On Repentance 3
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- Small repentance and great repentance
- Formal laws of repentance and the proofs for essential repentance
- Christianity, indulgences, and formalism versus essence
- Analogies in Judaism: the Sages, the Sadducees, and new Orthodoxy
- The grace of repentance in Mesillat Yesharim and the meaning of uprooting the will
- Kiddushin, regretting one’s earlier deeds, Rabbi Elchanan, and the Chafetz Chaim’s distinction
- Two aspects in a commandment and a transgression: obedience/rebellion and repair/corruption
- Grace in small repentance versus great repentance and the connection to Maimonides and הדין
- The depth of regret as a continuum between the two kinds of repentance
- The Thirteen Attributes, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, and the uniqueness of “Hashem, Hashem”
- Rabbeinu Yonah and the tunnel parable from prison
- The paradox of choice and changing one’s value system in great repentance
- “Our Father, our King, bring us back,” the soul, and the blurring between outside and inside
- Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya as a model of great repentance
- Choosing whether to choose and weakness of will as the power of autonomy
- A prisoner cannot free himself from prison
Summary
General overview
The text presents a distinction between small, technical repentance, which erases sins through a formal four-stage procedure, and great, essential repentance, which is a global inner reversal that does not require verbal confession and does not require dealing with each sin separately. It attributes to the Maharal the association of “and He cleanses” with small repentance and “Hashem, Hashem” with great repentance, and explains that small repentance cleanses only what one actually worked on, whereas great repentance applies to everything. It then discusses formalism versus essence through analogies to Christianity and Islam and to struggles between religious institutions and fundamentalism, and afterward examines the special grace in repentance according to Mesillat Yesharim and Rabbi Elchanan together with the Chafetz Chaim’s answer. Finally, it presents the claim that the possibility of great repentance raises a logical paradox of self-change and choice, and explores attempts to solve this through the involvement of the Holy One, blessed be He, through prayers such as “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You,” through the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, and through the idea of “choosing whether to choose” and “a prisoner cannot free himself from prison.”
Small repentance and great repentance
The text defines small repentance as a process whose purpose is to erase sins through a four-stage procedure: abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, and confession, going through each and every sin until it is erased. It defines great repentance as essential repentance, an inner reversal or fundamental change in the soul that operates on all sins at once. It attributes to the Maharal the connection between two of the Thirteen Attributes and these two mechanisms, where Hashem, Hashem is responsible for great repentance and and He cleanses is responsible for the small, technical, accounting-style repentance. It explains “He cleanses, but does not cleanse” in light of the Talmud as “He cleanses those who repent and does not cleanse those who do not repent,” and adds the novelty that in small repentance the cleansing applies only to the sins on which actual action was taken, unlike great repentance, which cleanses “everything” because by definition it is done globally.
Formal laws of repentance and the proofs for essential repentance
The text argues that essential repentance is not bound by all the formal laws of repentance and therefore does not require the four stages in a technical way and does not require verbal confession. It states that regret and resolution for the future are present within it as a natural part of its essence and not as formal stages, and that there is no need to deal with each sin separately even at the stages of regret and resolution for the future, because the process is done with respect to all sins together. It brings proof from the Talmud in Kiddushin about “a wicked man who betrothed a woman,” where we are concerned that the betrothal may be valid “lest he contemplated repentance in his heart,” even though he said “on condition that I am perfectly righteous,” and concludes from this that one can become “perfectly righteous” without carrying out all the stages fully for each sin. It brings a second proof from Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, according to which “it is not plausible that within one hour he acquired his world,” so acquiring his world in such a short time points to a fundamental inner reversal and not to a technical, sin-by-sin passage through the four stages.
Christianity, indulgences, and formalism versus essence
The text tells an anecdote about repentance in Christianity through the mechanism of confession to a priest, and about the phenomenon of indulgences in the Middle Ages, where “they were selling atonement in advance,” and presents the Protestant criticism that selling atonement in advance contradicts regret and therefore cannot be repentance. It portrays the Protestant revolt as a revolt against the formalism and technicality of the Catholic religion and as an attempt to return to the sources and the heart of things, similar to parallel struggles in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites. It argues that the Protestants are “more fundamentalist than the Catholics” and compares this to the “hilltop youth” as a revolt against the establishment in order “to go backward” and not to move forward, and to “the women of the Taliban” as a revolt “in the name of what once was.” It describes the Catholic establishment as a “sober” establishment that develops technical solutions in order to remain reasonable and to manage with the sources, at the cost of giving the impression of technical evasions and lack of essence, and it compares this to criticism of the rabbinic establishment.
Analogies in Judaism: the Sages, the Sadducees, and new Orthodoxy
The text argues that the Sages were “in a certain sense Catholics” in that they interpreted “an eye for an eye” as monetary compensation in order to preserve logic alongside faithfulness to the sources, whereas the Sadducees are described as those striving “to return to Scripture” in a “Protestant” pattern. It quotes Yaakov Katz that “Orthodoxy is a new phenomenon” and argues that revolts against Orthodoxy are sometimes revolts meant to return to what once was. It says that Conservative Judaism is “much closer to the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)” than Orthodoxy and gives the example that prayer in the language of the country is “perfectly acceptable according to the Shulchan Arukh,” and mentions that in Reform Judaism “they prayed in German,” even though that was perceived as the height of heresy. It adds further examples such as “certain things may be said in any language, seventh chapter of Sotah,” and women being called up to the Torah, and argues that some issues became articles of faith “even when that goes against the Talmud.”
The grace of repentance in Mesillat Yesharim and the meaning of uprooting the will
The text quotes Mesillat Yesharim at the end of chapter 4, which presents the attribute of mercy as what enables the world to exist without annulling the attribute of justice, and explains that according to strict justice the sinner should have been punished immediately, with fierce wrath, and that there should be no repair for the sin because “the sin has already been done.” It explains that mercy introduces three reversals: giving the sinner time, making the punishment not one of total destruction, and granting repentance as complete grace such that “the uprooting of the will is counted as the uprooting of the deed.” It describes the act of repentance as recognizing the sin, admitting it, reflecting on its evil, complete regret “just like regret over a vow,” strong pain, abandoning it for the future and fleeing from it, until “the sin truly departs from reality” and “this is certainly a grace that is not according to strict justice.”
Kiddushin, regretting one’s earlier deeds, Rabbi Elchanan, and the Chafetz Chaim’s distinction
The text brings Rabbi Elchanan’s question from the Talmud in Kiddushin about “a perfectly righteous person who rebelled at the end” and thereby loses his merits, and asks why he should not be viewed as “half and half,” so that the merits remain and the new sins are added to the liability side. It quotes the Talmud’s answer, “when he regrets his earlier deeds,” and raises the difficulty that if uprooting the will as uprooting the deed is a grace beyond strict justice, it should work only for good and not for bad. It says that Rabbi Elchanan asked the Chafetz Chaim about this, and the Chafetz Chaim answered that it depends on the distinction between “repentance out of love” and “repentance out of fear”: in repentance out of love, uprooting the will works “as strict justice,” whereas in repentance out of fear it is a “special grace.” It explains that “a righteous person who rebelled at the end and regrets his earlier deeds” is the parallel “anti-thesis” to repentance out of love, and therefore there too merits are uprooted by law, whereas in repentance out of fear the uprooting works only on the side of repentance and beyond strict justice.
Two aspects in a commandment and a transgression: obedience/rebellion and repair/corruption
The text presents an approach of Rabbi Elchanan according to which every transgression and every commandment has two aspects: obedience or rebellion against the command, and essential repair or corruption contained in the act itself. It argues that uprooting the will removes, as a matter of law, the rebellion of the will against the will of God because the will has now changed, but erasing the corruption created by the act itself is an act of grace, and therefore “that the uprooting of the will be counted as the uprooting of the deed” is beyond strict justice. It cites a source for this idea from Ramchal in Derekh Hashem and adds that similar ideas appear in the medieval authorities (Rishonim), in Tosafot HaRosh and Ritva on “greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does,” where they explain that a commanded mitzvah includes both the repair accomplished by the act and the added virtue of obedience, whereas one who is not commanded and does receives only the repair accomplished by the act.
Grace in small repentance versus great repentance and the connection to Maimonides and strict justice
The text suggests a direction according to which in the great, essential repentance “strict justice says that everything should be erased for you,” because the person has changed and become “someone else,” and therefore there is no point in punishing him for what he did before. It argues that in the small, technical repentance the person “has not really changed,” so erasing the past is a “special grace.” It connects this to Maimonides by saying that in small repentance the goal is “to remove sins that are lying on the scale” on Rosh Hashanah, and therefore it is an attempt “to fix the past,” which is beyond strict justice, whereas essential repentance “speaks about the present” and changes the person now, and therefore does not require special grace in order for him to be judged for life on Yom Kippur. It also illustrates this with a human analogy of natural forgiveness when one sees genuine regret and real change, and argues that the absence of forgiveness where there is no real regret is precisely the place where forgiveness would be beyond strict justice.
The depth of regret as a continuum between the two kinds of repentance
The text qualifies the dichotomous picture of the two kinds of repentance by saying that it is a pedagogic tool and that in practice there is a “continuum” between small repentance and great repentance. It states that the parameter that moves one along the continuum is “the depth of regret,” and the more complete the regret is, the more it expands beyond one particular sin and thus applies to all sins. It argues that complete regret already places the person on the side of great repentance, and that the twofold division is meant only to make the conceptual treatment easier.
The Thirteen Attributes, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, and the uniqueness of “Hashem, Hashem”
The text notes that many sources depict repentance as an exception to normal rules and not only as a phenomenon in small repentance, and it mentions that Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner says that “Hashem, Hashem” is the attribute of mercy responsible for great repentance. It explains that the uniqueness of Hashem, Hashem is that it is not a trait that can also be ascribed to human beings, unlike attributes such as compassionate, gracious, and slow to anger, and therefore it expresses something that exists only in the Holy One, blessed be He. It adds midrashic sayings such as “repentance preceded the world” in order to show that repentance is an exception to the ordinary laws of the world, and therefore there is apparently a “special grace” in all processes of repentance.
Rabbeinu Yonah and the tunnel parable from prison
The text brings Rabbeinu Yonah at the beginning of Shaarei Teshuvah as speaking about a special grace in the form of a tunnel dug so that the prisoner could escape from prison and repent. It interprets the grace in small repentance as the fact that a technical act is accepted despite the absence of essential change, but the grace in great repentance as the fact that “it is possible at all.” It emphasizes that the grace is “the existence of the tunnel” and not the escape itself, because if there is a tunnel then obviously escape is possible, while the prison is the result of free choice that brought the person into the state of sin. It presents great repentance as paradoxical in that the person has to change himself, and the very ability to exit a system into which he brought himself is itself the grace.
