How do I forgive someone who hurt me?

Judaism takes forgiveness seriously enough to build it into the structure of the year itself. The Days of Awe, the ten-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are partly designed to ensure that the community actively works through its hurts before the year ends. But this is not just a seasonal ritual. The rabbis developed a nuanced and frankly demanding framework around forgiveness, one that refuses to flatten the experience into a simple transaction or a pious feeling you are supposed to summon on demand.

A foundational distinction in Jewish thought is between sins against God and sins against other people. Yom Kippur can atone for the former, but wrongs between human beings require human repair. This places enormous weight on the process. The person who hurt you is expected, in classical halakhic thinking, to genuinely seek your forgiveness, ideally three times and with sincere effort to make amends. The tradition does not ask you to pretend nothing happened or to absorb injury without acknowledgement. Maimonides, the great medieval legal and philosophical thinker, wrote carefully about the conditions under which forgiveness is both sought and granted, and he was clear that the burden of repair begins with the one who caused the harm. Knowing this can be quietly important when you are the one who was hurt: you are not simply expected to absorb it and move on.

At the same time, the tradition does ask something real of you. If someone genuinely seeks your forgiveness and you withhold it without good reason, that refusal itself becomes a moral problem. The rabbis describe a person who refuses to forgive a sincere penitent as cruel. This is not about letting someone off the hook or pretending that what they did was acceptable. It is about recognising that holding on to a grievance beyond its useful moment can harden you in ways that harm you spiritually and relationally. Jewish thought tends to be very honest about the fact that we all live in a web of imperfect relationships, and that none of us are entirely innocent. The liturgy of the High Holy Days keeps returning to this, asking each person to examine themselves alongside asking God for mercy.

What makes this tradition particularly useful for someone genuinely wrestling with being hurt is that it separates several things that often get tangled together. Forgiveness, in Jewish thought, is not the same as forgetting. It is not the same as reconciliation, which may or may not be possible or wise depending on the situation. And it is not the same as excusing what happened. You can work towards releasing your claim on resentment, which is broadly what forgiveness involves, while still naming the wrong clearly, protecting yourself from further harm, and expecting appropriate repair. There is a sobriety here that many people find more honest than frameworks that ask you simply to feel warmly towards someone who has damaged you.

Some contemporary Jewish thinkers, particularly those working at the intersection of psychology and religious ethics, have explored what it actually takes to move from being trapped in anger to something freer. The concept of teshuvah, usually translated as repentance but more literally meaning turning or returning, applies not just to wrongdoers but in a broader sense to the spiritual lives of everyone. When you have been hurt, part of your own inner work may involve a kind of turning: not away from what happened, but away from being defined and controlled by it. This is slow work. It does not require you to feel something you do not feel. But it does invite you to take seriously that your own spiritual wholeness matters, and that clinging to injury indefinitely costs you something precious. Judaism is a tradition that refuses easy comfort, but it also refuses to leave you alone with your wound.