Teshuvah
At our event hosted with Hadar and led by Rabbis David Kasher and our Ye’ela Rosenfeld we discussed some of the understandings behind Teshuvah. In my piece a few weeks back I talked about how Rabbi Alan Lew viewed the cycle of the Jewish holidays and their relationship to Teshuvah. The three essential themes of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are Teshuvah, Tefillah, Tzedakah. Teshuvah is the hardest of the terms to explain, and this is the reason why we talk about it so much. Tefillah is prayer and Tzedakah is giving charitably. Although there is a great deal to be said about those two elements, I am going to press on with a discussion of Teshuvah because even the simple understanding of the concept is elusive.
Simply put, Teshuvah is the act of return. The first and most immediate questions then are: return to where and return from where. The distance between ourselves and God is best understood as a kind of alienation. We have let our actions grow into an obstruction between us and God, and that obstruction has made it uncomfortable for us to speak. Teshuvah with God is a matter of clearing the air. Tefillah and Tzedakah are good ways to get that effort started. Tefillah gets us talking even if we can’t jump into the places where the problems are. Tzedakah, in that it focuses a part of our energies on the interests of others, inspires thoughtfulness. It gets us back into the practice of considering the other from their viewpoint. We head in the direction of seeing thous and not its. But the direction of the return is hard to judge when the sense of both where we are and where we want to be seem un-moored, and elusive.
Teshuvah is often translated as atonement. This is NOT the simple meaning of the word. There is an apologetic for this, which is to break the word down into at-one-ment – making as one. The problem with this is that being as one is not really the goal of this reconciliation. The goal is to clear away what divides us. It is not to remove the particularity of our distinctiveness. To be ourselves, and to be capable of a healthy relationship with those who are not us, is the highest challenge of human relations. This is the case with God and with other people. The key to this is understanding. We can never know another fully and with complete certainty, but with effort we can reach a point of understanding, or, at least, mutual comprehension.
In Christianity, one effects atonement through their Jesus who acts as your intermediary. Jesus is a one-stop shop. In Catholicism one goes to a priest and confesses one's sins, real or imagined, faults or actual sins. The priest then gives you a task or a list of tasks to perform as penance and offers forgiveness with no additional terms. Who one may have sinned against is inconsequential. This is not how we do things. In the Jewish tradition, we believe that forgiveness comes only from those who we have wronged. The downside is, you can only be forgiven if the person whom you wronged is available to forgive. Those who died in the Holocaust will never forgive anyone. The upside is, by improving your relationship with another person through atonement (in a process sometimes described as “appeasement”) affects an actual improvement of the world, not just the intention of one.
I used to be on an email list with a thousand or so booksellers and collectors. Some of the Jewish members of the list would send out emails to the list at this time of year asking to be forgiven by anyone who they might have offended over the course of the year. This is a nice gesture. It might be of some use, but I find it problematic. It puts a burden on those who have been offended. They have to be the one to raise the issue. And, it is a little insulting to admit that you have been unaware or have forgotten the thing that caused the offense – as easy as this is for us to do. At best, this practice is a way to jump-start the process of Teshuvah.
What is it that we should be making Teshuvah for? With God, the list of things that offends God is listed out in Torah. It may be a tall order to effect, but it is all there in writing. There are many Torah laws that are between people. When we violate those it is on us to go to the person and try to heal the breach. But much of what we do goes beyond the simple understanding of Torah law. As human beings, we are limited. As we go through life we discover our limitations and struggle to do well by the most people we can. Nevertheless, we find ourselves required to make choices: one person instead of another. We may like one of them more than the other, but at the end of the day we may have had to choose the one we liked less rather than the one we liked more. We may have regrets, but if our intentions were good, they are a product of our love for others rather than an intentional wrong. It can be good to air those regrets, but Teshuvah is meant to close gaps that were created through intention.
Of the examples I gave above, real Teshuvah is the most demanding course of action. It brings to mind some lines from a fairly obscure Bob Dylan song:
Oh, when your, when your days are numbered
And your nights are long
You might think you're weak
But I mean to say you're strong
Or to put it another way, the strongest weight-lifters often talk about feeling weak all the time. The weakness that they feel is a prod for them to pursue their goals with even greater intensity. To feel weak isn’t what we should fear. It is the feeling we get when we are most attuned to the effort to better ourselves. Whether that is in building physical or spiritual muscle, the emotional life is nearly the same.
Teshuvah is about making real change in ourselves and in the relationships that we have. To do this we need to be in close personal relationships. This is a muscle that we let atrophy over the many years that we have sat on our phones or at our keyboards. COVID times didn’t help either. We are now more afraid of the kind of close contact and challenging conversations that Teshuvah demands. If it feels like a tall order to you, it is. It is probably too much to speak to everyone who you need to speak to.
The internet makes it much easier for us to offend others and much easier for them to feel offended. It has made it easier for us to reach a much larger group of people that we used to be able to reach with a hundred times the effort. The internet is too big for real Teshuvah. And anyway, real Teshuvah is in person. To do it you need to get up from your keyboard. If a phone call is the only way to get in touch with someone, then perhaps that is where you can try to make Teshuvah. But in person will always be the best place to do it. Don’t wait. True, you can only do so much, but do what you can and do it now.