The paradox of choice and changing one’s value system in great repentance
The text argues that great repentance presents a “logical paradox,” because changing one’s value system from within that very system is impossible in a simple formulation: if the person already sees that the old values are wrong, then he is already a penitent, and if he still does not see this, then how can he initiate the change? It presents the dilemma this way: if repentance “happened to me,” then there is no credit and no responsibility, and if I did it intentionally, then I am already equipped with the new value system, so it is unclear what the process even is. It connects this to the problem of “weakness of will” and to the dilemma of whether one is acting under compulsion or willingly, and expands that the problem is not only psychological but also tied to the definition of the process. It uses images like Baron Munchausen pulling himself up by his own hair, and cites Ron Aharoni (The Cat That Isn’t There) on subject-object confusion, where “I act upon myself” places the same “I” both as subject and as object.
“Our Father, our King, bring us back,” the soul, and the blurring between outside and inside
The text suggests that the dichotomy between “I do it” and “an external factor does it” is not sharp, and connects this to the conception that a person contains “the divine point” and that the soul is “a portion of God above.” It interprets “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You” as a request that the Holy One, blessed be He, be a partner in the act of repentance, because otherwise the process is not properly defined. It uses an image from the Talmud in Berakhot 10, that the Holy One, blessed be He, “fills the world as the soul fills the body,” to explain how one organism can emerge out of a multiplicity of parts, and from here that the boundary between the human being and the Holy One, blessed be He, is not sharp. It argues that without Him one cannot understand how self-change and choice occur without turning into external programming or logical impossibility.
Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya as a model of great repentance
The text returns to the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya and quotes his appeal to mountains and hills, heaven and earth, sun and moon, stars and constellations to ask for mercy on his behalf, and their response that they must first ask for mercy on themselves, from various verses. It interprets the appeal to outside forces as an expression of human helplessness in changing oneself alone within the paradox of great repentance, and then emphasizes the decisive moment, “the matter depends on no one but me,” and the crying “until his soul left him,” about which it was said, “there are those who acquire their world in one hour.” It states that this is a description of how great repentance involves tension between the need for outside help and the demand that the act still count as the person’s own act, and it portrays the grace in great repentance as the grace that the process is possible at all.
Choosing whether to choose and weakness of will as the power of autonomy
The text suggests another direction for solving the problem of weakness of will by distinguishing between one’s value system and a “second-order choice,” namely the choice “whether to choose.” It argues that a person’s value system may be correct even at the moment of the sin, but the person “chose not to choose” or did not invest enough mental resources to be autonomous and to realize his values, and therefore the impulse “took him” to a place that he himself did not want. It uses examples such as dieting, sports training, and driving on automatic pilot to illustrate that a person may not want the bad outcome and still fail because he was not in a state of full control. It defines the continuum between small repentance and great repentance as connected to the intensity with which the person “takes the reins into his own hands” and mobilizes energy to become a chooser, rather than as a change in the value system itself. It connects this to the wording “Bring us back, Hashem, to You, and we shall return” as a request for help in realizing autonomy and the ability to choose, not as a request to discover new beliefs.
A prisoner cannot free himself from prison
The text concludes with the idea that “a prisoner cannot free himself from prison” as a model for the fact that forces operating from within a system are limited by that system, and that breaking out requires a force external to it. It adds that our rabbis say this is stated, as it were, even about the Holy One, blessed be He, in “I am with him in distress,” meaning that the Divine Presence is in exile together with Israel and is, as it were, redeemed along with their redemption. It uses this principle to strengthen the claim that great repentance requires a dimension of help beyond the person’s own capacity within the “system” he is in.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, we talked about two tracks, or two mechanisms, of repentance: small repentance and great repentance. And I drew a kind of dichotomous distinction between them. I said there’s the repentance whose goal is basically to erase sins—a four-stage procedure: abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, and confession. You go through each and every sin and it gets erased. And then there’s essential repentance, which is basically some kind of inner reversal or fundamental change in the soul that works on all the sins. The Maharal ties this to two of the Thirteen Attributes: Hashem, Hashem is what’s responsible for the great, essential repentance, and and He cleanses is responsible for the small, accounting-style, technical repentance. And therefore “He cleanses, but does not cleanse”—the Talmud says that means He cleanses those who repent and does not cleanse those who do not repent. And I said, what’s the novelty in that? That unlike great repentance, this repentance cleanses only those sins on which I actually worked, because it’s a technical matter. What I did is what happened. Great repentance cleanses everything because here we’re not dividing at all between sins I repented for and sins I didn’t repent for, because repentance of that kind is, by definition, done with respect to everything. I said that essential repentance is not bound by all the formal laws of repentance. Meaning, you don’t need the four stages, you don’t need verbal confession. Regret and resolution for the future are of course a natural part of it—not as formal stages, but because that is obviously the essence of this kind of repentance. But, for example, you don’t need verbal confession. And you don’t need to deal with each and every sin separately, even at the stages of regret and resolution for the future; rather, it’s something done globally, meaning with respect to all sins together. I brought two proofs for that. One proof is the Talmud in Kiddushin about someone who betrothed a woman: a wicked man who betrothed a woman, we are concerned about the validity of the betrothal lest he contemplated repentance in his heart. And I said: if he contemplated repentance in his heart, so what? There are still all the stages, and he has to go through each and every sin.
[Speaker B] On condition that I am perfectly righteous. What? That he betrothed a woman on condition that I am perfectly righteous. Perfectly righteous.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, on condition that I am perfectly righteous. So you see that yes, we are concerned that he became perfectly righteous without actually carrying out all the required stages. And the second proof was Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, that over the course of his long career in the criminal realm, it’s not plausible that within one hour he acquired his world. So if within one hour he acquired his world, then once again that means he apparently underwent some sort of reversal and did not go sin by sin applying all four stages to each one of them. Those are two indications that there is apparently some kind of fundamental repentance, an essential repentance, that is not subject to these rules of the laws of repentance.
[Speaker C] Actually I heard some anecdote connected to this, that in Christianity this whole area of repentance is very developed—you know, confessions, you go to a priest. And then in the Middle Ages there was something called indulgences, where apparently they needed money, so they would sell atonement in advance. And the Protestants came out strongly against it. They said: it can’t be that you sell atonement in advance, because if you commit the sin, then something is already flawed there; that can’t be repentance.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then your regret is already not there.
[Speaker C] Right, it’s an inherent problem in the act itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I did hear about that. Part of the whole Protestant revolt, by the way—in many ways there’s a very interesting analogy between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, by the way. We’re always convinced that we’re incredibly unique, but actually I’ve already heard from various people—there’s Ephraim here, what’s his name? Ephraim Barak, who’s an expert on Islam. So I sat with him at some wedding—we talked about this once, I think—and he told me a bit about the Shiites and the Sunnis. Very, very similar. It’s amazing how similar it is. And also the Protestants and the Catholics. Meaning, the Protestants are rebelling against the formalism, the technicality, of the Catholic religion, and in a certain sense they want to go back to the sources, to be more connected, supposedly, to the heart, to the meaning of things, and less to techniques like confession and little check marks and things like that. And the Sunnis against the Shiites are the same thing: the Shiites are parallel to the Catholics, let’s say, and the Sunnis are parallel to the Protestants. By the way, people usually think the Catholics came first—sorry, that the Sunnis came before the Shiites. What? The Sunnis came before the Shiites. But the struggle between them is basically parallel to the Catholics and Protestants in these senses. Meaning, the Shiites are more, let’s say, in our language, the Shiites are the Orthodoxy.
[Speaker B] The Orthodoxy from their perspective, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. The Sunnis are fundamentalists, like the Protestants. Among Christians it’s much more obvious. With Christians people usually think the Catholics are the more fundamentalist ones. The Protestants are more open, more liberal—and that’s a mistake. The Protestants are more fundamentalist than the Catholics. It’s a bit like, for us, the hilltop youth. The hilltop youth is a return to the sources. It’s a rebellion against the religious establishment in a certain sense, but it’s a rebellion meant to go backward, not forward. It’s a rebellion against what they see as the falseness in the religious establishment, against the feeling that people aren’t really doing what they should and are too committed to rules and unwilling to dare, to break through, to rebel, and all sorts of things of that kind. The women of the Taliban—yes, exactly—the women of the Taliban are also some kind of rebellion, but it’s a rebellion in the name of what was, not in the name of what will be. There’s a rebellion that wants to throw everything out and move forward; and there’s a rebellion that says: you’ve strayed from the path, let’s go back to the time of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), herd goats, and play the flute. I mean, there are all kinds of rebellions of that sort. It’s somewhat similar to the Protestant revolt—a revolt whose goal is fundamentalism. It’s not a revolt whose goal is to oppose fundamentalism. On the contrary, the establishment is actually more sober. The Catholic establishment is a sober establishment, and many times people slander it and criticize it because it looks as though everything is technicality and they found loopholes and somehow make things work, and the essence is missing. In a certain sense it’s very similar to our own religious establishment, the rabbinic establishment here. Because I think sometimes it really does involve falseness, and with us too there is room for criticism—that we really do lose the heart of things a bit and latch onto the technique of the matter. But on the other side of the coin, that is the way to deal with sources and remain rational. Meaning, you have to find technical solutions in order to preserve the logic and not cling to those principles without looking right or left and taking them all the way to the end—which on the face of it seems more faithful, more meaningful, more impressive. But very often that leads to things that are plainly irrational. Now, I don’t know how to explain this to you from the sources. In the sources, you’re right—but it can’t be that that’s correct. So I’ll say “an eye for an eye” means monetary compensation. That’s it. What do you mean “an eye for an eye” means monetary compensation? You think I’m fooling around? What does “an eye for an eye” mean? It says “an eye for an eye”—what stories are you telling me? The Sages too were, in a certain sense, Catholics in that perspective, and the Sadducees were Protestants—that is, return to Scripture. Very often many of these confrontations are highly parallel. It’s really interesting—it was really eye-opening, that conversation. Then afterward I understood it in the Christian sphere too; we were talking about Islam. In Islam, for Shiism for example, the scholars of that generation have authority sometimes to do whatever they want—meaning, what they decide is what determines things, so the Jewish law there develops. In Sunnism there is no possibility of changing the…
[Speaker B] That’s why the Shiites succeeded in establishing a state that survives in a reasonably stable way—not in the sense of being friendly toward us—Iran. Iran is basically the only modern Muslim state that tried to operate according to Muslim law, and they’re successful to some degree; they manage to exist at all because they’re willing to change.
