The Art of Return

Elul: Repentance in an age of flux

The following is a piece I wrote for a magazine a year ago on the topic of Teshuvah/Repentance. It was actually my first attempt at writing in this genre so it is a little rough and may not be on par with my current work. Having said that I still think it holds up, and I have tweaked it around the edges for what I hope will still be an enjoyable read.

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Teshuva is the central theme of the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which immediately follows the preceding month of Elul, known collectively as the "Ten Days of Teshuva". The process of Teshuva is roughly translated as repentance.

"Fraught with dissonance!" aptly describes my relationship with Teshuva in Elul.

To be sure, Teshuva is a gift of inestimable value. In the formulation of Maimonides {a significant twelfth-century Torah scholar and philosopher}, "Even if a person sinned all his days and repented on the day of his death […] all his sins are forgiven". The incredible capacity to erase all sins is invested in the Teshuva mechanism. Still, these high-stakes rewards can lead to emotional exhaustion as Elul progresses. Picture playing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? for four weeks straight – but instead of a cash jackpot, it's both your spiritual and material futures on the line.

If you think Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is stressful you should try Elul.

And it gets worse. In addressing the laws of repentance, Maimonides asks the killer question, "What is Teshuva?" While helpful in tackling this fundamental quandary head-on, his answer only makes matters harder rather than easier. Teshuva, he establishes, "is when a person abandons the sin that he sinned, removes it from his thoughts and [also] commits in his heart that he will not do it again." In other words, he sees Teshuva as a bifurcated process that simultaneously addresses both the past and future: to express remorse over what has happened and to project resolve as to what shall now be. But this deceptively simple understanding of Teshuva is capable of causing significant discord in our approach to repentance.

The hyper-focus on past misdeeds may backfire from the original intent of self-correction. Consider the case of a team or player losing in a sports game. To win, they must put aside their past mistakes and focus on raising their immediate performance levels. Forward-looking thinking is the key to success here, rather than negative self-introspection. And that is not the only flaw in the latter approach. The Baal HaTanya {a 3rd generation Chassidic leader, founder of the CHABAD philosophy} sharply critiques overtly negative self-appraisal. He warns that if a person is not thrown into a depressive state, he risks being "led to irreverence […] by such an attitude, with sin failing to perturb him at all." Yet, despite everything discussed thus far, it seems evident that Teshuva would be hopelessly defunct without retrospect.

Turning our lens on Teshuva's future-oriented function is also fraught with complexities. Wittgenstein asserted that the "limits of my language are the limits of my world." Essentially, any system is constrained by its internal vocabulary regarding what it can imagine or describe. No one can step outside of the frame they inhabit.

Needless to say ‘the scream’ stepping out of the frame he inhabits was a traumatic experience for all involved

When it comes to Teshuva, it follows that our current spiritual standing will undermine any hope of accurately projecting our improved inner self. It is easy enough to crudely imagine a white-bearded avatar of ourselves in perpetual prayer or study. Still, a person at a lower spiritual level cannot grasp the nuances of a future played out on a different spiritual playing field. The individual in question, by definition, lacks the necessary tools to comprehend its meaning. Standing on the docks of the present, we are hopelessly far from envisioning our future shorelines.

Furthermore, a superficial understanding of the ideal 'righteous' self risks disillusionment or cynicism when the desired goal is never achieved. As the Days of Awe approach again, we are certainly not strangers to this sinking sensation. Nevertheless, growth without dreams is impossible. What, then, must we do?

It appears that the lens of analysis creates all sorts of problems for an already tenuous understanding of Teshuva. But what if we discovered that the glasses we gazed through were faulty all along? An underlying motif in Rabbi Doctor Jeremy Kagan's thought is that the traditional Jewish view of existence is diametrically opposed to the parallel Western understanding. And because we are shaped and influenced by modern thinking, we effectively approach our very own heritage in translation.

Teshuva is a uniquely Jewish concept. Nothing could fundamentally misrepresent Teshuva more than its sister word in English: "repentance". Repentance conceptually invokes classical Christian penance. Man is inherently evil, and only submission can save him from hellfire. Conversely, Teshuva is etymologically linked to the Hebrew word "to return" (תשב). There is a pristine spiritual core within us, an entity that the Kabbalists call 'the Divine soul'. And it is to this locus that we are called to return. Teshuva is that call. This is famously symbolised in the raw, visceral blast of the shofar {a ceremonial Ram's horn} whose haunting cry is drawn from its user's inner breath and life force.

But how do we return to a soul with no discernible place in time? Our past is full of regret, and our future is unknowable! I believe the answer lies in Teshuva's ability to help us realise radical individuality in our divine service.

First, let's discuss past sins. Tolstoy famously observed, "All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Perhaps the same could be said of angels and mankind. All angels are alike in their perfection, but all mankind fails in their own way. This, admittedly, still doesn't sound fantastic. Are we saying that man's uniqueness derives from his errors? Well, yes – but that's all before Teshuva comes into play.

Not only does Teshuva, conducted out of love for God, erase our previous sins, but according to the Talmud, it can transform them into mitzvahs retroactively. The brilliant Rabbi Chaim of Brisk {a defining Talmudic innovator of the 19th century} explains how this works. In retrospect, we can see how our errors became enablers for the mitzvah of Teshuva. It follows that an individual's catalogue of iniquities can be transformed into a cornucopia of unique positive deeds. Within each soul, a glimmering diamond of individuality emerges from the charcoal press of imperfections. Every failure lops off a wonky branch from my ego's haphazard tree, like a crazed gardener whittling me into shape. But this transformation can only be meaningful when synthesised with a Teshuva-based approach to future commitments.

