The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

DENNIS PRAGER
I am a religious Jew who has come to admire many Christians and to appreciate
Christianity. I have come to see it as a holy path to God for non-Jews (this is not a small
theological metamorphosis for a Jew raised in the Orthodox yeshiva world), and I deeply
fear the consequences of a de-Christianized America. Yet, more than a decade of weekly
dialogue with Christians and intimate conversations with Christian friends have convinced
me that, aside from the divinity of Jesus, the greatest—and even more important—difference
between Judaism and Christianity, or perhaps only between most Christians and Jews, is
their different understanding of forgiveness and, ultimately, how to react to evil.
When the first edition of The Sunflower was published, I was intrigued by the fact that all
the Jewish respondents thought Simon Wiesenthal was right in not forgiving the repentant
Nazi mass murderer and that the Christians thought he was wrong. I have come to understand
that this is not because the Holocaust was particularly the Jews’ catastrophe, but rather
because of the nature of the Jewish and Christian responses to evil, which are related to
their differing understandings of forgiveness. I do not know which came first, the different
Christian approach to forgiveness or the different Christian approach to evil.
First, forgiveness. As Wiesenthal's fellow sufferers and as a number of Jewish
respondents noted in the first edition, the relevant Jewish view of forgiveness is that a
person who hurts another person must ask forgiveness from his victim and that only the
victim can forgive him. God Himself does not forgive a person who has sinned against a