[Speaker D] According to…
[Speaker B] Muslim law, and they succeed to some extent because they’re willing to change.
[Speaker D] They’ve existed for thirteen hundred years. What? Shiism has existed for twelve hundred years, I don’t know how long. They managed to establish a state thirty years ago, that’s all. So that’s your proof? What does that prove? They didn’t succeed—the fact is they didn’t manage until thirty years ago to establish a state.
[Speaker B] The modern state. Sunnism has even more difficulty coping than Shiism.
[Speaker D] There’s Saudi Arabia, no? They’re Sunnis. Saudi Arabia, yes.
[Speaker B] They’re Sunnis.
[Speaker D] But I don’t know, there’s Saudi Arabia, there’s Turkey—are Sunnis lacking?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It doesn’t matter. In any case, there’s a lot of analogy. How did we get into all this? I already don’t remember. Ah, right—the technicality versus… yes, exactly. For example, that indulgence business—maybe the Church needed money. Now everyone will criticize it: what cynicism is this? They need money, so they sell it. But on the other hand, maybe they really did need that money for proper purposes, and without it they wouldn’t have been able to raise it. So they found some formal solution, and yes, it’s crooked and annoying and it looks bad, but I don’t know—I have no idea, I don’t know how it developed. Maybe it developed out of greed too. Doesn’t matter. But on the principled level, formal solutions are often a very important tool for remaining rational on the one hand and not deviating from the sources in too blatant a way on the other—that is, somehow being able to manage. The price is always that you manage with them in some formal way, but you don’t really uphold the spirit blowing out of the sources. Meaning, you basically do what you think is right. In that sense the Shiites are like that too, and the Sunnis attack them for it. That’s why the Sunnis are much more extreme in our world today than the Shiites. Because the Sunnis are the ones clinging to the past, more fundamentalist. And the Shiites have law; they know; they’re pragmatic; they can manage. Meaning, if today’s scholars decide that Islam says otherwise, then from their perspective now it says otherwise. The Sunnis won’t accept that—they’ll blow them up. There’s no such thing. There is the truth, and you go with the truth all the way. So very often—we’re not used to this—these rebellions are rebellions for the sake of the past, to return to the past, not for the sake of… The establishment is actually… that’s what Yaakov Katz writes about Orthodoxy. Yes, that Orthodoxy is a new phenomenon. We always think Orthodoxy is Moses our teacher from Mount Sinai, and the others are rebelling against Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is a new phenomenon. Meaning, that’s actually the new thing, and the rebellions often—not all of them, but some of the rebellions against Orthodoxy—are rebellions meant to return to what once was. I think Conservative Judaism, for example—or maybe even Reform, but Conservative certainly—is much closer to the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) than Orthodoxy. No question. Much closer to the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Never to the Talmud, but to the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). What you see—I don’t know—prayer in the language…
[Speaker B] In the language of the country where I live—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] is—
[Speaker B] perfectly fine according to the Shulchan Arukh. Yes, right. And now Orthodoxy decided no, that people pray only in Hebrew. But they… in that sense they are…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Reform Jew prayed in German, the Reform Jew prayed in German—and that, of course, is the height of heresy and the height of rejection of our ancestral custom. It’s a Talmudic text: “certain things may be said in any language,” seventh chapter of Sotah. Yes, that’s what it is. Yes. Women being called up to the Torah—doesn’t matter, all sorts of things like that that turned into these fundamental articles of faith even when they go against the Talmud. I’m not even talking about “you can interpret it this way or that way”—simply against the Talmud. And anyone who does that now is Reform, a heretic, an apikores, whatever. Meaning, there are fascinating processes here. Anyway, back to our topic. So essential repentance is basically repentance that is exempt from the requirements, from the halakhic criteria. That’s the claim. Now I want to continue—I think that’s where I got to, I’m not sure I remember correctly. I want to speak a bit about the question of the special grace that exists in repentance. I don’t remember whether I already spoke about this, whether we already started talking about it, where we got to—I no longer remember. Mesillat Yesharim at the end of chapter 4 says: “And if you say: if so, what role does the attribute of mercy play, since in any event it is necessary to be exacting in judgment over everything? The answer is: certainly the attribute of mercy is the very sustenance of the world, for without it the world could not stand at all. And even so, the attribute of justice is not impaired. For according to strict justice it would truly have been fitting that the sinner be punished immediately, right after his sin, with no delay at all, and that the punishment itself be in fierce wrath, as is fitting for one who rebels against the word of the Creator, blessed be His Name, and that there be no repair for the sin at all. For indeed, how can a person repair what he has twisted when the sin has already been done? If a person murdered his fellow, if he committed adultery—how can he repair such a thing? Can he remove the deed that has been done from reality?” That cannot be according to strict justice. “However, the attribute of mercy provides the opposite of the three things we mentioned. Namely, that time is given to the sinner and he is not destroyed from the earth immediately when he sins, and that the punishment itself is not unto total destruction—not to the very end—and that repentance is granted to sinners in complete grace, so that the uprooting of the will be considered like the uprooting of the deed.” Meaning, the fact that you uproot the will—you regret it—that is as though you didn’t do the deed. It rewrites history. “That is, when the penitent recognizes his sin and admits it, and reflects on its evil, and returns and regrets it with complete regret, just as one regrets a vow, so that he is wholly remorseful and would desire and yearn that the thing had never been done, and he feels strong pain in his heart over the fact that it was done, and abandons it for the future and flees from it—then the uprooting of the matter from his will is counted for him like the uprooting of a vow, and he is forgiven. And this is what Scripture says: ‘Your iniquity has departed and your sin shall be atoned for,’ that the sin truly departs from reality and is uprooted by the fact that he now grieves and regrets what was, retroactively. And this is certainly a grace that is not according to strict justice.” Strict justice was not supposed to allow such a thing. But there is a special grace that this happens. And on this Rabbi Elchanan asks—I don’t remember if we talked about this—Rabbi Elchanan asks from the Talmud in Kiddushin, which says that a perfectly righteous person who rebelled at the end loses his merits. The Talmud asks: let him be viewed as half and half. Give him the merits he has, and the sins he does from now on will accumulate on the side of liability. The Talmud answers: when he regrets his earlier deeds. And when he regrets his earlier deeds, he loses them. Rabbi Elchanan asks: if so, then apparently the fact that uprooting the will is like uprooting the deed is not a grace beyond strict justice, because otherwise it should work only for good and not for bad. The Holy One, blessed be He, inclines toward… because here we don’t do things that are beyond strict justice. That’s Rabbi Elchanan’s question. Then he asked the Chafetz Chaim about this, and the Chafetz Chaim told him that this is repentance out of love and that is repentance out of fear. Repentance out of love—there it is uprooted as a matter of strict justice; and repentance out of fear—it is a special grace that it is uprooted. Whereas the wicked person—the righteous person, sorry—who rebelled at the end and regrets his earlier deeds, that is of course the anti-thesis or anti-parallel of repentance out of love. Because this is basically someone who is not doing it out of fear; he is doing it because he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t want it, he regrets what he did, really regrets what he did. Okay? So that parallels repentance out of love; therefore there it is indeed uprooted by law, and therefore merits too are uprooted and not only liabilities. In repentance out of fear, which exists only on the side of repentance and not on the side of leaving religion, okay?—only on the side of repentance—there it is only beyond strict justice, and that’s what Mesillat Yesharim is talking about. Rabbi Elchanan says that in Mesillat Yesharim, and in other places as well where we see that this is a special grace, it does not sound as if it refers only to repentance out of love and not to repentance out of fear. And then he enters into another line of thought that speaks about the… I’ll just say in one sentence: he says that in every transgression and every commandment there are two aspects. There is the aspect of obedience or rebellion against the command. I talked about this. Obedience or rebellion against the command, and then there is the essential aspect—the repair or corruption inherent in the deed itself. If there is corruption in the transgression, that is why the Torah forbids it; and if I transgressed, then besides the corruption, I also rebelled against the command. There are two problems in a transgression a person commits. In a commandment that a person performs there are two advantages: first, the repair that the commandment brings; and second, the fact that he obeys the command. So Rabbi Elchanan argues that the grace is that the uprooting of the will is considered like the uprooting of the deed. The uprooting of the will certainly removes the violation of God’s will, the rebellion against the command. If I’ve now changed my will, then what are You judging me for—the will I had before? Now I have a different will. So that is by law. Fine? But the fact that the deed you did—not the bad will I had, not the rebellion against the command, but the corruption—how does that corruption change just because I regret it now? That is grace. That the uprooting of the will should be considered like the uprooting of the deed—that is not by strict justice; that is beyond strict justice. That is Rabbi Elchanan’s claim. And therefore the Talmud in Kiddushin talks about how uprooting the will changes the will. So that is strict justice. But that uprooting the will should count as uprooting the deed—that is what Ramchal says is grace beyond strict justice. Okay? The source for this—that in every commandment and every transgression there are these two aspects—is also Ramchal. He brings it in Derekh Hashem. But actually these are things that already appear among the medieval authorities (Rishonim). Tosafot HaRosh and Ritva speak about “greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does,” and they explain that greater is one who is commanded and does because he has two things: both the repair of the commandment that he performed, and the fact that he obeys the command. One who is not commanded and does has only the repair that the deed brings, but not the obedience to the command. And therefore greater is one who is commanded and does. Meaning, you see this elsewhere too. What I wanted to say, somewhat similarly, actually in the direction of the Chafetz Chaim, is that when you do the great, essential repentance—the inner reversal—then strict justice says that everything should be erased for you. That is the core law. Why? Because you really changed; you became something else, someone else. If you became someone else, then there is no reason to punish you, no reason to relate to what you did before. The one who did that previous thing was someone else, not me. Again, of course it’s me, but I’ve already changed; there’s no point in coming to me with claims about what I did. So there it is, by strict justice, that the repentance is accepted. But in the case of someone who does the small, technical repentance, you haven’t really changed—so how did you erase the past? That is a special grace. And we saw that these are the two moves we also saw in Maimonides: that in small repentance the goal is to remove sins lying on the scale, yes, on Rosh Hashanah. Since that’s the case, the goal is basically to repair the past, and that is grace beyond strict justice, because it is repair of the past—how can you repair the past? Essential repentance does not change the past; essential repentance changes me now. If now I am someone else, then what does it matter to you that on Rosh Hashanah I was average? Now I’m someone else. What, on Yom Kippur You’ll kill me because I was average on Rosh Hashanah? Now I’m someone else. This speaks about the present, not the past. So here no special grace is needed, because I really am, as I am today, deserving of being judged for life. That’s not beyond strict justice. In the cleansing of sins I came out average. Now I’m still average—I didn’t change that—but I repented and cleansed a sin that was there then. The very fact that I can cleanse the past is a special grace, and the fact that this is accepted and that on Yom Kippur in the end I am judged for life—that is a special grace. Fine. But if I’m judged according to what I am now, then now I really am okay; that is not beyond strict justice. What, should I be judged to death when I’m actually innocent, when I’m righteous? Why? “Will You slay even the righteous?” I mean, why kill someone who is righteous? There’s no logic to it. Even an ordinary human being—if someone came to him who had wronged him, and let’s say he somehow managed to understand what was in that person’s heart, he sees real regret, the person deeply regrets what he did, he’s in a completely different place—of course he would forgive him. Not beyond strict justice; that’s normal. It’s someone else. Why should I now settle accounts with him for what he did a week ago when he was in a different frame of mind, headed in a different direction? From my perspective he was someone else. Again, I mean that metaphorically—he was someone else; today he is something else. What do I even have to do with what was a week ago? In fact it might be more like an evil inclination or mere stubbornness if I go on bearing a grudge anyway for what he did. So here this is strict justice, not beyond strict justice. I would expect human beings to do this too, not only the Holy One, blessed be He. Okay? But if someone didn’t really regret it, then the question is why forgive him for what he did—that would be beyond strict justice. That really is not strict justice.
