I read: “Forgiveness is impossible because it demands the forgiveness of the unforgivable, so in order for the notion to even exist, it must self-announce as a paradox.” The Derridaean notion of forgiveness as paradoxical is confusing. By virtue of the history of this last word—paradoxical—, isn’t this language still attempting to locate forgiveness within the safe limits of rationality as we know it? The key issue is that forgiveness cannot be recognized (or too late, and then enshrined, as in the story of the “prodigal son”). What is called forgiveness or recognized as such is an effect of it or an aura.

In the story of the lost son in Luke 15, the drama is inside the father as much as it is “outside,” between him and his younger son, later his older son. One can only guess at what has been going on inside the father’s heart. The structure of the chapter indicates the search is inside the father. We are told about the search for one sheep out of one hundred outside in the wild “garrigue,” then the search for one coin out of ten inside a house, finally about this loss and struggle within one’s heart, between the always already frozen and self-justifying morality of a given society and the necessity (“it was right”) to go beyond it, without any guarantee, except…

An Arab Shepherd is Searching for His Goat on Mount Zion

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the “Had Gadya” machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
(By Yehuda Amichai, ET by Chanah Bloch)