Repentance and Forgiveness

During the Spring of 1996, with the support of the American Jewish Committee, I was privileged to be in Rome to teach Jewish Studies at the Gregorian Pontifical University. The entire Rome experience was amazing (see my “Letter from Rome,” Cross Currents, Fall 1996, pp. 388–393). This paper is part of a continuing conversation with colleagues and friends in Rome as well as elsewhere in the Catholic world. In the spirit of ongoing Catholic-Jewish dialogue, I offer the following reflections on the Jewish teaching on repentance and forgiveness, which is an old tradition, reaching back thousands of years and drawing on the wisdom of untold numbers of sages. As a further part of the dialogue, I include here the Hebrew terms, accented for proper pronunciation, together with a short bibliography. (Note: the Hebrew “ch” is pronounced as in the German “Loch.”)