[Speaker B] And the regret that’s listed among the four stages—isn’t that enough for this? Enough for what? For great repentance.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I didn’t talk about this then, and I’ll still talk about it more, but if you take it all the way to the end, then yes. I said there’s a continuum; it’s not really— I talked about this — I said again that I presented a dichotomous picture, either small-scale repentance or great repentance, but the truth is that it’s a continuum. And the continuum is determined — the parameter that moves you from one side of the continuum to the other is the depth of the regret. The more complete your regret is, it’s not about one sin, then obviously it’s about all the sins — what are you regretting? So it’s clear that basically the depth of the regret determines whether you’re on this side or that side. If it’s deeper, then you’re already getting closer to the great repentance; if it’s full regret, then you’re already in the great repentance, which in fact means this is really a continuum. I present it as two because it’s easier to deal with it that way. So the claim, then, is that when I talk about a special grace involved in repentance, that refers to the small repentance, not the great repentance — sorry, the other way around — to the small repentance and not the great repentance. And the great repentance is accepted as a matter of law. But as Rabbi Elchanan writes, and as we’ll see from various other sources, from the attitude of the Sages as well as other commentators, and we’ll also see that even the great repentance contains some special grace — people make less of a distinction there between small repentance and great repentance. Even about the divine name, the double divine name, which Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner brings, that the double divine name is the attribute of mercy responsible for the great repentance. Why is it the double divine name? Because the divine name is not — after all, all the other attributes in the Thirteen Attributes are attributes that can also be ascribed to human beings. Compassionate, gracious, slow to anger — these are concepts we understand, and they also exist among human beings on some level or another. Okay? But the double divine name is something that exists only with the Holy One, blessed be He; it’s not a shared name between the Holy One, blessed be He, and human traits, unlike all the other attributes. And they say there that in truth this doesn’t exist in the world, it doesn’t follow the world’s laws, repentance preceded the world — all kinds of midrashim of that sort, from which it’s completely clear that repentance is some kind of departure from the ordinary rules. There is some special grace in apparently all processes of repentance, not only in the small repentance as opposed to the great repentance. So here I want to broaden the discussion a bit and explain why there is grace even in the great repentance. And Rabbeinu Yonah brings at the beginning of the book Shaarei Teshuvah, he says: “Know that when the sinner delays…” — did we talk about this?
[Speaker B] I think so.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] With the tunnel — that story I told about Rabbi Yukel, something he told us about why we didn’t go to demonstrations — yes, I think so. Okay, so it seems I’m repeating myself. Fine. So Rabbeinu Yonah basically says that there is a special grace in the fact that they dug us a tunnel so that we could escape from prison, so that we could repent. What stands behind that is a non-trivial conception of the grace in repentance. The parable sounds simple, okay, but when you think about it a little, look: the grace in the small repentance is the grace that the repentance is accepted. You didn’t really undergo a real reversal; you performed a technical act, and there is a special grace in the fact that they nevertheless accept it from you. In the great repentance, the grace is that there is such a mechanism at all — not that it’s accepted, but that it’s possible to do it at all. The existence of the tunnel, that passage leading out of the prison, is the grace. Not that you succeeded in escaping — if there’s a tunnel, then obviously you can escape. But the fact that there is a tunnel, that itself is the grace.
[Speaker C] And the fact that there’s a prison — isn’t that grace too? And the fact that there’s a prison is also…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The prison is my sin.
[Speaker C] Yes, but the very fact that you can enter prison is also…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I chose. I was given free choice, I chose evil and supposedly entered prison — that’s the prison in the parable. Now the question is how I can get out of it. I put myself into prison with my own hands. So I’m saying: if I get out, then obviously I’m outside. But the very fact that I can get out — that’s the grace. By contrast, the grace of the small repentance is not that you got out of prison and we’ll take you out.
[Speaker D] Wait, and with regretting one’s earlier deeds, do you also call that a tunnel? What? Regretting the earlier deeds, and with a righteous person… is that also a tunnel?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, yes, I’ll explain that in a moment. The claim, in fact, is that in the great repentance there is something very paradoxical. We haven’t talked about that yet, right? About weakness of will and serving for its own sake and all that…
[Speaker C] Yes, yes, yes, we talked about needing to put…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes? Okay, so then I really missed badly. So we talked about all of it? I don’t remember that we talked about all of it.
[Speaker C] There was an argument here with this…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] About the problem of choice, how you can get out from within the… from within the… yes? Okay, so then I’m not at all where I thought I was. Fine. So I’ll say it briefly then: the point is that in the great repentance I’m supposed to change myself. And when a person changes himself, that’s something that seems, on the face of it, logically impossible. It’s a logical paradox. It’s not a technical problem of whether the repentance is accepted or whether it deserves to be accepted or not. There’s some kind of logical paradox here. This logical paradox stems from the fact that let’s say I begin from a given set of values — my values right now — and that led me to commit the sin. Okay? Now I repent. What does that mean, that I repent? It means that I think those values are not right; they need to be changed. So I’m already a penitent. Because I already think those values are not right, I’m already holding the values… so what repentance do I still need to do? I’ve already done it. But how did I get to the point where I think those values are not right? It just happened to me. So if it happened to me, then I didn’t do the repentance; rather something — I don’t know — it happened on its own.
[Speaker C] Why, why does it have to happen? Why can’t you choose to do it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because if you choose, then you’re already there. There’s no need to undergo the process… I now want to get to a state in which serving God is my supreme value, that I’m not willing under any circumstances to deviate from the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. So I’m already there. That’s what I believe. I can try to internalize it more, fine, but my basic value system — if I want to repent, then I’ve already done it. But if I’ve already done it, then who did it? Because if I did that deliberately, then I’ll push the question one step further back: what caused me to have that initiative? Something already happened within me. So again, I’ve already done it. In other words, in the end it happens by itself. It can’t happen deliberately. A person cannot repent deliberately. Because if he does it deliberately, that means he decides to set out on the path and repent. The moment he decides, he’s already there. He doesn’t need to set out on the path. Now he just needs to work on himself better, to absorb it into himself more deeply, but the direction he believes in, his values, are already the right values. He doesn’t need to do anything. But then it comes out that repentance basically happens to us. Repentance is not done by us deliberately; rather it somehow occurs. But if that’s the case, then what value is there in such repentance? I didn’t do it; it just happens to me.
[Speaker E] I thought that was what you wanted. That it’s grace that it works that way. Can’t hear? That it’s grace that it works that way.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m saying: after that… maybe I do need to absorb it more, internalize it more… and that’s work. Fine, and that comes afterward. But first of all I have to decide what my fundamental values are. And that I don’t decide — it simply, it just happens to me.
[Speaker E] Or from the Holy One, blessed be He — everything is from the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If the Holy One, blessed be He, does it, then He repented, not me.
[Speaker E] Fine, but I still have value in it because I worked, I also did work.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] After the repentance I did work — that’s what I said, assimilation and internalization. I’m talking about repentance itself, the basic point. The question of weakness of will that I brought last time basically says — the underlying assumption there says — that if you did something, then that is what your value system told you to do. Don’t tell me stories that you don’t believe in it and still did it. If you did it, then that’s what you wanted to do. Now, if you want — you think you want to serve God, and nevertheless you committed a sin. What does that mean? It simply means that the pleasure in the sin, or whatever it was, the interest you had in sinning, was more important to you than serving God. That’s your value system. There is no sin that doesn’t begin in your value system, one way or another. Because if it didn’t begin in your value system, then something forced itself on you, and then you were under duress. You didn’t think that was right; you were just forced to do it. So that was what you really wanted to do. But if that was really what you wanted, then one way or another: if something else caused you to do it, then you were simply under duress, and you don’t need to repent for it. If you yourself decided, and lucidly acted out your own values, then you yourself think it’s right — so what does it mean to repent? How can you decide to repent? After all, you believe in it. You don’t believe in the other path to which you want to return. Because if that’s the path you want to return to, then already now you believe in it — so why did you commit the sin?
