Choice, Lesson 1

Table of Contents

• Opening the series and framing the discussion
• Parashat Nitzavim: repentance and the transition to “choose life”
• The Laws of Repentance in Maimonides: free choice inside a “strange” collection of laws
• The connection between repentance and free choice, and the claim that Maimonides is following the Torah
• The contradiction in Maimonides regarding the commandment of repentance, according to Minchat Chinuch
• The Book of Commandments versus the Mishneh Torah: an explicit command versus the overall body of obligations
• “And you shall return” as a promise rather than a command according to Maimonides, and the requirement to repent based on reason
• The definition of repentance and the critique of Meshekh Chokhmah’s explanation
• Two mechanisms of repentance: formal and essential
• Essential regret as repentance for all sins, and the Maharal on the Thirteen Attributes
• The need for a formal procedure when there is no access to a person’s inner heart
• Repentance, sin, and changing desire: a critique of “weakness of will”
• The conceptual problem: who changes his own system of values
• Repentance as choice, and the reason choice appears in the Laws of Repentance

Summary

General overview

The text opens a series on free choice and places the discussion within Parashat Nitzavim and Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance, because free choice appears in the Torah immediately after verses about repentance. It raises the question of why Maimonides inserts two chapters on free choice into the Laws of Repentance, and develops the essential connection between repentance and choice: repentance is not just a technical procedure but an inner reversal and a change of will, in other words a return to being a “chooser.” It explains the contradiction that Minchat Chinuch points out between the Book of Commandments and the Mishneh Torah in Maimonides, and argues that according to Maimonides there is no explicit Torah command to repent, only a promise, and therefore it should not be counted as a commandment even though it is obviously something one must do. It presents a conceptual difficulty: if repentance is a change in the system of values itself, then who is the “I” that performs the change, and why one cannot command choice and repentance just as one cannot command the very fact that a person is a chooser.

Opening the series and framing the discussion

The text presents a new series dealing with free choice and notes that the topic has aspects that do not fit the mold of a standard Torah discussion but lean in a philosophical or scientific direction. It argues that the very same content becomes “Torah study” when it is written in Rashi script inside a Chumash, and that the same is true in other books as well.

Parashat Nitzavim: repentance and the transition to “choose life”

The text cites the verses in Parashat Nitzavim that describe “and you shall return to the Lord your God” and connects them to repentance, noting a dispute: Nachmanides says this is literally a commandment, and Maimonides does not. It shows that the passage repeats several times “and you shall return” and speaks of blessing as a result of listening to God’s voice, and then arrives at the verse “For this commandment that I command you today is not beyond you and is not far away,” bringing the commentators’ dispute over whether “this commandment” refers to repentance or to the commandments in general. It describes how afterward a seemingly new passage begins: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil,” and it concludes with “choose life,” so free choice is located within the context of repentance.

The Laws of Repentance in Maimonides: free choice inside a “strange” collection of laws

The text argues that Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance are an unusual collection that does not seem purely halakhic, because it includes conceptual issues such as idolatry, the World to Come, Torah study for its own sake, the Messiah, and free choice. It notes that at the beginning there are chapters about repentance, some of which deal with the greatness of repentance and its meaning, and then in chapter 5 Maimonides devotes two chapters to choice, citing “permission is granted to every person,” and raises the question of divine foreknowledge versus free choice. It adds that in chapter 6 Maimonides also deals with the difficulty of “the Holy One, blessed be He, hardened Pharaoh’s heart” in relation to responsibility and punishment, and sharpens the question of placement: why is free choice found דווקא in the Laws of Repentance and not anywhere else, where commandments also presuppose choice?

The connection between repentance and free choice, and the claim that Maimonides is following the Torah

The text states that the Torah itself placed “behold, I set before you” and “choose life” immediately after the passage of “and you shall return,” and therefore Maimonides too places the discussion of free choice within the Laws of Repentance. It says this still does not explain why that is correct, and suggests that the connection is not accidental, because repentance involves a demand to choose the good and return from one’s previous path.

The contradiction in Maimonides regarding the commandment of repentance, according to Minchat Chinuch

The text cites Minchat Chinuch, who points to a contradiction in Maimonides’ formulation: at the beginning of the Laws of Repentance Maimonides writes, “There is one positive commandment, and it is that the sinner should return from his sin before God and confess,” whereas in the Book of Commandments, positive commandment 73, he uses wording that implies the commandment is confession when a person repents, not a command to repent. It compares this to the structure of tzitzit and Grace after Meals: there is no commandment to wear a four-cornered garment or to eat until one is satiated, but an obligation arises once one enters the relevant situation; so too, apparently, repentance is not itself a commandment but a condition that generates an obligation of confession.

