Forgiveness without an apology

Most people carry at least one thing they haven't forgiven. Sometimes it's enormous. Often it's small and ten years old and still warm to the touch. And sometimes what stands in the way isn't the size of the wrong but the fact that the person has never once said sorry. Jesus pushed hardest against keeping count. When Peter asked whether forgiving someone seven times was enough, he named a number meant to end the counting, though in Luke's telling the offender repents each time. Shakespeare's Prospero, at the end of The Tempest, forgives through gritted teeth the brother who stole his dukedom and set him adrift at sea, and the brother says nothing in reply, not a word of apology. The forgiveness goes out anyway, into the silence. Hannah Arendt thought forgiveness was one of the great human powers, the only release from the fact that what we do can't be undone. But in 1958 she also set a limit. Forgiving and punishing, she argued, work on the same human scale, and some crimes are so radical that they are beyond the reach of either. Simon Wiesenthal met that limit as a prisoner in a concentration camp. He was brought to the bedside of a dying SS soldier, who confessed to taking part in burning Jews alive and asked a Jew to forgive him. Wiesenthal left without a word. Years later, in The Sunflower, he put the question to dozens of writers and religious thinkers, and many of them answered that it had never been his to give: only the people who were murdered could have forgiven it. Think of the thing you haven't forgiven. What, if anything, would it take?