[Speaker C] So you’re saying a person’s values are imposed on him, and you don’t choose your values?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Seemingly there’s something terribly problematic here. In other words, this process of repenting, or really of choosing, brings us back to the question of choice itself, yes — our very ability to choose a value system, and certainly to change a value system, is something that appears logically impossible. Either it happens to us by itself, or it can’t happen. It cannot be done deliberately, in a way that I decide upon and carry out. Because the one carrying it out and the one on whom it is carried out are both me. So if I change my own value system, then what does that mean? I, the changer, am already equipped with this new value system. So why do I need to repent? I’m already there. And whom am I changing? There’s something very problematic here. I probably mentioned Ron Aharoni and his book The Cat That Isn’t There. He says that what defines all philosophy is the confusion between subject and object. He shows how all the important philosophical issues can be mapped onto one single flaw. He claims there is no such field as philosophy; it’s just a collection of mistakes, and they are all one fundamental mistake, and it appears in all the contexts of the central philosophical issues — that’s what he shows there. The claim, in fact, is that when I act on myself, think about myself, and things of that sort, then the “I” and the “self” are the same thing. We often describe it as though X acts on Y. And now we set Y = X. That is, I act on myself. That’s how we always think, that’s how we always relate to it. But that’s not correct; it cannot be correct. In other words, you can’t set Y = X. So if you act on yourself, then you’re already there; you don’t need to do anything. I’m now applying that here, to the value system — and elsewhere too. Therefore, the “I” serves here in two roles: I am both the subject of the action, the one who performs the action, and the object upon whom the action is performed, okay? But if I am one and the same, then there is no need to perform the action; I’m already in the place to which I want to bring myself. It’s like Baron Munchausen, who tells how he fell into a pit and ran home to bring a ladder, or pulled himself up by his own hair and that’s how he got out of the pit. Yes, all those kinds of stories of his. There’s no such thing. If you pull yourself up by your own hair, that means you’re already outside — there’s no one to pull, because you’re already outside. And if you’re not outside, then you’re inside; who is going to pull you out? You can’t do such a thing. Now, with Baron Munchausen everyone dies laughing, but when we talk about choice and repentance and changing a value system, we all talk in exactly the same way. It’s the exact same story. We take ourselves and pull ourselves out of the pit. One way or another: if we’re pulling ourselves out of the pit, then we’re already outside — there’s no one to pull and no need to pull. And if we’re inside the pit, then who is doing the pulling? Who is taking us out? What does it mean that I take myself? There is no such thing. There’s something very problematic here. Okay, so the claim is that in fact the possibility of changing our value system…
[Speaker D] Wait — according to your approach, what about rehabilitating prisoners? They committed a crime — who rehabilitates them? Their thinking — a rapist, so he won’t rape again — all that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A change in the value system.
[Speaker D] After all, they change… wait, okay, so who rehabilitates them?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Either someone from outside changes them — the rehabilitator changes them — or they were never sick in the first place, like with the turkey-prince. Did I mention the turkey-prince? Yes, right. So they were never really sick; it was always something external, really duress in our language. They really shouldn’t have been sitting in prison as punishment; they were under duress, and we help them deal with the duress that happened to them, and then they get rid of the duress that happened to them and return to being themselves. All right? But one way or another it can’t really be that way. I’m saying again — this is a difficulty, not a solution. I’m not saying this as a conclusion. Every paradox is like that. We talked about the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. What do you mean — of course Achilles catches the tortoise, so what kind of paradox is that? It’s obvious that he catches the tortoise. Right, that’s the paradox: on the one hand it’s obvious to you that he catches the tortoise, but on the other hand I can show you with an orderly argument that he never catches the tortoise. That is exactly the paradox. And here too, weakness of will is a paradox, not a claim. It’s a paradox in which on the one hand we do feel, with every fiber of our soul, that we really can change ourselves, but on the other hand, when you think about it systematically, you see that there’s something here… something here is logically incomprehensible. It doesn’t — something here doesn’t work. It can’t be.
[Speaker D] It’s not only in repentance. What?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, not only in repentance.
[Speaker D] Everything, every choice. When the Torah commands, “And you shall love the Lord your God.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “And you shall love the Lord your God” — there you could say that really the commandment is only to internalize that value within me. I want to love Him; I always wanted to love Him. And the commandment is to internalize it in my heart and also to feel it or experience it or identify with it, but not — it’s not a command to change a value system. “You shall not hate your brother in your heart.” Same thing. It’s only — it’s not a command to change a value system, but a command to implement a value system that I already believe in even before the command. If I understand that it’s right not to hate my fellow, and you don’t manage to live up to it, but I understand that it’s right not to hate my fellow, then no problem. Now what I need is to work on myself in order to realize what I already believe in. But to change what I believe in — what does it mean that I will change what I believe in? How can I…? Then who is the one changing and who is the one being changed? If I am already changing, then I don’t need to change because I’m already there. Again, obviously this is a paradox. Obviously the fact that we — what do I mean fact? At least the feeling — that we do change. And we change in a way that doesn’t merely happen to us, because otherwise we really wouldn’t deserve any credit for it, on the one hand, or punishment if we do it in the negative direction. So clearly we do grasp that a person is responsible for his choices, for his values.
[Speaker E] The Holy One, blessed be He, enables me to do it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “He enables me” — that doesn’t change anything; it’s words. In the end the question is what I do.
[Speaker D] The concept here, call it in terms of the good inclination and the evil inclination. The good inclination and the evil inclination — we talked about that when we talked about emotions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the good inclination and the evil inclination don’t say anything. The good inclination and the evil inclination are two inclinations trying to pull me in various directions. But what do I do with that? I am not the inclinations; I am the one upon whom the inclinations are trying to act. And when I decide to whom to respond or not respond, that’s my decision, not the inclinations’ decision. The inclinations don’t decide. The inclinations try to push and pull, to take me to various places. My role is to make decisions about what I do: whether to respond to them, not to respond to them, which way to go, how to do it. So I’m talking only about my bare self; I’m not talking about my environment, which exerts on me various forces, drives, and pressures. Inclinations are outside the game here. From my perspective the inclinations are the environment. I’m talking about the person acting within that environment. There’s something here — the argument of weakness of will is very strong in that sense, because it puts us in front of a mirror from which apparently there is no way to escape. In other words, if we committed a sin, that means that is what we thought was right to do. Because if not, then we were under duress, and then there is nothing to repent for. Because we didn’t think to do it and were coerced; something caused us to do it.
[Speaker E] Because it wasn’t external duress, it was internal duress, and that inner part needs to be fixed.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But what does it mean to fix it? Why didn’t you fix it at the time when you sinned?
[Speaker E] Because it was stronger than me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it was stronger than you, then you were under duress. So why does it need fixing? And why — no, I’m talking before the fixing — why do you need to repent? You were under duress.
[Speaker E] Because it still involved partial desire, because it’s something inside me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that means you did want to do it. There’s no partial and not partial. You wanted to do it, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t have done it. So if you wanted to do it, then that’s you, so yes, you wanted it. One way or another: if you didn’t want it and still did it, then you were under duress; you have nothing to repent for. Fine, whether to repair or not repair is another matter — then let’s go to a psychologist, and with hammer and chisel he’ll fix me — but that’s not repentance. Repentance means that I was in the wrong. In other words, it’s not correct to say about someone under duress that he needs to repent. Repentance is not only repair, repair in the technical sense. Repentance is cleansing; it’s the cleansing of something that was wrong, not only in terms of the outcome. I was wrong — meaning I could have avoided it, I wasn’t under duress, because if I was under duress there’s nothing to repent for; duress is duress.
[Speaker E] What can I do? The Holy One, blessed be He, upholds “everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted.” What is this here?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That if everything, in the end…
[Speaker E] In the end the Holy One, blessed be He, is the one who enables us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t help here at all. How does the Holy One, blessed be He, help here? I’m asking now what I do. Whether something enables me or doesn’t enable me, after He has enabled me and after everything — what do I do now? How does it work within me? I don’t care who gives me the power to do it, who built me — everything is the Holy One, blessed be He. I’m asking now what happens in my own process, the process I undergo. And my process — you can’t formulate it. There’s something problematic here. It’s a matter of internalization? So if internalization means I’m already built correctly from the outset, then why did I sin?
[Speaker E] Because there’s an incorrect structure composed of all kinds of parts.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But which part prevails? As long as I have a set of values, there is also a hierarchy among them.
[Speaker E] At a certain stage, truly, the negative sides were stronger.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Holy One, blessed be He, enabled you to repent. What does “enabled you” mean? He repented. Again, what the Holy One, blessed be He, does doesn’t interest me. It may be together with me, with lots of work. No — you do a lot of work, but did He decide to repent? A person needs to repent, not the Holy One, blessed be He. It can’t be.
[Speaker E] But the root of it in the end is still the Holy One, blessed be He. We need to work with effort. No, no — everything is the Holy One, blessed be He, no.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I absolutely do not agree with that. In no way is everything the Holy One, blessed be He. “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven.” Absolutely not.
[Speaker E] Even fear of Heaven — and it’s not in man’s hands, it’s in Heaven’s hands. You need — everything requires — but also that the Holy One, blessed be He, enable me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say — “the Holy One, blessed be He, enables” doesn’t help me at all. Again I’m saying: He enabled, everything’s fine. Now I’m enabled, enabled and purified. Now I’m asking — explain to me what happens, okay, afterward, what happens within me in my own process. A partner in the work.
[Speaker E] What? That I’m a partner in the work of purification. What does “partner in the work” mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you believe? You — not the Holy One, blessed be He. What do you believe? Do you believe one should not desecrate the Sabbath? Yes. Then why did you desecrate it?
[Speaker E] Because there was a moment…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] At that moment, what happened in that moment?
[Speaker E] The other side overpowered me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Which means you wanted the pleasure more than obedience to the Holy One, blessed be He, right? So that’s really what you wanted. Right? Now you repent. What does that mean, you repent? You want to strengthen the side of serving God over the side of pleasures. Which means you’re already there. So there’s nothing for you to repent. That already happened to you. I’m asking: how do you decide that the value of serving God outweighs the value of pleasure? The decision — I’m talking before the internalization — I’m talking about the decision to change values, not about internalization. This decision to change values: do you make it deliberately? Because if so, I don’t understand how that happens. After all, at one point you were saying, “As far as I’m concerned, serving God is less important than immediate pleasure.” That was true at one moment. A moment later, what happened now? After all, I’m in the same state. Rather, what — something happened to me so that now serving God suddenly became more important. So it happened to me; I didn’t do it. It happened by itself. Unless — no, I do it deliberately. So what does it mean to do it deliberately? I myself now decide: come, let me bring myself to a state where serving God matters more than immediate pleasure. Fine — but then I already believe that serving God matters more, so I’m already there. I don’t need to bring myself there. There’s no escaping this.
[Speaker D] You can escape it, you can. Everything you say in the pure prayer: “Woe is me that I yielded to the evil inclination, woe is me that I did this, that I followed the counsel of my eyes, the counsel of my inclination, the counsel of my inclination.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why are you telling me about the pure prayer? How does that help me? Explain the mechanism to me. Why do I care what they say in the pure prayer? The mechanism — yes. Explain to me how it works. I asked a question. How does what they say in the pure prayer help me?
