Forgiving Sirhan Sirhan

Sometimes life imitates art (and sometimes just the reverse), but what is true about art is true about religion as well: there are times when specific issues are on our minds owing to the nearness of a holiday or some imminent life cycle moment…and then, just as we are focused on that specific issue, it appears on the front page of the paper in some wholly other context and invites us to consider its intricacies from an entirely different angle.

As we count down the days to Rosh Hashanah, the question of forgiveness is on our minds…and in a dozen different ways. If we have wronged someone in the course of the year now ending, can we ask for forgiveness in a way that provokes a charitable response on the part of the ill-treated party? If we have behaved poorly (even in a way known solely to ourselves), can we repent us of our sin sufficiently meaningfully and wholeheartedly for us not to be judged harshly during the course of these coming Days of Judgment? If we have remained silent and inert while seeing another soul being wronged or demeaned, or treated unjustly—or even while merely knowing that someone was being treated in one of those ways, can we forgive ourselves to the extent necessary to stand up in shul and recite our Rosh Hashanah prayers without feeling like hypocrites? Owning up to our own weaknesses of character and errors of judgment is, after all, not quite as easy as it sounds in that it requires a level of self-awareness and candor that comes naturally to almost none of us. So to do it at all is difficult. But to do it because we truly regret our errors of judgment and moral missteps and not merely because we hope merely to garner for ourselves a good write-up in God’s great Book of Life—that is neither a simple nor a straightforward path for any of us to follow.

So those were the ideas that have been occupying me in these last weeks as we move ever closer to the Days of Awe. And then I opened the paper the other day and who should be looking out at me if not Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and sentenced the following year to be executed for his crime. (In 1972, when the California Supreme Court determined that capital punishment was in violation of the state constitution’s stricture against cruel or unusual punishment, his sentence was retroactively commuted to life in prison.) The years passed. As generally happens with the incarcerated, the public heard almost nothing about him. From time to time, a brief note would appear in the paper reporting that Sirhan had yet again been denied parole. But then, just one week ago, Sirhan appeared for a sixteenth time before the parole board and this time he was recommended for parole.

Their recommendation, it turns out, does not guarantee his release. First, there will be a ninety-day review by the California Board of Parole Hearings. And then Governor Gavin Newsom will have thirty days to accept the parole board’s recommendation or to alter it or to reject it. The governor, who has his own hands full with a serious effort to remove him from office, has not indicated how he will respond. Sirhan Sirhan was twenty-four years old at the time of RFK’s assassination and is now seventy-seven.

I remember Robert Kennedy’s assassination vividly. I was just wrapping up tenth grade when he was killed on June 5, 1968. And I was a huge fan, one of my only classmates to prefer his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president to Eugene McCarthy’s. He had his flaws, to be sure. But he had been a presence in American life since the John Kennedy presidency, during the course of which he served not only as his brother’s Attorney General, but also as his closest advisor. As a result, his willingness to run for president represented—to many of us, at least, including to myself and my parents—the possibility of returning to Camelot, of restoring some version of the John Kennedy presidency to our riven country just five years after Dallas.

And then, in a heartbeat, it was over. The images are, at least for people my age, indelible. RFK lying on the floor of that hotel kitchen. The busboy putting a rosary in Kennedy’s hands while he was still conscious. The funeral service at St. Patrick’s. Andy Williams singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The nighttime burial in Arlington. John Glenn presenting the flag to Ted Kennedy, then the latter handing it to his mother.

The assassin, a Palestinian without American citizenship, was motivated to murder Kennedy because of the latter’s support for Israel. So that’s certainly part of the story—in general as well, but for me personally in an intense, meaningful way.

And now the newspaper meets the Machzor and challenges me, not to decide what the man’s fate should be (that will ultimately fall to the governor of California, Newsom or whomever), but answer a series of simple questions prompted by the parole board’s decision. Is forgiveness a gift that must be freely offered or can it be earned? If the former, can it be offered other than by the wronged party? (That is obviously an impossibility if the wronged party is dead.) Society can free RFK’s murderer…but would that be tantamount to forgiving the man? The man has been in jail for fifty-three years. He claims to have been drunk when he murdered RFK, a man he had never met and did not know personally. He admits his guilt, but only because he feels it was proven in court, not because he has any recollections at all of the actual event. He is clearly a danger to no one at all at this point. And so the parole board felt that he had earned the right to live free for whatever time he has left. They clearly have the right to free (or to start that ball rolling). But can they forgive?

The responses to the parole board’s decision have been fast and furious. Six of Robert Kennedy’s children expressed outrage that their father’s murdered could possibly be allowed to get on with his life, while their father remains dead and thus unable to get on with his. (To see Maxwell Taylor Kennedy’s op-ed piece opposing parole from the Los Angeles Times, click here. To read Rory Kennedy’s piece published yesterday in the New York Times, click here.) But two of RFK’s sons, Douglas Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., support the board’s decision, the latter going so far as to say that he was grateful to have lived to see the day on which his father’s murdered could be deemed “worthy of compassion and love.” Clearly, they forgive their father’s murderer. But do they have that right? That’s the question the whole story has challenged me to ponder.

That Sirhan Sirhan is a different man at seventy-seven than he was at twenty-four is hardly an impressive achievement: of what seventy-seven year old could not the same thing be said? But the question here is neither whether he is a new man or whether he regrets his actions. Nor is the question for me personally to consider whether the man will or will not constitute a danger to society if he is freed. (Those are obviously huge questions for the parole board to work through. But I don’t sit on that board—and I’m asking a different question here, one related to the question of forgiveness, not to the actual decision regarding Sirhan Sirhan’s release from prison.)  Our tradition is clear that bad deeds fall into three categories: those which can be forgiven by the wronged party (whom the doer of the deed must find the courage to approach and ask for forgiveness), those which cannot be forgiven by the wronged party because the latter is dead (in which case tradition suggests convening a minyan at the grave of that individual, publicly confessing to the wrongdoing, and praying for God’s mercy), and those which cannot be forgiven because the aggressed-against party is not known (in which case all the doer of the deed can do is to fast, confess the wrongdoing, and pray for forgiveness). There are a thousand subcategories to those categories, but all are rooted in the same simple concept that only the wronged individual can forgive the wrongdoer. The rest of us can be understanding, generous, kind, and non-judgmental. But if you wish forgiveness, tradition instructs you to find the courage to address the wronged party and to ask—simply and unequivocally—for that individual’s forgiveness. Nothing more than that. But also nothing less.