It’s true that asking forgiveness is really not pleasant but when you do ask, it shows the other party you wronged that you admit you made a mistake and you show him you’re not proud of your actions and regret them. So though it’s difficult you’ll always feel cleansed after asking forgiveness. You demonstrate that you didn’t wantonly cause harm on purpose but rather you weren’t properly thinking it out or paying attention when you wronged your friend or spouse.
Living with a spouse that is incapable of saying sorry is difficult. The conclusion someone draws from such refusal is ‘He/ She wants to hurt me and doesn’t care’. So as soon as you say you’re sorry you clarify that you actually love them and had no intention of hurting them and that you did it by mistake. When you apologize you take a great load off of both of you.
Asking forgiveness from a 10 year old boy whose foot you stepped on is real easy. But asking forgiveness from the same child for speaking meanly about him either behind his back or to his face is much harder. Some ‘sorrys’ are easy and spontaneous and some cause you to approach with trepidation.
There are those who can’t get the word ‘sorry’ out of their mouth, but on the other hand they do a lot of good deeds. If such a person needs your forgiveness, accept it even if it’s only through deeds and not through his words.
Saying sorry can repair broken relationships. Where 2 people kept a distance from each other because of what happened, saying sorry can help them stop distancing each other until they get back to where they were before.
When someone asks me for forgiveness I should be open to accept it. If I close my doors on my friend he may never come back and ask for forgiveness and I may lose a friend. How can I refuse him? He went the distance overcoming his internal opposition and discomfort and came to ask forgiveness. Let’s remember we could be in his shoes and then how will we be so brazen to ask forgiveness if we don’t give it ourselves?
My father that passed away 2 years ago used to always ask us to forgive each other. Invariably one child would say: “But Abba, I didn’t do anything wrong to him?” And my father would answer: “It’s sufficient that he even thought you did something wrong to him that you should ask his forgiveness. Now think that maybe you actually did do something to him just you forgot. So just go ask forgiveness…”
It’s really difficult to say ‘I’m sorry’ but when we do, we can come to the synagogue on Yom Kippur feeling purified in all our limbs. We succeeded and we overcame the obstacles in our way and we did what we were supposed to do; now we are clean and pure.