Your righteous anger, your pride, the terrifying depths of your crippling childhood injuries, does not relieve you of your duty to do the right thing toward people you care about. Anyone who is not a psychopath knows the difference between right and wrong, though this line is easily colored over by strong emotions and righteous group think.

You can find yourself at the end of a once beautiful relationship, with no further obligation to endure what has soured into mutual contempt. That happens between humans sometimes, it is impossible to unsee contempt once it is shown to you by someone you trusted. This is very sad but sometimes, in human affairs, as inevitable as death itself.

Once you feel contempt directed at you from someone you love and trust, the hurt and betrayal you feel is usually transmitted right back to them. Faults you have long overlooked in your dear loved one transform into unresolvable obstacles to love, as do your faults to them. It is difficult to keep feeling generous toward someone who treats you with contempt. Once this transition happens, the odds are very low of overcoming it and restoring the relationship to what it was before mutual hurt corrupted it.

Finding ourselves at an ugly juncture with loved ones who hurt us does not relieve us of our obligation to act in the way we know is right. The hopelessness of a situation, until it is revealed without any further doubt — like when the Nazis began machine gunning Jews who showed them their humanity and soul power, as Gandhi advised them to do — does not change your moral obligation to do what you know is right, to refrain from doing what is hateful to you. It is OK to kill a Nazi who is trying to kill you, to defend your life and your loved ones from Nazis, once the killing starts, it is even praiseworthy to do so. It is never OK to become a Nazi.

The human dilemma, how to continue to act attuned to your higher nature when you are suddenly thrashing in a toxic sea of the lowest human impulses. There’s a riddle that will keep an honest person awake at night, especially during the ten days when we are commanded to make amends with those we have hurt and with those who have injured us.