Forgiveness
Forgiveness can become a path of self-healing. In this reflection, I share a personal story about a moment when the word “forgive” rose out of me in the midst of danger, and the long inner journey that followed.
The Self-Healing Within Forgiveness
Much has been written about forgiveness—about how important it is, and how deeply healing it can be. In the Hebrew calendar there is even an entire month devoted to it: the month of selichot, the prayers of asking and granting forgiveness.
Forgiveness has the power to change our lives. I want to share a personal story that shaped me, and at its center is forgiveness.
My Personal Story With Forgiveness
In 2015, I was driving back to central Israel with a friend after a birthday weekend in Hararit, in the Galilee. We had spent the weekend with good friends, sweet babies, music, thoughtful conversations, and that rare feeling of being inwardly replenished—like the heart has been given a little more room for the week ahead.
It was a pleasant night. I was driving my friend’s car. Not long after we began the trip, we suddenly came upon a roadblock near Kafr Manda, on what seemed to be the route Waze had marked.
It All Happened So Fast
We were on a one-way road. The cars ahead of us began trying to turn around, which created a jam in the narrow lane. We tried to turn around too, but in one instant someone noticed us—two blond people with blue eyes—and started shouting “Jews, Jews” in Arabic.
Within seconds, the whole crowd ran toward us and surrounded the car. I saw them block the front and back with rocks. Shouting “itbach al-yahud,” they encircled the vehicle and began striking it violently from every direction.
It was an enraged crowd. It looked like hell.
There was a hatred in their eyes I had never encountered before. They cursed and hit the car with force. The three rear windows shattered almost immediately. The front windows cracked but did not collapse. They pounded on the car from every side. In one blow, a calm drive home with a friend became a scene from a horror film. People climbed onto the car and beat it fiercely. It felt as though it could turn into a lynching. The fear was overwhelming.
The Unexpected Cry
Then something unexpected happened.
The word forgive began bursting out of my mouth. I shouted: “Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!”
I did not think about it. The words simply came. Maybe from some unconscious part of me, maybe from inner guidance, maybe from somewhere I still cannot fully explain. At the same time, I raised my hands toward them, palm to palm, in a gesture like prayer or namaste, and shouted it loudly so everyone could hear.
It was surreal. Completely unexpected.
And not fair.
I had always wanted peace. I came from a peace-seeking home, and throughout the years I consistently supported peaceful political paths. And here I was, being attacked out of nowhere with terrifying intensity. I had done nothing to these people, yet it felt as if they were enraged at me personally, as if they meant to take our lives.
They were already destroying the car while we were inside it. Later we found stones in the vehicle, as well as sticks, iron rods, and even a beer bottle. And there I was, asking for forgiveness—calling it out, shouting it—asking them to forgive us.
And then something shifted.
Deliverance
In one moment, I saw someone pull away one of the young men who had been standing on the hood, smashing the windshield with determination while staring at me with the most frightening look I had ever seen in someone’s eyes. It was a gaze I later needed to do a great deal of trauma-clearing work around.
When he was pulled off the car, my field of vision opened. I could suddenly see the person in front of me looking directly at me while moving aside the rock that had been placed in front of the car.
In that instant, without hesitation, I pressed the gas as hard as I could and we flew out of there—shaking, screaming, terrified. I drove as fast as possible until we saw police. We spent much of the night there.
And then my journey into understanding forgiveness began.
The Journey Toward Forgiveness
I will say honestly: I did not come out of that experience feeling stronger. It took time to absorb and process it, and despite all my efforts, it did not completely leave me.
I wrote about what had happened on Facebook, and many wonderful friends and colleagues from healing and therapeutic fields offered help with great generosity. I accepted that support with gratitude. At the same time, I also sought other forms of help from people whose gift it is to work with suffering and recovery, including studying A Course in Miracles with the wonderful teacher Efrat Sar-Shalom.
Each person helped me in their own way. But the experience had entered me so deeply that for a long time I could not fully rise above it.
