Is Repentance a Commandment? — Shabbat Shuvah

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With God’s help

Is repentance a commandment?

Shabbat Shuvah gives us an opportunity to examine the unique nature of the commandment of repentance.

Maimonides opens his Laws of Repentance with a ruling that defines the concept of repentance:

With regard to all the commandments in the Torah, whether positive or negative, if a person transgressed one of them, whether deliberately or inadvertently, when he repents and turns away from his sin he is obligated to confess before God, blessed be He, as it is said: “When a man or woman shall commit…” and “they shall confess their sin which they have done” (Num. 5:6–7). This is verbal confession. This confession is a positive commandment. How does one confess? He says: “Please, O Lord, I have sinned, I have acted perversely, I have rebelled before You, and I have done such-and-such. Behold, I regret and am ashamed of my deeds, and I will never return to this matter again.” This is the essence of confession. Whoever confesses at greater length and elaborates on this matter is praiseworthy. Likewise, those who are obligated to bring sin-offerings or guilt-offerings, when they bring their sacrifices for their inadvertent or deliberate sins, do not obtain atonement through their sacrifice until they repent and make verbal confession, as it is said: “and he shall confess that in which he sinned” (Lev. 5:5). Likewise, all who are liable to court-imposed death penalties or lashes do not obtain atonement through their death or flogging until they repent and confess. Similarly, one who injures another or damages his property, even though he has paid him what he owes, does not obtain atonement until he confesses and resolves never again to do such a thing, as it is said: “from all the sins of man” (Num. 5:6).

Repentance is the way by which we cleanse our sins, and as part of it we must confess verbally. It should be noted that Saadia Gaon held that there are four parts to the process of repentance: abandoning the sin, remorse, resolution for the future, and verbal confession. But here Maimonides mentions only confession.

These remarks of Maimonides imply that this is a positive commandment. And indeed, Nahmanides, in his commentary on Deuteronomy (30:11), rules that there is a commandment to repent:

The meaning of “this commandment” is not the whole Torah. The correct interpretation is that when Scripture says, above (Deut. 8:1), “All the commandment that I command you this day,” it refers to the whole Torah. But “this commandment” refers to the repentance mentioned here, for “you shall bring it back to your heart” (v. 1) and “you shall return unto the Lord your God” (v. 2) constitute a commandment directing us to do so. It is phrased in this manner to hint at a promise that in the future this will indeed come to pass.

This commandment is derived from the verse (ibid.): “And you shall return to the Lord your God.” By contrast, Maimonides, in Laws of Repentance (7:5), explains this verse differently:

The Torah has already promised that in the end Israel will repent at the close of their exile, and they will immediately be redeemed, as it is said: “And it shall be, when all these things come upon you…” and “you shall return unto the Lord your God,” and then “the Lord your God will return…” (Deut. 30:1–3).

According to him, this verse is God’s promise that in the end Israel will repent, and it seems that in his view there is no positive commandment here. Indeed, when we look closely at his words cited above, we see that the commandment is to confess when one repents. What kind of commandment is defined in that way? Is there an obligation to repent and to confess? On a straightforward reading, this appears to be a conditional positive commandment. The Torah tells us that if we repent, we must confess, for that is the proper way to repent, but there is no commandment to repent as such. Something similar may be found in the positive commandment of Grace after Meals: there is no legal obligation to eat, but if you have eaten there is a positive commandment to recite the blessing. The same applies to the commandment of fringes: there is no obligation to wear a four-cornered garment, but if one wears such a garment one is obligated to place fringes on it. By analogy, there is no obligation to repent, but if one repents one is obligated to confess.

But on closer examination it seems that there is a difference between repentance and those examples. If a person ate and did not recite Grace after Meals, he has failed to perform a positive commandment. His situation is worse than that of someone who did not eat at all, and therefore did not bless. Likewise, if a person wore a four-cornered garment and did not place fringes on it, he has failed to perform a positive commandment. His situation is worse than that of someone who did not wear such a garment at all. Now I ask: what is the status of a person who repented but did not confess? Has he failed to perform a positive commandment, so that his situation is worse than that of someone who did not repent at all? It is highly implausible to claim that a person who did not repent is fine, since there is no obligation to repent, but if he did repent and did not confess, the failure to perform a positive commandment is counted against him. His situation would then be worse than that of someone who did not repent at all.

