The news keeps on coming in the Madoff Meltdown, and it’s not getting any better. But the comments to last week’s post about this mess have been great and they demand a response about the relationship between concepts like justice, compassion, t’shuvah (repentance) and kapparah (atonement). They are not mutually exclusive, even as applied to a single person and that person’s wrong-doings.
My thinking about this is still evolving and, given the scope of this, I hope that yours is too. So here goes. I start by distinguishing between compassion and forgiveness – something that many commenters seem loathe to do. I wonder why? One can have the former without granting the latter.
A good example from Rabbinic literature might be how the Sages interpret what it means to love one’s neighbor as one’s self — a reasonable way to think of compassion. Among the views offered is the notion that it means we should execute a convicted felon in a dignified manner. Hardly what most of us would call forgiving, but we might call it compassionate nonetheless. At least the Sages did.
The compassion about which I write is not squeamish about the law.

It simply realizes that we will need to go deeper than procedural justice (a rebalancing of the scales), if we want to really understand what happened here and make it less like to occur in the future.
From a philosophical standpoint, t’shuvah (repentence) is an ongoing process. It involves both the pursuit of kaparah (atonement) and the gaining of mekhilah (forgivness). And while accomplishing it vis a vis God is a purely internal issue, vis a vis our fellow human beings it is not. Those whom we have wronged need to be satisfied, which can be a lot more difficult than satisfying God.
Bernard Madoff may well never be able to accomplish full kaparah (atonement) from the standpoint of his investors because he probably cannot fully repay them. They however, could grant him mekhilah (forgiveness) independent of that fact. It’s entirely up to them if they choose to do so, but there is no undermining of justice if they do. One is a matter of satisfying the demands of the law and the other is a decision that those who have been hurt are always free to make.
We do not have the right to demand compassion from others when dealing with wrongs that were done to them. It is theirs to either share or withhold. But neither should we hide a lack of compassion behind the claim that it would be wrong to show some because doing so dilutes justice. We simply have to make a choice.
If we just want to be right, then we can keep shouting – at Bernie Madoff and at each other. But if we want to have impact, then more than shouting is needed. That’s where compassion comes in. It never subverts our commitment to justice. It does however demand that justice is done with gentleness, modesty and love.