My Jewish Home: Faith & Forgiveness - Rivka Malka Perlman

hi everyone its riff Komaki and welcome today we're talking about forgiveness so forgiveness is a huge topic and it's an amazing thing because Yom Kippur comes every year and we're told that our sins are forgiven and we're told to ask one another for forgiveness but what does forgiveness actually mean and what is the process of healing as you're getting over whatever this pain was what about if you're the one who inflicted the pain how do you get forgiveness I mean I'm sure you've had this experience where you apologized to someone your apology is very difficult for them to accept and even when they accept it your relationship is never quite the same we don't realize how many resentments we walk around with like it's like a big heavy sack of resentments all these stories we carry around from every age and every stage and millions of interactions and institutions and organizations and all the people that wronged us and everything and without understanding forgiveness and faith and the role that faith plays in forgiveness we cannot behold I promise you that if you take in the lessons that we're going to learn today from so many beautiful people and you do some soul searching you will find new doors opening for you so open your heart and join the conversation today I want to introduce you to some people who have amazing things to say and it's kind of a treat for me to introduce them to you because they are so important in my life and our first guest is dr. Covino Samuels IV is a chiropractor with an emphasis on functional medicine well I have high vino what she does and how it relates to faith and forgiveness Thank You Rivka Malka what I do is a type of healing bodywork that's based in chiropractic but it's really grounded in emotional release what are we seeing when we say release there's 12 energy centers in the body so we're releasing the emotion from that energy center and we're allowing it to balance so let's bring this to our topic here because there's a connection between the work that you're doing and forgiveness now what happens when a person doesn't forgive so when emotions get trapped in your body or they stay there they it can fester and it's sometimes it can create toxins but what it does is it actually affects your biochemistry so you can actually get sick from holding on to resentment and I have seen it when they release it their body is able to heal so I always give people homework if you can shift the energy into something more constructive or productive for yourself it's basically getting it off of yourself and doing something for someone else forgiving another person is a huge active lesson but forgiveness doesn't mean that what they did was right yeah they're so just because you forgive them you're not condoning what they did it's like a part in like you still did a crime but I'm absolving you of the day exactly and that's my gift to you and what you're really saying is that's my gift to myself right and the beautiful thing is is that what comes after forgiveness is love and love is one of those things that you were saying at the beginning like one thing is true on all the levels you know love is you can finally feel out some love that things happen for a reason because you can love yourself instead of beating yourself up right you can love the other person because exactly but you can't get there yeah unless you forgive did you ever have a time when you had to forgive someone absolutely I wouldn't be able to do this work if I'd if I did not know how to forgive when I was younger I was raped and I had to learn to forgive I had to learn forgiveness for the person that did it for me to me I had to learn to forgive myself right oh my gosh I brought this on myself whatever so so harmful yeah it's very harmful and it trickles into a lot of different areas like you don't get to be a channel for forgiveness but you are for so many people unless you've done your work right and I still work on it I want to share with our audience that for my experience the journey to forgiveness is the journey to wholeness it's a choosing of how you want to walk through life as the victim of circumstances of people or as as a proactive receiver as a welcomer of all the gifts that Hashem is sending you as a person of purpose and you know with an understanding that all this stuff is for a purpose and part of our life story I actually want to introduce you to son I've been wanting to introduce you to her for a long time and I want to introduce our audience to her and she is someone who has helped me on my journey of forgiveness and I'm really excited for the two of you to me and also for our audience to hear her perspective this is Esther Winer my dear friend and healer she's like a multi-faceted diamond she's a lawyer and a negotiator and also has been in the healing field for 40 years that means I started when I was 3 years old ok I got it ok I invited you today so you can share how faith and forgiveness work together and really gives people an understanding of what how worth it it is to do the work of forgiveness in working over a number of years and in a number of different modalities of healing and energy work it's become increasingly clear that where we as individuals have our most difficulty is in forgiveness whether it's ourselves and many times that is the hardest nut to crack for anyone often that bottom line is I'm no good and I'm no good because this happened in my life and I can't forgive myself for that because I'm bad that takes God totally out of the picture because of course God created us created us with all of our skills all of our character bonuses and flaws and loves us completely so when we can't accept ourselves we don't let in Hashem love for us when we don't let in Hashem love for us how on earth can we love somebody else if we can't forgive somebody else he won't forgive us so it's like this this ball of knots that need to be unraveled forgiving the other is really a step towards our freedom what does it mean to forget what it really means is you understand at the deepest level in your bones in your bones that everything that happens to you is from Hashem frankly I