[Speaker D] The guy last week said it. Because generally you’re in a place where you didn’t activate your intellect, and you gave in to your inclinations, and acted automatically.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, so you acted automatically — you were under duress. Fine, so you acted automatically, you were under duress. So what does that have to do with repentance?
[Speaker D] Let’s be a bit more precise, Rabbi — you’re expanding the concept of duress a bit too much.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? If you had no choice, then you were under duress. Isn’t that what “under duress” means? Unless what — you decided on it? So if you decided on it, then that was the value system you had. So how did it change? One way or another, there’s something problematic here. I’m saying again: you have to be careful with solving paradoxes by saying, well, obviously that’s not true. I also know it’s obviously not true. That’s exactly the paradox. The paradox is that in the logical calculation you arrive at one conclusion, but the bottom line is obviously to you that it’s not correct. That’s why it’s a paradox. You can’t wave it away by saying it’s obviously not true; I also agree it’s not true. I’m only asking where it’s not true. What isn’t true here? That’s the question. Show me in the reasoning what isn’t true here. Don’t tell me it’s not true in the end; I know that too. Do you understand? That is, that’s not how you solve paradoxes. A paradox has two sides, and to solve it it’s not enough to point to the other side. You have to explain why the first side doesn’t contradict it, and where the problem lies in the reasoning on the first side. I think the point is… I’ll say two things. Maybe before I say the two things: what I really want to show through this line of reasoning is that even in the great repentance there is grace. And the grace is that in truth, according to the rules, ordinary logic, the process is undefined. That is, it is not possible. There’s something really problematic here. And therefore there has to be some kind of departure from the ordinary rules, the ordinary mode of functioning. Here it is almost a departure from logic; I don’t even know if one can speak of such a thing, in order for such a thing to be defined at all. Not in order for it to be accepted. Because if I changed, if I performed great repentance and changed, then as a matter of law it is accepted. There is no grace there. The grace is in the small repentance, that it is accepted. In the great repentance, the grace is that it’s possible to do it at all. If you did it, then as a matter of law it is accepted. Fine? In the small repentance, the grace is that it is accepted. It’s possible to do it, no problem; it’s a technical process, do it. Fine? That’s not the point. So the fact that it is accepted is grace, because you didn’t really change; you’re the same person. In the great repentance — I said this before — it’s a matter of law. True, if you did it. If you did it, then the fact that it’s accepted is a matter of law. You’re a different person. Why should one reckon with you for things you did in the previous phase? But even here there is grace. The grace is not that it’s accepted, but that it’s possible to do such a thing at all. Now what’s the point here? I’ll say. Two things that I’m not entirely sure really solve the problem. And therefore I’m telling you in advance: I’m trying not to deceive you, because there’s something very slippery here, and each time I wonder whether it really solves the problem or doesn’t solve the problem. First of all, I’ll actually start from your formulation: “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You.” Yes, the root of the problem, if we formulate it in a certain way, is the question of who performs the change. Right? By the way, every change, not only in repentance, but also in the question — also in the Talmud in Kiddushin. The Talmud in Kiddushin parallels the great repentance, the big question, parallel to the great repentance, yes? Now this is a matter of law. I said: it is a matter of law that if you did it, it is accepted. So the fact that it’s possible to do it is grace. And also the fact that you can turn from a righteous person into a wicked person is grace. Why? Because the fact that you are given the possibility to choose to change a value system is pure grace. What you do with that thing — whether you take it in a positive direction or a negative direction — that is already your decision. But your very possibility of changing is sheer grace from the Holy One, blessed be He. Sometimes you misuse it — what can you do? That’s grace; that’s how the world was created. Fine, so it’s grace that we were given the possibility of being choosers, as distinct from every creature or every other thing that is deterministic, that behaves deterministically. Now the point is — so the difficulty in this process of self-change lies in the question, the one-way-or-another question. If this change happens through some external factor — I don’t care whether it’s my inclinations, from my point of view my inclinations are also an external factor — or by the Holy One, blessed be He, or whoever you want, then it’s worthless. That is, someone repented, not me; it has nothing to do with me. If it happens through me, it’s impossible — how can I change myself? Yes? Either I’m already changed or it’s impossible. Okay, so that’s the direction.
[Speaker B] You’re presenting a binary situation here, but as the Rabbi said earlier, there is a continuum, and basically it’s not that I’m either this or that; rather these two continua are together, both before and after, in every process.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, let’s take the pole of great repentance. Let’s focus for a moment on that pole, forget the whole continuum. Great repentance. I want now to understand how it works. Let’s talk about that repentance, and say that perhaps no person is ever really there except Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya — and I don’t know if he ever existed — but let’s assume so; it’s some kind of story that teaches us this idea, okay? But this idea is supposed to be some mechanism that is possible in principle. Not everyone reaches it, and perhaps in different doses, but let’s discuss it. How does it happen? Now it is already pure — there’s no continuum here — it is completely pure. And I ask: how does this thing work? What happens there? It seems to me that here too we really need to blur the dichotomy a little in order perhaps — maybe that can solve the problem. The claim is what you said earlier, that the Holy One, blessed be He, enables us, or formulations of that sort. In a binary outlook this won’t help. That is, in the end the question is: if I do it, then it’s impossible. If someone else does it, then it has no value. It’s possible, but it has no value — that is, someone programmed me, so what difference does it make? The question is what credit I deserve for repenting. The claim is that perhaps those two possibilities are not so sharply distinguished from one another. And that already takes us into somewhat problematic metaphysical regions, because when I stand before the Holy One, blessed be He, the question is how I conceive the relation between me and Him. Am I standing opposite Him — I’m here and He’s there — and now the whole question is whether I do the work myself or He does it to me? But if I really understand that something — in other words, there is some kind of continuum between us, not the continuum of repentance, but our relation is not some dichotomous relation, I’m here and He is opposite me, but rather something of Him — what people always call the divine point, and other things of that sort — something of Him is also involved in me. Therefore this action, I don’t know whether to define it as being done from outside or being done from inside. It’s both together. Once you can’t make the sharp distinction — either from outside or from inside — maybe that somehow removes the sting or solves the problem, because the whole problem is this one-way-or-another. If it happens from outside, then it’s worthless; if it happens from inside, then it can’t happen. But no — the distinction between outside and inside, which is the basis of the problem, may be a distinction we are not careful enough about when we make it. Because it may really be that the boundary between us and the Holy One, blessed be He, is not so sharp — that we are here and He is there — but rather there is within us something that is from Him. And when I speak of myself doing something, it is always together with Him — the sort of formulations you suggested earlier. But for that, you really have to adopt a non-dichotomous faith: not either I do it alone or He does it to me, but the distinction between me and Him is not sharp. In other words there is — we talked about how the soul…
[Speaker B] is a part of God above, right?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Therefore there is some kind of process here.
[Speaker B] Here — that’s the process. Exactly. Continuum. Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll get to that in a moment, to this story; we’ll come back to this story in a moment. So the claim is that perhaps this dichotomous distinction between me and the Holy One, blessed be He, which creates the problem, is the root of the problem. But then really, I don’t know how to define it; I’m not even sure it’s fully definable. Something that is me is nevertheless also something of Him. It’s a bit pantheistic. We once talked about collectives and particulars, one of the topics last year, and I said that for an organic entity not to be just a collection of cells, but to be a human being that I relate to as a new entity, there has to be something additional weaving all the cells together and turning them into — the soul, yes. In a materialist world you can’t understand why a person is one creature. A collection of molecules, of cells, of atoms, depending on what resolution you go down to. It has no meaning; it’s a fiction. Collective entities are a fiction. What defines this collection of cells as one thing? It’s just a definition, a convention. Only if you understand that it’s an organism — an organism in the sense that there is something, that the soul fills the whole body, like the Talmud in Berakhot 10, that the Holy One, blessed be He, fills the world as the soul fills the body. What does that mean? Why is the world perceived as an organic being, as collective, as one thing? True, it contains many parts, but they function as one organic whole because the Holy One, blessed be He, is the soul of this world. And just as there is within us a soul and that turns the body into a single entity — otherwise it’s just a collection of cells — so in that sense here too I’m saying that the distinction — I don’t know whether it’s a part of the Holy One, blessed be He, but there is something of the Holy One, blessed be He, present within each of us that turns us, in fact, into some kind of one organism, and that basically means that the distinction between me and Him, and the question whether it is done from inside or from outside, is not a sharp distinction. And here really all the “Our Father, our King” that we say — usually it’s “Our Father, our King, save us, do this, do that, give us this, give us that, forgive us and pardon us,” and all kinds of things — all that one can understand. But what is “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You”? That’s a very unusual “Our Father, our King.” Now usually with “bring us back in complete repentance before You,” people will tell you it means “accept our repentance,” but we already ask for that in “forgive and pardon all our sins,” right? In “return us” the meaning is not “accept what we return.” “Bring us back in complete repentance before You” means: perform the act of repentance upon us. Why? Because if I do it to myself, it’s impossible to do it to myself. I ask myself — I’m already in that state. What does it mean that I should do it to myself? Either I’m already there or I’m not there, but what does it mean to deliberately make a change? For this thing to be defined at all, you need the Holy One, blessed be He, to be involved in the matter together with you — that is, that He should do it. And now I asked: if that’s so, then if He does it, it has no value. He repented, not me. The point is that what is called “I” apparently includes something of Him.
[Speaker C] Meaning, the distinction is not sharp. Without that you can’t understand the… You don’t pray “bring me back,” you pray “bring us back.” That means that I, as an individual, am praying for the whole community to be brought back. That is, it’s like I’m praying for my friend.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but if the Holy One, blessed be He, does it to us, then it has no value — even for the community, what difference does it make? Then it has no value; He did it.
[Speaker C] Yes, but the Chazon Ish says this in some responsum, that when a person with free choice prays for someone else who has free choice, then it began with choice. So even though it coerces him, it is still the result, the offspring of…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the repentance is mine, not his. I don’t understand that. The repentance is mine — why does he deserve credit? So then it’s some external factor — whether it’s the Holy One, blessed be He, or me, or whoever it may be — but it’s not him. You have to say that there is some kind of mixture here at the truly metaphysical level. It’s not only a question of to whom it is attributed and in whose favor the credit goes, but something in this process apparently happens in such a way that my boundaries are not sharp. The outside and the inside are not sharply distinguished. I know I’m saying things here that I myself don’t even know how to define fully, but without that we really remain with some problem for which I don’t see much of a solution.