Therefore it seems that confession is not a positive obligation, whose non-fulfillment constitutes the neglect of a positive commandment, and not even a conditional obligation. Rather, it defines the proper way to repent. One who wishes to repent must confess. If he did not confess, his repentance is incomplete, but there is no failure to perform a positive commandment here. Whether this is a definition or a conditional positive commandment, it is clear that there is no obligation to repent. This is only the context in which the obligation of confession is defined.

However, Minchat Chinukh (commandment 364) and other later authorities already pointed to an apparent contradiction in Maimonides on this point. On the one hand, in Sefer HaMitzvot (positive commandment 73) Maimonides writes:

It is the commandment by which we are commanded to confess the sins and iniquities that we have committed before God, exalted be He, and to state them together with repentance.

There is no command here to repent. Confession is mentioned here only as part of defining the mechanism of repentance, as we saw above in his words.

By contrast, in the enumeration of the commandments that precedes the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides writes as follows:

There is one positive commandment: that the sinner repent of his sin before the Lord and confess.

This seems to yield a different picture. Here repentance is presented as a positive commandment containing two components: to repent and to confess. It would seem from this that according to Maimonides there is a commandment to repent, in contradiction to what we saw above in Sefer HaMitzvot. Various approaches have been suggested to explain Maimonides’ position, but almost none of them truly resolves this contradiction. I will suggest here an approach that rests on an understanding of the role of Sefer HaMitzvot and of the nature of repentance.

As emerges from an examination of the fourteen principles that Maimonides places at the beginning of his Sefer HaMitzvot, he includes in his count only commandments for which there is an explicit command in the Torah. Commandments that are derived by interpretation (see there, Principle Two), or by logical reasoning, or that were received in the Oral Tradition as a law given to Moses at Sinai, are not included in his count. Thus there can be obligations at the Torah level that are not mentioned in Sefer HaMitzvot. The conclusion is that the fact that a certain commandment does not appear in Sefer HaMitzvot does not necessarily mean that it is not a commandment of the Torah. Indeed, there are quite a few Torah obligations that are not counted as commandments in Maimonides’ enumeration.

Is there an explicit command in the Torah with regard to repentance? As we saw above, according to Maimonides the verse “And you shall return to the Lord your God” is a promise and not a command. It is therefore no wonder that in the enumeration of the commandments there is no positive commandment to repent. And yet, we saw that in the Mishneh Torah Maimonides writes that there is an obligation to repent, and it appears to be a full-fledged obligation, since the commandment is to repent and confess. It seems to me that the explanation is that there is indeed an obligation, but its source is reason rather than an explicit command in the Torah, and therefore it does not appear in Sefer HaMitzvot. By contrast, in the Mishneh Torah Maimonides brings all of our legal obligations, whether those that come from the Torah, from interpretation, from rabbinic law, or by force of custom, and therefore the obligation to repent appears there as well.

The premise of the explanation I have suggested is that there is an obligation to repent, even though there is no positive commandment to do so. According to Maimonides, there is an obligation to repent, but it is grounded in reason and not in an explicit scriptural command. What is that reasoning? It seems to be this: if God created an avenue for us by which to return to Him and obtain atonement for our sins, and the very existence of the mechanism of repentance does indeed appear in Scripture, then the natural conclusion is that we ought to use it to atone for our sins.

Rabbeinu Yonah, at the beginning of Sha’arei Teshuvah, addresses the very existence of such a mechanism:

Among the kindnesses that the blessed Lord bestowed upon His creatures is that He prepared for them a path by which to rise out of the pit of their deeds and flee the snare of their transgressions, to keep their souls from destruction and turn His anger away from them. He taught them and warned them to return to Him when they sin against Him, out of His abundant goodness and uprightness, for He knows their inclination, as it is said (Ps. 25:8): “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in the way.” Even if they have greatly transgressed and rebelled, and the treacherous have dealt treacherously, He has not shut before them the doors of repentance, as it is said (Isa. 31:6): “Return to Him from whom they have deeply defected.” And it is said (Jer. 3:22): “Return, wayward children; I will heal your backslidings.”