Failure personified as a a crazed gardener whittling me into shape

Projected goals tend to be superficial at best and mimetic at worst. Even so, we can still use them in a healthy manner. The Talmud itself challenges us to imitate God's ways: "Just like God is merciful, so you should be merciful..." This charge of Imitatio Dai is definitionally absurd. After all, God is the ultimate other, entirely beyond the comprehension of a created being. If so, what value could there be in setting ourselves up to fail in such a dramatic way?

Perhaps failure itself ought to be re-understood.

In his book Sin.a.gogue, Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin describes the dialectical relationship between religious goals and spiritual errors: "Religion focuses on man's moral lapses, and there it finds the individual. Human individuality emerges through the friction of moral failure and aspiration." In his exegesis of the Torah, Rabbi Yaakov Leiner {The third-generation leader of the iconoclastic Ishbitz/Radzin Hassidic school of thought} gives an ethics-based interpretation of the verse from Proverbs, "There is no investigating kings' hearts". He derives from here that the work to be done on one's character extends ad infinitum. In other words, the more man develops himself, the more he will realise how far he is from ever achieving moral parity with God himself.

At first glance, this approach may seem to exacerbate the gaping mimetic chasm; after all, we have guaranteed our failure from the outset. However, the mistake with such a conclusion stems from imagining God as part of our universe rather than us embedded in His. When we understand that the roots of our moral prerogative must necessarily be planted outside the system we inhabit, the realisation dawns that its purpose could never have been for us to receive 100% on the Imitatio Dei ‘scorecard’. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto {a pivotal 18th-century systemiser of kabbalah} details in his classic work ‘The Way of God’ how the ultimate pleasure and purpose of our existence is to build a relationship with God. A relationship is based on the existence of commonality. The charge of Imitatio Dei is therefore not viewed as an impossible goal but as a way to, so to speak, share a ‘common interest’ with God, namely morality. Of course, we will fail to imitate God perfectly, but a vigorous effort to do so will draw us ever closer to Him.

The story goes that Rabbi Yisrael Salanter {the 19th-century founder of the ethicist ‘Mussar movement’} claimed to have tried to emulate Rabbi Akiva Eiger {A righteous sage and an outstanding genius of the earlier generation}, and in doing so, he became Rabbi Salanter. Some people interpret this as a Jewish version of the adage Reach for the stars, and you will land on the moon. I believe that underlying it is a far more profound message. On the contrary, through his failure, he became a role model in his own right. This was how Rabbi Salanter realised that there was an individual that only he could become. In short, our failure to attain our chosen ideal is what often personally defines us. Our very missteps can ultimately and paradoxically prove to be the stepping stones towards realising our individuality.

The simultaneous search for the past self that once was or the future self that could be permeates society. I have heard this attributed as the driving force behind the allure of ‘80s and 90's nostalgia regurgitated by popular television series and the success of aspirational social media accounts. Much has been written about the speed at which culture and time now appear to move for us.

Not everyone was able to move on from the 80’s nostalgia

Our physical homes provided us with a foundation for forming our identities when we were young. That is why God commanded Abraham to leave “from your land, your birthplace and from your father’s house.” Abraham needed to physically and psychologically separate himself from where his identity was grounded to redefine himself.

But it appears that time's ebb and flow also destabilises the self. Just like a person needs a place in space, he also needs a place in time. Abraham may have been a nomad in space, but as Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin suggested, the difficulty of our contemporary age is the “feeling of being a nomad in time.” The person we were, the person we are, and the person we want to be, are individuals that appear blurred in a state of flux. We float unmoored and submerged in time's river, grasping at the debris of nostalgia. We struggle to connect to an “I” that functions more as a mirage than a concrete anchor.

Perhaps Teshuva can resolve this all too human experience. Fascinatingly, Abraham was the first bonified ‘Baal Teshuva’, independently discovering monotheism and leaving the dominant culture of idolatry behind. There is a cryptic ‘Midrash’ that poetically portrays Abraham’s return to God as a process of “contemplating the world and seeing a castle aflame.”

Physicists have theorised that the union of special relativity and quantum theory would mean that the apparent solidity of our physical existence is an illusion. Rabbi Moshe Shapiro {a contemporary master of Jewish philosophy and Talmud}, explains that one way of reading the previously cited Midrash is as “a castle formed from flames.” A flame, he explains, appears to possess absolute existence; however, this is only an illusion. The flame looks constant to our eyes only because each momentary blaze rapidly ignites the next. Yet, in reality, the flame cannot exist independently; its seeming solidity and constancy actually rely on the constant introduction of new combustible material and oxygen to initiate the following reaction.

One name given to God is Hamokom, ‘the place'. This name represents the fact that God is the place where all reality exists. Abraham looked around and saw that his reality was transient in both the physical and metaphysical senses, a proverbial ‘castle formed from flames’. This philosophical realisation meant there was only one place, in the absolute sense of the word, that he could return to. That place was G-d, Hamokom.

Rabbi Nosson of Breslov uses the striking imagery of a melodic tune played on a musical instrument to convey Teshuva's reality. As he describes it, the skill is to play the instrument in such a way as to select the “good ruach,” the music, and simultaneously avoid dissonance and noise.

Our journey through life should not be viewed as a linear story with a beginning, middle and end, with each section dissected in isolation. Instead, human life should be viewed as a tune; the individual notes can only be genuinely contextualised when the ‘niggun’ is finally over. The dynamic melody of existence only exhibits its sweeping majesty once each fleeting note surrenders to the soaring harmony of the whole. Teshuva weaves time's torn fabric back together, merging a faded past and hazy future into a vibrant, eternal present.

Through Teshuva, we return to ourselves, but not to a self that was, or even the self that may be. Instead, we are returning to the true self that alternatively strives and struggles to cleave to our Father in Heaven.

The self that is becoming.

Thanks for reading and, Keep Pondering!