Is Repentance a Commandment?

Derekh Chayim – 5769

With God’s help, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5769

Nachmanides, in his commentary on Deuteronomy (beginning of chapter 30), states that there is a commandment to repent.[1] This commandment is derived from the verse (ibid.): and you shall return to the Lord your God (“and you shall return to the Lord your God”). By contrast, Maimonides, in the Laws of Repentance (7:5), writes that this verse is a promise from the Holy One, blessed be He, that Israel will ultimately repent. Does Maimonides, too, hold that there is a commandment to repent?

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

He commanded us to confess the sins and iniquities that we committed before God and to state them together with repentance. (“He commanded us to confess the sins and iniquities that we committed before God and to state them together with repentance.”)

There is no command here to repent. Confession is mentioned here as a conditional commandment: if a person repents, he must recite confession as part of the repentance (and all this together with bringing the sacrifice). The act of repenting itself does not appear here as a commandment (just as with slaughter: one who wants to eat meat must slaughter properly. Slaughter is a conditional commandment, but eating meat in itself is certainly not a commandment)[2].

From here the author of Minchat Chinukh (commandment 364) concludes that if a person sins and does not repent, he incurs no punishment at all for not repenting (he is punished only for the transgression he committed). He adds that even if he repented but did not confess, he has not annulled the positive commandment of confession, since this is not an obligatory commandment (it is a “fulfillment” commandment: one who performs it is rewarded, but one who omits it has annulled nothing).[3]

Against all this, in the enumeration of commandments prefacing the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides writes as follows:

There is one positive commandment: that the sinner return from his sin before God and confess. (“There is one positive commandment: that the sinner return from his sin before God and confess.”)

This seems to yield a different picture. A person who has sinned is commanded to turn back from his evil deeds, and in addition he is also commanded to confess. Here repentance is presented as a positive commandment, with two components: to repent and to confess.[4] This stands in contradiction to what we saw in Maimonides’ words in Sefer HaMitzvot. Various approaches have been suggested in explaining Maimonides’ view, and in my humble opinion they do not truly resolve this contradiction. I shall suggest here another approach, based on an understanding of the role of Sefer HaMitzvot and of the nature of repentance.

As emerges from a study of the fourteen principles that Maimonides places at the beginning of his Sefer HaMitzvot, Maimonides includes in his count only commandments that have an explicit command in the Torah. Commandments derived by interpretive exposition (see there, principle 2), or by reason, or from a law transmitted to Moses at Sinai, are not included in his count. Hence there may be Torah-level obligations that are not mentioned in Sefer HaMitzvot. The conclusion is that the fact that a given commandment does not appear there does not necessarily mean that it is not a Torah commandment.[5]

Is there, then, an explicit command in the Torah regarding repentance? We saw above that, according to Maimonides, the verse and you shall return to the Lord your God is a promise and not a command. And yet, in the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides presents the obligation to repent as a full-fledged obligation. The solution is that there is indeed an obligation, but its source is reason rather than Scripture, and therefore it does not appear in Sefer HaMitzvot. By contrast, in the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides presents all of our obligations in Jewish law, whether they are explicit in the Torah, derived by exposition, rabbinic in origin, or based on custom, and therefore the obligation to repent appears there as well.

We thus learn that, at least according to Maimonides, the obligation to repent is grounded in reason. If the Holy One, blessed be He, created for us a channel through which we may return to Him and obtain atonement for our sins, then simple reason dictates that we must use it (see the midrash cited at the beginning of Rabbenu Yonah’s Sha'arei Teshuvah, about the tunnel dug in the prison, through which every prisoner is supposed to escape).

This is also why, in the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides does not merely set out laws, but also describes the process of repentance, waxes poetic about the greatness of the penitent (see there 7:4–6, and elsewhere), and even discusses free choice (in chapters 5–6), which underlies the possibility and obligation of repentance. In Maimonides’ other legal compilations we do not find this kind of writing. Apparently all of this is intended to persuade us that one ought to repent, and that one can do so. The reason Maimonides, in his legal book, tries to persuade us to perform a commandment is that for this commandment (= repentance) there is no command in the Torah. Its foundation is reason, and therefore Maimonides must persuade us that we are nevertheless obligated to do it, and that this is one of the most important commandments (and see Lechem Mishneh 3:3, who wrote that one who did not repent during the Ten Days of Repentance will be called to account for it, and that this is a sin in itself. This is contrary to the words of the above-mentioned Minchat Chinukh, according to whom not repenting is certainly not a transgression. Perhaps one should distinguish between the Ten Days of Repentance and the rest of the year).

At the margins of our discussion, let me note that usually the absence of explicit commands regarding obligations in Jewish law stems from the fact that they are not important enough to be included at the Torah level. But there are commandments for which the lack of an explicit command stems precisely from their great importance and foundational nature. In commandments that are foundations of the service of God, the Torah is careful specifically not to command us, so that we will do them on our own initiative.

Rabbi Kook, in his letters, writes a similar principle regarding character refinement. He explains there that in matters fundamental to the service of God, the original conception remains in force: greater is one who acts without being commanded (“greater is one who acts without being commanded”). For this reason the Torah did not command us regarding them.[6] The obligation of repentance is a central example of this.

Our Father, our King, bring us back before You in complete repentance. (“Our Father, our King, bring us back before You in complete repentance.”)

I wish the entire yeshiva community, our Rosh Yeshiva—may he live long and well—the devoted staff, all the dear students and their families, together with the entire house of Israel, a good inscription and sealing in the book of the righteous. May it be His will that this be a year of success and holy contentment. A year of health (especially for the dear youth Yisrael Yosef ben Ruth ben Tolila, and for all of us). A year of growth in Torah and in the service of God, and success in all the work of our hands.

[1] The same is true in Chayei Adam, and in Rabbenu Yonah’s Sha'arei Teshuvah in several places (there he writes that, as Yom Kippur approaches, there is an additional commandment derived from the verse before the Lord you shall be cleansed (“before the Lord you shall be cleansed”)).

[2] To be sure, Rabbi Yerucham Perlow, in his commentary on Saadia Gaon’s Sefer HaMitzvot, explains that according to Saadia Gaon there is a commandment to eat meat when we are well-off, derived from the verse: When the Lord enlarges your borders and you say, ‘I would like to eat meat…’ (“When the Lord enlarges your borders and you say, ‘I would like to eat meat…’”). But this is a singular view, and certainly the law of slaughter applies even when a person simply wants to eat meat, even when his borders have not been enlarged and there is no commandment in the eating itself.

[3] His proof is simple: if repentance without confession were indeed a sin, that is, the neglect of a positive commandment, then the state of one who sinned and repented without confession would be worse than that of one who sinned and did not repent at all. That is, of course, unreasonable.

[4] There are many examples of commandments that include several details. For example, the commandment of the Four Species, or the commandment of fringes (blue and white strands). See Maimonides’ principle 11 on this.

[5] Some have explained in this way the omission of the commandment to settle the Land of Israel from the enumeration of commandments, even though there is considerable evidence that Maimonides, too, agrees that this is a Torah commandment.

[6] See also my article, “Terumah and Challah: Between Commandments and the Will of God,” Tzohar 27 (where I distinguished between two types of such commandments).