Public humiliation is painful for me to watch. I do not revel in the downfall of the high and mighty. I do not rejoice in the destruction of public careers.

When a congressman is found to have been bribed by lobbyists, I lament the pressures of political power and responsibility. When a prominent evangelical preacher is revealed to have engaged in shameful and hypocritical behavior, I imagine and feel the pain of his family. When people sin, I do not assume that I or my community are immune from the same charge.

But there are limits to my sense of compassion and forgiveness.

When Charles Roberts barricaded himself, with breathtaking premeditated malevolence, in the West Nickel Mines Amish School of Lancaster Country, Pa., and shot (among others) little 7-year-old Naomi Rose Ebersol 20 times, I did not share the stunning Amish response of forgiveness.

When Mohammad Atta successfully plotted and executed the use of civilian airplanes as guided missiles, killing 3,000 innocents on Sept. 11, 2001, I was not (and still am not) inclined to turn the other cheek.

When Timothy McVeigh noted the existence of a day care center for employee children at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in order to maximize human suffering when he proceeded to gratuitously destroy it, I saw no room for tolerance, understanding or compassion.

Ecclesiastes, that famous melancholy text from the Hebrew Bible, teaches us that "there is a time for hating."

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe remembers when, in December 1997, Michael Carneal killed three of his fellow high school students and severely wounded five others in West Paducah, Ky. The next day a sign went up in front of the school: "We forgive you, Mike."

Jacoby recalled a term for the notion that forgiveness is a freebie to which sinners are entitled as a matter of right. The great Dietrich Bonhoffer, a Protestant theologian murdered by the Nazis, called it "cheap grace."

For some, no crime is too heinous, no cruelty too monstrous, to qualify for instant absolution.

Count me out on this standard of forgiveness as a matter of right.

I do not forgive Stalin and Hitler and their thousands, perhaps millions, of co-conspirators. I do not forgive Timothy McVeigh, Mohammad Atta, Saddam Hussein, Michael Corneal, Osama bin Laden or Charles Roberts.

"Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts," says the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, "and let him return to the Lord who will have mercy upon him."

In the Christian Bible, Jesus tells his disciples, "if your brother trespass against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he trespasses against you seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turns again to you, saying 'I repent': you shall forgive him (Luke 17:3-4)."

Repentance comes first. Forgiveness is then, and only then, possible.

Rabbi Clifford E. Librach leads the United Jewish Center in Danbury.