Monday, January 9, 2023

Two kinds of repentance: 'mechila' and 'slicha'

In her book On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World (Beacon Press, 2022), Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg describes two Hebrew concepts: mechila and slicha:

“You stole from me? OK, you acknowledged that you did so in a self-aware way, you're in therapy to work on why you stole, you paid me back, and you apologized in a way that I felt reflected an understanding of the impact your actions had on me — it seems that you're not going to do this to anyone else. Fine. It doesn't mean that we pretend that the theft never happened, and it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that our relationship will return to how it was before or even that we return to any kind of ongoing relationship. With mechila [pardon], whatever else I may feel or not feel about you, I can consider this chapter closed. Those pages are still written upon, but we're done here.

Slicha, on the other hand, may be better translated as 'forgiveness'; it includes more emotion. ... Like mechila, it does not denote a restored relationship between the perpetrator and the victim (neither does the English word, actually; 'reconciliation' carries that meaning), nor does slicha include a requirement that the victim act like nothing happened. But it has more of the softness, that letting-go quality associated with 'forgiveness' in English.

Notably, the Jewish literature of repentance mostly deals with mechila, the former type of forgiveness.”

Please also see my article: "Past and Future Are Up to You (More or Less): On repentance and hacking time." It's a 3-minute read on Medium.

My own novel of injury and moving on:



cocoon attached to a twig
Image by Ian Lindsay from Pixabay

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