wouldn't be here talking to you and you and in Baltimore door or you guys any any of that if something really horrid Lee tragic hadn't happened in my life to bring me to Baltimore in essence faith and forgiveness have to go together yes if you don't have faith then when something happens to you you're gonna be a victim you ain't gonna stay a victim yes okay but if you can if you have your faith and you believe that Hashem loves you and that he's doing everything for your good then everything that happens to you whatever comes your way is a challenge and an opportunity to become the person that you are supposed to be yeah by forgiving your saying you know what this is gonna make me stronger and this is what makes me the person that I am today and that's what made me the person that I am the ability to help people that have been sexually abused and like you know that I've had serious trauma in their lives I wouldn't be able to do that if I if I hadn't have gone through it myself so I always say when something happens to you you're an Olympic athlete yeah and Hashem does not give you know went an Olympic athlete athlete Turkish okay there's no so if you step up to the challenge because you're meant to be great oh yeah so it's a long journey it's a very long journey and I think it's our journey home to ourselves okay thank you riff come on you're like high-fiving all right so let's get real on the journey to forgiveness you're gonna have some bad days and then those days I want to give you permission to make pancakes for dinner so here's a really easy pancake recipe okay thank you I love pancakes and they are truly a comfort food so here's the recipe I'm gonna read it to you it's 2 cups of flour I've made this with almond flour and with regular flour and with whole wheat flour 4 teaspoons of baking powder it is good with this recipe to get the measurements I was just about to say to get the measurements right and I can't remember if I put it there for 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 a cup of sugar 2 eggs 2 cups of milk or anything it's gonna have tablespoons of oil before I put in the oil would have been good to mix in that baking powder otherwise your whole pancakes are gonna taste like baking powder you know what else is fun about pancakes when I make them for breakfast which takes around 3 minutes as you'll see everyone feels like I've made a really big breakfast so I'm gonna put my fire over here on to medium-high and I'm gonna add in a bit of oil you can do this with Pam also but I like the oils a little bit better that's a coat the whole thing will be crispy on the bottom and we're starving you hungry my kids make their own pancakes from about age 4 I do like that last segment that we did I'm forgiveness I apenas amazing it was so amazing for me to see the true you on the same page we reach different people in different ways but it's still the same message yeah you need that rawness you need to let go yeah I have an amazing story about that I get a text from my friend and she said I have to tell you something try and call me she got a call from a parent in who kid was a camp with her son the parent calls her and said your son is bullying my son and camp and your son is so nasty and so mean what kind of mother are you and what kind of parenting goes on in our family my friend is listening to this and she's very taken aback and she hung up the phone and that was that where that should have been that but after whenever she would see the lady in town it would be like cold shoulder so this went on for years and she just had this this resentment because she was feeling very defensive and upset and then fast forward and this time it was her daughter and not her son and they were in camp these two two siblings were now in the same bunk together and the sibling of the other woman's child told my friend's daughter I can't in your bunk my mother doesn't let she says you have a bad family and my friend said like this is crazy devastating devastating how long is this going to go on so she did an incredibly brave thing she called her up and she invited her out to dinner she said I want to invite you out to dinner because I want there to be showing between us I want there to be peace between us she didn't say I'm right you're wrong she had this burning desire there should just be peace the world cannot handle any more of this nonsense camp and they met in the restaurant and my friend reached out and she gave her a hug and the woman hugged her right back and she said I'm so glad that you invited me and they sat down together beautiful they didn't talk about what happened cuz what happened was nonsense it was people being people and humans being humans and kids being kids and they sat there together and my friend ended up helping her and she ended up helping her with our children and I get to share this story with you she said in that moment when she called this woman up to ask her out to dinner she said like I don't know if I ever did anything good in my life but if I did one thing good it was this moment they're like okay I'm doing my part to bring Redemption how happy that made Hashem yeah are you ready to taste our pancakes it's only perfect exactly hmm I'm having another yeah enjoy your pancakes guys enjoy your comfort food so we've spoken about how to forgive when stone has wronged you but what if you are the one who is wronged someone else and I brought in a very special guest Rabbi Slatkin I love the work that Rabbi ii does he works with couples as a therapist focusing on imago therapy to repair relationships so I thought you were the perfect person to speak about what is the process of making amends thank you it's a pleasure being here making amends in Jewish tradition is involves two steps one is taking ownership and admitting what you did wrong and the other is having regret for what you did wrong and resolving not to do it again that's what we call chuhwa and that is really what we're doing when we're making amends in a relationship whether it's a spouse or a friend we want to admit that we did something wrong and we want to do it and it's a sincere way we don't want to just do it to say like you know please forgive