Q&A: The Dispute Between the Chafetz Chaim and Rabbi Yisrael Salanter
The Dispute Between the Chafetz Chaim and Rabbi Yisrael Salanter
Question
It is well known that the Chafetz Chaim and Rabbi Yisrael Salanter disagreed about whether one must ask forgiveness from a person who does not know that we hurt him and spoke against him.
The Chafetz Chaim’s view is that one must ask forgiveness, and he even brought Rabbenu Yonah as support for his position.
On the other hand, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter’s view is that a person is forbidden to cause his fellow pain in order to obtain forgiveness, and one should not go ask forgiveness, since the moment he hears about the matter he will suffer distress.
There are books that draw various distinctions, but they do not sit well with me.
Rabbi Yisrael Salanter’s view is a bit hard to understand, since he too agrees that there is an obligation to ask forgiveness from the other person.
So from here there seem to be two possible ways to say it:
A. You remain with the sin, just in order not to cause pain to another Jew.
B. Since causing pain to another Jew is involved, that pain comes and exempts you from asking forgiveness, a kind of positive commandment overriding a prohibition.
What is the Rabbi’s view on this???
Answer
This is not a question of a positive commandment overriding a prohibition. The discussion here is not whether you fulfilled the commandment of repentance (if there is such a commandment at all), but whether your sin is atoned for. Those are two different questions (see Minchat Chinukh at the beginning of section 364, and many others).
Reason suggests that, regardless of doing repentance, there is no reason to make your atonement depend on hurting your fellow again. Would the Torah really require a person to hurt his fellow for his own sake? At this point there are two possibilities: 1. To deny me atonement altogether, but that too is unreasonable. Because I wronged my fellow, do I lose the possibility of atonement? 2. To atone for me without my revealing it to him. That is more reasonable.
Still, one can also understand the Chafetz Chaim’s view in several ways, but this is not the place to elaborate.