Yom Kippur is coming. After forty days of special prayers and reflection, we enter into a day of repentance, resolve, supplication, and forgiveness. The center of Yom Kippur is atonement between us and God and reconciliation with our neighbors. As year follows year, there’s always the danger of falling into routine, the merely ritual repentance, the pattern of obligatory sorrow and forgiveness that is rehearsed rather than discovered. This year I took up Martha Nussbaum’s new book Anger and Forgiveness. She attempts, among many other things, to assess Jewish and Christian approaches to forgiveness, which in some respects she finds wanting. I hoped her criticisms would help me focus my thoughts in the weeks leading up to the holy day of Yom Kippur.

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