[Speaker C] After all, once we talked about some model, that there’s this sort of gradient, some sort of two-dimensional plane, where you’re like a ball, and you have to overcome the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] This model is what creates the whole problem. Because if I decide to overcome it, then okay, I decided to overcome it because I believe I need to climb the mountain even though it’s a mountain. And if I decided not to climb the mountain—the inclination, let’s say, made it into a high mountain, and I decided not to climb it—then what does that mean? It means that climbing the mountain really wasn’t important enough to me. So how did I repent, and suddenly decide that yes, I will climb the mountain? On the contrary: within this model, the whole process of change becomes much more problematic. This model is exactly what sharpens the issue, because you can’t tell me that now the mountain turned into a valley—thank you very much—that the Holy One, blessed be He, repented, not me. I just don’t have the trial anymore, so I succeed. That’s no great feat. The feat is that before I didn’t climb the mountain, and now I decide that yes, I will climb the mountain. So that means that… if it’s not a change in the environment, then it’s apparently a change within me. But a change within me can’t be, because that’s why I created the environment—to try to define the change sharply. But that’s exactly why, in repentance, this won’t help. Because repentance is a change that happens inside this little ball that’s moving along this topographical outline, not in the outline itself. Now that’s not defined. That’s why we created the outline, because you can’t talk about the structure of the little ball. Okay. And that really is the meaning of “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You”—the idea is: come together with us. Because otherwise I can’t do it; I don’t understand how one does it. And the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia now takes on much more significance, because he writes like this: “He went and sat between two mountains and hills”—you read the second part, we already saw this. He said: “Mountains and hills, ask mercy for me.” They said to him: “Before we ask for you, we must ask for ourselves, as it is said, ‘For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed.’” He said: “Heaven and earth, ask mercy for me.” They said to him: “Before we ask for you, we must ask for ourselves, as it is said, ‘For the heavens shall vanish like smoke, and the earth shall wear out like a garment.’” He said: “Sun and moon, ask mercy for me.” They said to him: “Before we ask for you, we must ask for ourselves—‘Then the moon shall be ashamed and the sun embarrassed.’” He said: “Stars and constellations, ask mercy for me.” They said to him: “Before we ask for you, we must ask for ourselves, as it is said, ‘And all the host of heaven shall waste away.’” He said: “The matter depends on no one but me.” He placed his head between his knees and cried bitterly until his soul departed. Okay—what is the meaning of this appeal to the heavens and the hills and the clouds and I don’t know, all these things around him? What is this?
[Speaker B] Maybe he’s blaming them? Heaven forbid.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think he’s blaming them. He says, “Ask mercy for me”; he’s not saying, “You’re guilty.” Help me repent. Ask mercy for me, right? Because I can’t. Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia taught us the great repentance, the inner reversal, “I am not the same person,” as Maimonides writes. Now, that kind of repentance can’t be done out of yourself; it’s simply not defined. What does it mean that I’ll grab myself by the forelock and pull myself outside? The literary expression of that is what’s written here. Someone has to do it to me from the outside; I’m helpless. I want to, but what does it mean that I change myself? In what sense? If I’m different, then I’m already different, so why do I sin? How did I sin all my life if I’m this kind of person? Rather, I’m not that kind of person, but I do want to change. There’s something very confusing here. Now you try to take yourself—each of us experiences this to some extent—we want to change, but it doesn’t really work. We really do want to change. Meaning, this very feeling of wanting to change is itself a kind of paradox. But I want to change, and it’s not really happening. I need someone to take me. There, the psychologist—you mentioned therapy earlier, doesn’t matter—that’s also a kind of thing like this. Because a psychologist basically takes me; he doesn’t change me with hammer and chisel. He helps me, or is supposed to help me, go through some kind of process. “Our Father, our King, bring us back in complete repentance before You”—the Holy One, blessed be He, helps us go through some kind of process. Now Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia feels this: he wants to change, but he performs the great repentance, because of which he is called Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia, since he taught us that there is such a thing as great repentance. That’s what I spoke about last time. So now, how does this work? He says, okay, I understand the situation is difficult—what do you do? He sits there and cries. He’s helpless, he doesn’t know what to do. What does it mean that I take myself and now change? I am what I was yesterday and the day before and what I always was. What’s happening here? Now I feel that I’m not okay, but it could be that regarding all his previous sins too, he felt he was not okay, all right? Now he wants to change. What does it mean to change? If so, then I’m already different, so what’s the problem? But then I was already different back then too, if I’m already different—so why did I commit the sins? It’ll come back again afterward as well. There’s something here that’s not just philosophical confusion; it’s a real difficulty. Someone who wants to repent doesn’t really know how to do it. It’s not—we often feel that we have a psychological difficulty, that it’s hard for us to repent. I think it’s not just that. It’s much stronger than that. It’s something that is logically impossible; it starts there. The psychological difficulty is an expression of it, but I think a large part of our failure comes from the fact that we don’t understand that there’s a problem in the very definition of the process. It’s not just a question of our not being strong enough—not only that. There’s something here where it’s unclear where to begin. What does it mean to change the… okay, I really want to, and therefore what? What am I supposed to do now? If I want to, then I’m already there—finished. I’m already a complete penitent; what’s the problem? What is left for me to do? But I know I haven’t changed, because all in all I now want what I wanted a year ago and two months ago, but then I still sinned. So what’s going on? Am I already different, am I not different? What does it mean that I change myself? This whole collection of things, from every angle you look at it—that’s really the tangle at the foundation of repentance. It’s a logical tangle, not a psychological one. And Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia expresses it in the strongest way. He says—it’s why he turns to all the external factors around him, because he understands that by himself he can’t do it: mountains, hills, heaven, I don’t know, stars—ask mercy for me. Meaning: you do it. I really want to, but what does that mean? I can’t pull myself by my own forelock and get out of the pit. Something here is undefined. And then in the end he says: “The matter depends on no one but me.” Nothing happens. They don’t do anything for him; they can’t do anything. That’s not it, not it, not it. It won’t happen. You have to do it. Otherwise it has no value. What does “you” mean? After all, that’s not defined. “You,” of course, together with the Holy One, blessed be He, as we said before. And then his soul departed. He said, “The matter depends on no one but me,” cried, his soul departed, and Rabbi says, “There is one who acquires his world in a single hour.” Meaning: that is how one actually does great repentance. The process of great repentance is deeply bound up with this paradox I’ve been talking about. Because the process of small repentance does not involve changing my very self, changing my fundamental values. Therefore, yes, there is the kindness that it is accepted—but the fact that it can be done, fine, it can be done. That’s not the point. Great repentance, which is a change of my very self—there’s something terribly problematic there at the logical level. The kindness is that such a thing exists at all, not that it is accepted. If I changed, then as I said, strictly speaking it makes sense that my repentance should be accepted. But the fact that it is possible to do such a thing at all—that is kindness. And that kindness is because of this connection that I have with the Holy One, blessed be He, in which we are not sharply distinguished from one another.
[Speaker E] On account of His transcendence? On account of His continuity? What does that mean?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What—surrounding and filling? Okay. Something of Him is present within me in any case. I’m not going into definitions right now—what of Him and what… something of His somehow acts together with me. Otherwise it couldn’t work. The whole concept of choice and of changing the value system—even adopting the initial value system is also some kind of change—apparently has to be carried out somehow together with some factor that is external-internal. If it’s external, then again, it’s not me. Then it made the change in me—that’s repentance that… it’s not choice. It’s conditioning or programming. Choice is when I do it. And when I do it to myself, that’s always problematic. So it has to be that I simply don’t stand by myself. In a certain sense, choice does require some external factor which is also somewhat within me—something of it is inside me, and it is also external. Meaning that I am not alone in the world. A person who is alone in the world, with the whole world standing opposite him—I don’t think one can really talk about choice in such a situation, or about changing a value system.
[Speaker C] But the whole difficulty begins only with extreme repentance, with the side of repentance out of love—but even if you go…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Great repentance.
[Speaker C] Yes, the regular kind. If you go a bit in the direction of repentance… I don’t know what “a bit” means—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know if there is—
[Speaker C] a paradox there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? There is, there is a paradox.
