I spoke to a couple of friends yesterday, and in the course of the conversation asked that, if in the past year I have done anything to offend or antagonize them, if they could please forgive me. They, of course, consented and asked the same of me. “Forgiveness is a wonderful thing,” said one of them.

The prep work for the Yamim Nora’im is much harder than the prep work for Pesach. In six months, we clean out our houses. Right now, we are cleaning out our souls. The work of Yamim Nora’im is not to find the crouton in the back of the refrigerator, but to find the grudge in the back of your mind, to unknot it, and to forgive. To search your actions in the past year, realize what you have done to hurt anyone else, and then to go to that person, and ask them if they can find it in their hearts to forgive you. Only after you have done this work, can you then go with a truly open and humble heart before God, publically confess and ask for forgiveness of the sins of which only you and The Almighty are aware.

There is someone in particular whom I cannot forgive, and of whom I cannot ask forgiveness right now. It is someone whom I need to reconcile to, but it is not the right time. As Yamim Nora’im approach, the situation feels more and more desperate, but the whole thing will blow up in my face and become much worse if I do anything about it, and he and I will both be paying for years and years to come, maybe for the rest of our lives, and that is something that neither he nor I can afford to have happen.

And so, this is what I am doing about it. Every day in my prayers, morning and night, I say that while I understand that it is not God’s place to forgive sins between man and man, I pray that God will give us the time that we need to reconcile to each other, however long that may take, that God will help to ease the process, and that we may become whole again. I pray that we be allowed, so to speak, to put off forgiving each other without too much ill-consequence. Because this is the best that I can do right now.

This is an extreme situation. For anything less serious than this I would call this a cop-out, a way to avoid the work of Yom Kippur. But having talked to my rabbi about the situation, there are some extreme cases when you just can’t finish the work of forgiveness in one year, or even five years, or, God forbid, ten. And you have to find a way to forgive yourself and the other person for *that* fact, and move on, doing what you can.