me but we really want to say in detail what we did and really specify make them know that we really feel you know we really feel hurt for what we did to hurt them so the sincerity is a big point another thing is to really validate the other person's experience you really get in their shoes to kind of think about what it must have been like them to be on the receiving end and really feel that sometimes in a situation where are you wronged another person you really especially if you if you're really wronged the minutes in a severe way you really have to go out of your way and show how sorry you are you know not maybe even it might feel like groveling before them but if you care about the relationship and you want to repair sometimes you have to make the extra step so it's not always enough just to say sorry at one time and hope the other person will forgive you you really have to make the extra effort to show that you're really sincerely sorry and then finally I find that when we ask for forgiveness besides feeling regret we actually have to take a step do a behavior to show that things are different because you know as we say talk is cheap we really need to show action so sometimes it's really showing an action and encouraging the person that you're wrong that you're going to be doing things differently now you're not going to you know reinjure them in that same way and action really shows that I'm hearing you talk a lot about this and being patient with the process that a person might not forgive you right away exactly yeah and it sounds like from what you're saying there's no quick way out it's you gotta like dig deep and really it's almost like you're teaching yourself to regret it every time you give you extend more kindness or another apology or buy them another little gift you're teaching yourself like this relationship is worth investing in I really I really messed with the trust here you know it's a process of building it's not just you know one half thing and what you know forgiving and we can move on the process so then we have this like concept of asking some for forgiveness let's say before Yom Kippur or something where you maybe they say they forgive you but you haven't actually done this whole process of rebuilding the relationship so what do you have to say about that that point it's a beginning you know asking forgiveness it's a beginning but there's a level of sincerity in there you know they're people that feel like they just have the obligation to ask for forgiveness and they do that and that's why I said that it's really important to really take ownership for what you did and to detail it yeah oh please forgive me like I'm sorry I hurt you by doing this it shows that you really you know what you did you're taking ownership for it and you're asking for that forgiveness yeah people can forgive and you can rebuild a relationship no matter what you've done to hurt it but it is a process and it's something that requires patience but if you stay the course you can experience that reconnection again yes okay thank you thank you very much so we've talked a lot about forgiveness and it's important in our growth and in our ability to become close to her shop but how do we get there because we are all getting because we are all Jews we are one big soul so when I forgive you for doing something to me what happens maybe I will merit some wonderful thing in my life because the Shem is happy that I forgiving another child or maybe what will happen is that I will be a power plant this is an amazing concept that I learned from one of my teachers here in Baltimore mrs. haya Kruk who I believe learned it from her teacher Rebbetzin Samet which is the idea that we are power plants and if we give over and forgive somebody else that creates just like a power plant where is one in one location but a light is on somewhere else in the room that barakah that we've brought down into the world may save a yen in Eretz Israel or in the Yucatan or wherever we're actually although we may not even see it or know anything about it it brings that blessing into our world helping other Jews so even if you feel that you can't do it for yourself for whatever reason think of doing it for all the claw think of doing it for our progress forward towards machine thanks for joining or Sookie welcome yeah so we invited tricky here because forgiveness is a topic for every age I don't know what your elementary school was like but your feelings get hurt all over the place so I wanted to just get a kid's perspective see what it's like for you have you um ever got your feelings hurt like pretty bad yeah this person that hurt you they were in your school yeah in my class are you still angry at them no not anymore so how'd you get over that I knew it was a test so I just pushed myself hard enough that I got over it that's remarkable so Shirky what-if imagine that there was like a magic mirror and you could look in this mirror and you could just see the future and you could see how every single thing that happened to you including that person who hurt you was actually a present for you to build you into this amazing person who does amazing things and without this pain happening to you you wouldn't be the same oh then I'd probably say thank you to her for doing it I want to offer that mirror to you for now for your whole life that when someone hurts you and you work hard to overcome that test of forgiving them in that moment you're actually becoming a greater person just by passing that test do you know that there were years in my life where I had no friends one year I remember all my friends dumped me at once I was like cool for about eight months and then suddenly BAM not cool no friends goodbye and you know I realized I realized that because all those friends were so mean to me and dumped me they actually gave me a big present that I learned how to enjoy my own company and how to enjoy people but not like need them every second that I can just be by myself and read a book and go out yeah so thanks for your time here you might not realize how special it is that your age that you have such a big vision you must have very special parents I think you taught us a lot amazing