I should have been a fucking diplomat (or maybe an advice to the lovelorn columnist).
Dear C:
In answer to your question [“whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness?”]: rachmunnis is mercy, empathy, decency, kindness. Forgiveness is a close relative, in fact, rachmunnis is sometimes translated as forgiveness.
This impulse to act with love, to move past hurt, to nurture someone else, after sitting with their uncomfortable feelings, is the heart of relations between humans who care about each other. Rachmunnis is easier to recognize than to consistently practice.
Humility and self-awareness are essential parts of being an empathetic person. You have to be willing (and able) to put yourself in someone else’s place in order to resolve problems, to forgive each other and show love instead of clinging to righteous anger that always escalates when conflicts are never resolved.
When someone tells you that you’re hurting them, and you insist they’re being oversensitive, overthinking it, making unfair accusations, making you uncomfortable and so on, you are showing the opposite of rachmunnis. If you do this once in a while it means you’re having a bad day, you weren’t yourself, and it’s not hard to overlook.
If you reflexively get angry and intransigent when someone tells you that you’ve hurt them, you’re not capable of rachmunnis. Forgiving a person who lacks rachmunnis is folly. It’s not true forgiveness, for one thing; it’s an empty gracious gesture that guarantees ongoing future harm. Forgiving without a real apology means you agree to swallow repeated spoonsful of shit every time the other person feels bad about anything.
What happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness in our case is that I’ve told you, over and over, and in writing several times — writing you tell me is clear, stylish and easy to understand — that it’s impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge fault. You continue to act like you can’t understand this.
Your son is a very neurotic person, he’s also very angry. He can only express his anger passively, and he has never conceded any kind of fault to me — or anyone else — as far as I know. He’s too insecure to admit he’s ever been wrong about anything. He’s too neurotic to express regret for anything he’s ever done, no matter what the cost to himself might be for not being able to do so.
In the end, for reasons you know well, I stopped trying to fix things with people who can’t even acknowledge anything is broken. For your part, you once seemed to understand this — telling me I had enough aggravations with my medical challenges without worrying about trying to be friends with R. Now you’re intent on forcing me to forgive a very aggravating person, because it pains you that I am such a fine person and your son only wants to be friends with me.
Can you forgive someone who accuses you of something his angry wife made up, angrily confronts you about it, eye twitching, telling you, before he even informs you what he’s accusing you of, that he’s not sure you can continue to be friends because of the viciousness of what you’ve supposedly done? Instead of showing anger, you answer him like a friend and try to help him with his problem, instead of walking away after the aggressive, ridiculous accusation. He never has to thank you for being a good friend or express the slightest regret about falsely accusing you or threatening you with the loss of an old friendship?
To be put on the defensive by a person like that, after years of asking him to stop passive aggressively provoking me, is intolerable. Yet, as even R will probably admit, I acted like a friend, treated him as a friend, did my best to help, seeing him in such a painful position. To be told years later, many Yom Kippurs [the day when Jews are traditionally required to make amends with those they’ve wronged] come and gone, that, for a series of frankly senseless reasons, I have to forgive him, even if his rabbi/therapist can’t make him see the need to honestly try to make amends with someone he claims to love and admire, is intolerable. Him lying to you about having apologized to me “a dozen times” – the disgusting icing on an excrement cake.
If you still can’t understand whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness, read the enclosed.
(which is slightly less diplomatic, I add, diplomatically.)
gratuitousblahg 