[Speaker C] Because it’s only you facing yourself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I’m saying—that’s why I say this continuum is very hard to define. What does it mean to be eighty percent in great repentance and twenty percent in small repentance? There’s some real remorse, I changed the value system, just not… what does it mean, in what sense is it not all the way? Either this is my value system or it isn’t. “Not all the way” is always about intensity—how intensely it’s so. And here I come to the second point. I said I would make two points, and perhaps together they help solve the issue. Because when I talk about the question of the continuum between small repentance and great repentance, that really brings me to something else. Because in the end, every repentance, wherever I am on the continuum, involves some kind of change of self. In fact, the paradox exists everywhere except at the far-left pole—the pole where it’s purely technical, nothing substantial. Otherwise every substantial thing is some kind of change, regardless of whether it’s at this intensity or that intensity, since they define the intensity. So I now want to define the intensity. And this is in fact the solution to the problem of weakness of will, on the philosophical plane too, but it will also bring us back to the two types of repentance. A person who sins often feels that he doesn’t want to do it, even in real time. He doesn’t want to do it. He sells himself all kinds of stories, but underneath he knows he doesn’t want to do it, and he falls. What does “falls” mean? If he did it, then apparently that’s what he wanted; pleasure was simply more important than serving God, or morality, or whatever it may be. Every sin—you can apply this even to dieting. Diet is the model here. It changes nothing. You have a value system you want, and yet you don’t conduct yourself according to it. That’s the concept of weakness of will. It can be in the religious context, the moral context, the context of dieting, any context—someone wants to be an athlete. Training is terribly important to him, but he has no strength, so he doesn’t train. So what, that’s also weakness of will. It has nothing to do with morality or anything. A person wants something but doesn’t carry out what he wants. So what do people say? If you don’t carry out what you want, that’s a sign you didn’t really want it. Don’t tell me stories. Resting was more important to you than being an athlete, and in the end you didn’t go train, that’s all. What are you telling me, “I really wanted to be an athlete but I was weak”? “You were weak” means there was something else more important to you than being an athlete. There’s no such thing as weak. That’s the problem of weakness of will. What I want to argue is that that’s not true—there is such a thing as weak. And the question is how much you wanted to be an athlete. That’s the question. But more than that—not how much you wanted to be an athlete, because that still stays on the level of what you want—but with what intensity you decided to activate your choice. In other words, my claim is this: a person has a certain set of values, and he has already decided on it. He believes in it, he has a scale, he can rank them. Everything is fine; he has a defined set of values. That does not mean he will act according to it. Why? Seemingly, if he “sins” against the diet and eats something fattening, that means he really prefers the pleasure over the… But we feel it’s not like that. The person doesn’t really prefer the pleasure; he falls. Every person feels: I fell. I wasn’t strong enough. In dieting, in morality, it doesn’t matter—in all areas. How do you explain that? The point is this: many times I didn’t want enough to be a chooser. And that is serving God; that is weakness of will. And weakness of will does not mean that I do not want to serve God. I do want to serve God. And if I were in a state of fully choosing, I would serve God and I wouldn’t fall anywhere. But sometimes there is another choice, a second-order choice: the choice of whether to choose. If I only moved it one debt over—no, that’s it, we discussed this on the website, I spoke about it once. In a moment I’ll leave that aside; I just want to clarify the point. The choice whether to choose. Okay. The choice whether to choose means the question of how much energy I invest in realizing the values I believe in. Now what happens in such a situation? Let’s say there’s a high mountain that I’m supposed to climb, all right? The mountain is metaphorical, it doesn’t matter—some desire to overcome the inclination. It’s very hard for me, I have a very strong inclination. It’s very hard for me, so I call it a high mountain. Okay. Now, if I failed and didn’t climb, I ate pork. I had a very strong desire to eat pork, and not eating pork was like climbing a high mountain. It was hard for me to do it, and so I failed. So they tell me: ah, if you failed that’s a sign that this is what you wanted. There was no other value you wanted more than not eating pork, more than serving God. But no—I decided to sleep, meaning I decided not to be a chooser. If I were choosing, the set of values would determine it; I wouldn’t eat pork. Again, my set of values is the right one. What was not okay there was my decision about how autonomous to be, how much of a chooser to be, how much energy to invest in choice. Now notice what I gain here, and that’s why I think this doesn’t merely push the problem one step back. Because here, when I ate the pork, you can’t say: you wanted to eat pork more than you wanted to serve God. No. My set of values, even at the moment of the sin, was the right set. I wanted to serve God more than to eat pork. So what happened? I wasn’t in a state where I fully took the reins into my own hands. In other words, I wasn’t in a state of complete choosing. But concerning that itself, I made a decision; therefore I am fully responsible for the act. You can’t say I was coerced. Why? Because I could have decided to be a chooser. What do I gain here? I gain the fact that my eating pork does not mean that I really wanted pork more. Then you tell me, so what is repentance, all the paradoxes I mentioned before? A sign that you wanted pork more than serving God? No. I wanted to serve God more. I was just asleep, and I let my inclinations carry me off to all kinds of… exactly, to places where I really didn’t want to be. If I had operated in a mode where I really do what I want, I would have done the right thing. I simply did not choose to choose. And here too there is a continuum. I talked earlier about what the continuum is, how one moves from one to the other. The continuum is the intensity with which you decide to be autonomous. That is, how autonomous you really are. And here there is a continuum of levels. You can be autonomous in the greatest way possible—it’s never infinite, but as great as possible—and then you will always do what you believe in. Those are the strong people. They always do what they believe in, all right? The weak people—it’s not that they believe in something else. They can believe in exactly the same thing, only they have weakness of will. That’s the expression “weakness of will.” What does that mean? My will is the right will, only it is weak. Now what does “weak” mean? Then what follows? If it’s weak, then am I coerced? Meaning the mountain forced me, I can’t climb it? No. I can climb it, because otherwise I would be coerced, and there’d be nothing for me to repent for in a case of coercion. So what happened? I chose not to choose. I didn’t choose to eat pork. The moment I chose not to choose, the inclination already took me to eating pork. So it’s not true that I chose to eat pork. I chose not to choose—or not strongly enough to choose. Okay, and therefore the inclination took me to eat pork. That is weakness of will. Why did you choose not to choose? Because of the pleasures on the other side? What… no, no—that’s exactly the point. If it was because of the pleasures on the other side, there’d be no point in bringing in this whole second plane. I simply chose pleasure at the expense of serving God. No. I want to serve God, but I wasn’t strong enough. What stood against your not being strong enough? What is the high mountain? Strength. I don’t have the strength to be a chooser. Being a chooser requires psychological resources. For a person to be constantly in control of his actions—I think everyone feels that it’s very hard to be in control every single moment, to think about everything you do, to decide about the thing, even when driving. Many times we leave it to autopilot, okay? Often we do the right thing, many times, and sometimes even better than if… because autopilot also has advantages. Fine, we decide to leave it… Now what are we… and let’s say we failed and had an accident, so what does that mean? That it was more important to me to have an accident than… or than to drive properly? Nonsense. Obviously I didn’t want to have an accident. But I didn’t have the strength to invest and be constantly focused and in control so that there wouldn’t be an accident. So it’s not correct to say that my value system was flawed. Rather, the energy I invested in realizing my value system was not strong enough. So on the one hand, if you ask whether I’m responsible for it, absolutely yes. I could have decided to choose, to be a chooser, and then I would have realized the right thing. But on the other hand, if someone says to me: but if you really did it by your choice, because you’re responsible for it, then you did it, not someone else. And if so, then what you did is what you wanted, so what does it mean to change yourself, and all the paradoxes I mentioned before? That’s exactly what I’m saying. The change means not changing the value system—the value system is correct. The change means being more autonomous, investing more energy in realizing the values in which, in a certain sense, you already believe. Not changing the value system. Changing a value system is something I just can’t make sense of. Otherwise, the Holy One, blessed be He, did it. And I think this is the continuum between great repentance and small repentance. Small repentance too—you also have to want the right thing, because otherwise why are you doing the technique? It’s not… So obviously you have to want the right thing. So what’s the issue? You fail to marshal the psychological resources to be a chooser one hundred percent. Fine, at least I declare that I want the right thing, I do the procedure, and the Holy One, blessed be He, in His special kindness accepts it. Great repentance means I now take that all the way. It means my remorse is complete. What does it mean that the remorse is complete? I take the reins entirely into my own hands. I become someone who completely does what he believes in. In the middle, where the energies I invest—that is the parameter now running here—not the depth of remorse as I said earlier, but the energetic intensity I invest in realizing my goals. If it’s one hundred percent, that’s great repentance. If it’s zero percent, that’s small repentance. And all the levels in between are basically the continuum. And therefore I sometimes fail when I don’t do complete repentance, because I don’t invest the full energy. But there is more energy than there was before. It’s not changing a value system; it’s investing more energy. Wait, then if I invest more energy, does that have to be an all-out investment, with all one’s strength? Meaning, does this consciousness have to be with all one’s strength—to be autonomous and invest with all one’s strength in what you believe in? Someone who… someone who repents for the sake of idolatry, then the same question remains; he’s repenting toward idolatry. I’m describing a mechanism at the moment. What a person should do, as a servant of God of course, is repent in order to serve God. And right now I’m talking about the very change of a value system without regard to the question of serving God. Yes, complete serving of God is indeed with all one’s strength, but God leads him. So that’s what I said earlier—that otherwise, otherwise we return to Oren’s question. Because this decision of how much energy to invest—even about that, one can ask the earlier questions. If before I didn’t decide, that apparently means it wasn’t important enough to me to be a chooser. So what happened now? How did I suddenly decide to be a chooser? Here I do have to arrive at the involvement of the Holy One, blessed be He. Meaning, I want to be a chooser, but I am weak, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is involved here and takes me into being a chooser. But it seems to me that the point is that the value system really does have to be a correct one. I’m not changing the value system—that I can’t understand. Otherwise, the Holy One, blessed be He, did it. Rather, this change is in the intensity of the investment in being autonomous, in realizing what I believe in. And then perhaps each time I still don’t fully manage to decide whether this really solves the problem or not, but it seems to me that this is the closest I can get in trying to solve this paradox of free will. And this is exactly the point of “Return us to You, O Lord, and we shall return.” We ask the Holy One, blessed be He, to return to being autonomous, to truly do what we believe in. Not to believe correctly. Asking the Holy One, blessed be He, to believe correctly is nonsense. You don’t believe that, so what are you asking Him to make you believe correctly? Then you already believe it, if you think that is the right thing. That He should lead him to the correct beliefs? But if they are the correct beliefs, then you already know the correct beliefs. So what do you need Him for? If you… if those are not the correct beliefs, then why are you asking Him to take you to them? To understand? Yes, to understand. No, not to know. To know, obviously—but we are talking about returning to beliefs when I’m already marking them as such, not about revealing beliefs to me that I don’t know. I want now to be the kind of person who keeps the Sabbath, who is meticulous with minor and major commandments alike, let’s say, who sees Sabbath as tremendously important. So I already know that Sabbath is tremendously important. I don’t need the Holy One, blessed be He, to reveal that to me. I want Him to help me realize it, all right? Not to take me there. Because if I don’t think Sabbath is important, why would I ask the Holy One, blessed be He, to make me think that it is important? That has no meaning at all, since I don’t think it’s important. And if I ask Him to make me think it’s important, then I already think it’s important. So I don’t need Him to make me. All the problems I mentioned before. Therefore I think we should not talk about changing the value system, but about the energy I invest in realizing the value system. And beliefs that are sometimes blurred… those blurred things mean how much energy I invest in realizing them. Not that the values themselves are blurred, but rather the question of how much energy I invest. I don’t know what “blurred values” even means, on some other planet. The question is whether these are values I believe in or not. It’s very simple. I don’t see the… There’s a relevant aggadah here. There’s a nearby aggadah that says, “A prisoner cannot free himself from prison,” and it reminded me of the topic about David or one of the prophets. The same idea—that Sisera cut off whose head? Yael. Not Yael. Sisera? No, Yael killed Sisera, with the milk and the tent peg and the blanket. Blanket—whatever—and the rest are things we won’t talk about here. There are things you can do for yourself, and things you can’t do for yourself. The system a person is in—when he is inside it, he cannot extract himself from it. That’s the idea of “A prisoner cannot free himself from prison.” He needs someone from outside to come and take him out. By the way, our sages say that this was stated even about the Holy One, blessed be He, as it were. “I am with him in distress”—the Divine Presence is in exile together with us, and as it were the Divine Presence cannot bring itself out of exile except through our being redeemed, and then as it were it is redeemed with us. But that’s the concept: a prisoner cannot free himself. The forces a person activates while he is within the system are forces limited by the system. To break through the system, you need a force external to the system. That is the meaning of “A prisoner cannot free himself from prison.”