At the same time, I was deeply curious about that cry of forgiveness that had come out of me so irrationally, so unexpectedly—and about the feeling that it may have saved our lives. What was that? Why did it happen? Those questions stayed with me.
I began a journey of inquiry that continues to this day. Through it I have discovered a great deal. I have grown, strengthened, and found openings in life and consciousness that I did not know before. I want to share some of that here, because I believe this is the kind of understanding that can help us in the moments when we most need it.
What Is Forgiveness?
Forgiveness is often understood as one of the strongest forms of protection in the energetic realm. This understanding appears, in different ways, across many cultures.
Forgiveness carries a powerful frequency. It can change the atmosphere of a moment.
It is also a conscious force. When we use it, something can loosen—physically, mentally, emotionally, and energetically.
Forgiveness has movement to it. It lifts perspective.
Its movement is upward, and this matters because from a higher perspective we can see more of the picture. When we see more, consciousness no longer needs to go on harming itself through lack of forgiveness.
What I mean is this: when I can look from a wider, higher perspective, that perspective is almost always more benevolent as well.
It allows me to see what I could not see from where I stood before. And the more of the picture I can hold, the more truth becomes available.
Forgiveness belongs to this movement of expanded perspective. More parts of reality become visible. More stories join the story I first told myself. And from there, vision changes into something more accurate, because it contains more truth.
After all, those who create suffering are themselves acting out of suffering.
When we understand that, the spirit has somewhere to rise. That rising is part of the movement of forgiveness. It helps protect us not only physically, but emotionally as well. When I forgive, I release the charged energy from my thoughts. I loosen what blocks me from freedom and happiness. I make room for inner peace.
Forgiveness is not something I do for someone else. It is an inner act I do for myself. That is why compassion and forgiveness both carry qualities of self-healing. Resentment and anger can bind us to painful and limiting experiences. Forgiveness is a key that opens the way out.
Deep forgiveness can restore our energy to us. It can awaken self-love as an act of emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual healing.
I experience forgiveness as something that lives in the body as well. It is the opposite of grasping. When forgiveness moves through us, it releases inner knots and frees what has been bound up in the future as well as the past. It prepares the inner ground for growth.
It can even turn injury—the terrible thing that happened—into fertile ground for becoming.
Paths Into Forgiveness
So how do we move toward this kind of forgiveness? Sometimes through more than one path at once.
One path I discovered is taking responsibility for the interpretation we gave an experience. For example, if someone insults us, what wounds us is often not only the event itself, but also the meaning we attached to it. This is why it matters to separate facts from interpretation.
When we loosen blame inside our own interpretation, something in us becomes freer. We are no longer run entirely by what we did not want to experience. And from that freedom, we have more capacity to act, to respond, and to change.
Another path is the willingness to accept the truth that there is always more in a situation than our present awareness can grasp. Even when it seems we see and understand everything about what happened—we do not. There is always more hidden than visible.
Forgiveness can also be chosen and practiced.
The next time you encounter anger, try quietly saying: “forgive, forgive, forgive,” and notice what it does. This can be in response to anger coming from someone outside you, or anger rising within you.
There is a spiritual teaching that says that among all our inner qualities, forgiveness is one of the few we may practice before we fully feel it—and through the practice, it becomes real.
This idea also appears in Jewish thought: that a human being has the capacity, through focused intention and inner discipline, to influence emotion through consciousness and thought. In this view, the decision to forgive is not false. It can be a doorway.
Love Is the Source of Everything
When I know that love is the source of everything, I come a little closer to a greater truth: I cannot possibly see the whole picture. And yet, what comes to me may still be serving the highest good, even when that cannot be understood in the moment.
God of Forgiveness
Rabbi Nachman wrote:
God of forgiveness,
only You know
how much I need
to learn to forgive.
Guard me from the anger
that burns within me.
Release me from resentment toward others
who have wronged me.
Help me be freed
from all harshness
and hostility
that seal my heart.
Help me turn
my anger into love
and my hatred
into compassion.
