keep my consciousness clear enough to hold a different picture.
I picture all our captives returning safe and healthy. I picture all our people here in the country, celebrating Independence Day together with joy before 2024 is over, God willing.
As the episode closes, a song by Margalit Tsanani begins to play. I love her, and I love how the song lifts us. We invite listeners to sing it loudly and imagine the captives coming home because, as I say, that joyful vision opens the way for their return. Raise your hands high and choose joy, because a Jew who lives with faith is a joyful Jew.
Have a good day, beautiful souls, and a calm, pleasant weekend.