From this he concludes:

[…] Know that when a sinner delays repenting of his sin, his punishment grows much heavier each day, for he knows that wrath has gone forth against him and that he has a refuge to which he can flee, and that refuge is repentance, yet he remains in his rebellion and persists in his evil. Though it is in his power to emerge from the upheaval, he does not fear the anger and the fury; therefore his evil is great. And our Sages, of blessed memory, said about this matter (Yalkut Shimoni on Job, sec. 906): To what may this be compared? To a band of robbers whom the king imprisoned in a jail. They dug a tunnel, broke through, and escaped, but one of them remained behind. The chief jailer came, saw that a tunnel had been dug and that this man was still confined, and struck him with his staff. He said to him: “You miserable man! The tunnel lies open before you, so why did you not hurry to save yourself?”

This rabbinic parable expresses in a very sharp and clear way the reasoning I described above: if such a path truly exists, reason itself demands that we make use of it.

Now only one question remains. If the Torah indeed wants us to repent and expects us to do so, why does it not command it and instead leave the matter to reason? Why is there no explicit positive commandment in the verses to repent? It seems that a possible explanation may be found in Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s letters on character refinement. Rabbi Kook explains that the Torah did not command the refinement of character because it wished to leave it to our initiative. A person who works on his character in order to fulfill a positive commandment is not like a person who works on his character because he himself understands that a human being ought to possess refined traits. He adds there that although the Sages taught us that one who is commanded and acts is greater than one who is not commanded and acts (see Bava Kamma 38a and parallels), there are matters in which the one who is not commanded is greater, and character refinement is one of the examples. His claim is that the Torah deliberately left character refinement outside the explicit commandments and did not write a command about it, in order to allow us to do it on our own initiative and not out of obedience to a command. Had there been such a command, it would have been harmful, because such a command neutralizes our ability to do it on our own initiative and out of our own understanding. The same may be explained with regard to repentance as well. The Torah wants a person to repent because he understands that he must purify himself and obtain atonement for his sins, and not because there is a formal legal command to do so. Therefore it describes the concept of repentance, but does not command us to make use of it.

Interestingly, Maimonides in his code also follows his understanding of the Torah’s will and intention. In the Laws of Repentance Maimonides hardly presents laws at all. A significant part of the Laws of Repentance is devoted to describing the process of repentance and to lyrical passages in praise of it and its greatness (see there 7:4–6, and elsewhere). In addition, two chapters (5–6) are devoted to a discussion of free will, which of course stands at the basis of the possibility and the obligation of repentance. The final chapters deal with reward and punishment, the service of God out of love and out of fear, and more. From an overall perspective, one immediately sees that the section called Laws of Repentance is not a legal collection, but primarily a conceptual and philosophical one. In Maimonides’ other legal sections you will not find this type of writing, except in concluding passages where Maimonides sometimes turns to philosophical ideas.

It seems that because there is no formal legal obligation to repent, yet as we have seen the Torah expects us to do so on the basis of our own reasoning, Maimonides devotes an effort here to persuading us to repent. He explains its virtue and importance in order to move us to do so, and does not suffice with a command, that is, with presenting a dry legal ruling that instructs us to repent. In the Laws of Grace after Meals he does not proceed in this way, for there Maimonides can suffice with saying that this is a positive commandment, and that one who neglects it incurs liability for neglecting a positive commandment. There is no need there to invoke the conceptual dimensions of the commandment and persuade us to fulfill it. The section called ‘Laws of Repentance’ is not built like a legal compendium, because in truth there are hardly any laws concerning repentance. This is a subject whose essence is primarily conceptual, and the purpose of the conceptual part of the Laws of Repentance is to explain to us why it is important and necessary to repent even though there is no commandment to do so.

In closing, I would note that ordinarily the absence of commands concerning legal obligations stems from the fact that these are obligations not important enough to be included at the Torah level of law. They lie below the minimal binding threshold. Here, however, we encountered obligations whose lack of an explicit command stems דווקא from the very magnitude of their importance and foundational character. In matters that are foundations of the service of God, the Torah is careful דווקא not to command us, so that we do them through an initiative that arises from below—that is, by our own initiative and not out of obedience to a command.

Source (Google Doc): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hoqP81ivBXP5EssJtV6IQQAPgIGe2A-U/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103054435058019085063&rtpof=true&sd=true