The Book of Commandments versus the Mishneh Torah: an explicit command versus the overall body of obligations

The text proposes resolving the contradiction by distinguishing between the role of the Book of Commandments and the role of the Mishneh Torah: in the count of the commandments, Maimonides includes only what appears in the Torah as an explicit command, not what is derived from exposition, and certainly not what follows from reason, whereas in the Mishneh Torah he includes everything that one is obligated by Jewish law to do, including rabbinic obligations such as Chanukah and Purim. It argues that from here one can understand how something can be halakhically obligatory and yet not be counted as a commandment in the formal tally of commandments.

“And you shall return” as a promise rather than a command according to Maimonides, and the requirement to repent based on reason

The text cites Maimonides in chapter 7, halakhah 5, where he brings the passage in Parashat Nitzavim as a promise that “in the end Israel will repent at the end of their exile,” and not as a command. It concludes that according to Maimonides there is no explicit Torah-level commandment to repent, and therefore it will not appear in the Book of Commandments, but still “it is obvious that one must” repent, whether by the force of reason or because “all the prophets commanded repentance.” It emphasizes that the Torah’s innovation is the very existence of a mechanism that repairs the past, and once such a mechanism exists, then “it is obvious by reason” that one should use it. It brings Rabbeinu Yonah’s parable at the beginning of Shaarei Teshuvah about a prisoner who remains in jail even though there is a tunnel through which he can escape.

The definition of repentance and the critique of Meshekh Chokhmah’s explanation

The text defines repentance as four stages: abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, and verbal confession. It cites Meshekh Chokhmah, who suggests that there is no need for a command to repent because the ordinary commandments themselves already cover the requirement not to continue sinning, but argues that this is only a partial explanation, because repentance includes regret, confession, and resolution for the future, which are not derived simply from the command to keep the commandments from now on. It sharpens the point that the reasoning that obligates repentance is not “because it is forbidden to continue,” but rather “because there is a procedure that repairs the sin,” and therefore it is proper to make use of it.

Two mechanisms of repentance: formal and essential

The text argues that there are two mechanisms of repentance: formal repentance according to the halakhic framework of the four stages, and essential repentance that does not fit into a technical framework. It brings proof from a passage in tractate Kiddushin: if someone betroths a woman “on condition that I am completely righteous,” we are concerned about the betrothal “lest perhaps he had a thought of repentance,” and a thought of repentance apparently does not include all the formal details and yet still turns the person into someone completely righteous. It also brings the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, who reached repentance through weeping, and a heavenly voice declared, “Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is destined for the life of the World to Come,” without any description of his going through a list of sins by means of the four-stage procedure. From this it concludes that there is a deeper repentance, an inner reversal, that atones in a sweeping way.

Essential regret as repentance for all sins, and the Maharal on the Thirteen Attributes

The text analyzes the concept of regret and argues that there is no true regret over a particular act in and of itself, but only over its being a sin. Therefore, full regret over one sin is regret over the very possibility of not obeying God’s command, and that automatically includes all sins. It cites the Maharal in Netivot HaTeshuvah, who explains the two mechanisms through the Thirteen Attributes: “The Lord, the Lord” is interpreted as the attribute of comprehensive repentance, “before a person sins” and “after he sins and repents,” while “and He cleanses” is interpreted as atonement for sins over which one repented in a specific way—“He cleanses those who repent, but He does not cleanse one who does not repent.” It connects this to the distinction between sweeping, essential repentance and formal repentance over individual sins.

The need for a formal procedure when there is no access to a person’s inner heart

The text argues that if it were possible to know with certainty what was in the heart of a person who had undergone a genuine inner reversal, there would be no need for all the formal requirements involved in restoring someone’s fitness for testimony or for serving as a judge. The procedure is required because in practice “we can never really know” what is taking place in a person’s heart. It describes Maimonides’ formulation, “he changes his name… meaning, I am someone else and not that same person,” as describing the inner reversal of essential repentance.

Repentance, sin, and changing desire: a critique of “weakness of will”

The text connects the depth of repentance to an understanding of sin, and argues that sin is tied to the system of values and desires that drives a person. It cites Donald Davidson and his claim that there is no real “weakness of will”: if a person did something without coercion, then at that moment he did what he wanted more. The stories about “the evil inclination overcame him” are explanations that hide an inner hierarchy of competing desires. It clarifies that if an impulse is truly impossible to overcome, then that is coercion and there is no repentance required for it; but when a person could have ruled over it and did not, then he chose the desire that ranked higher for him. It concludes that in this sense, “a person who sins is always a person who wants to commit the sin,” and therefore essential repentance means changing one’s desire and one’s scale of values so that the new person no longer wants the sinful act.

The conceptual problem: who changes his own system of values

The text raises a logical difficulty: if a person is a whole bundle of desires and values, and repentance is a change in that bundle, then who is the “I” that performs the change, and is he acting from within the old set or the new one? It presents a toy model of a person who serves God “not for its own sake” in order to receive reward and avoid punishment, and argues that there is no way to persuade him to serve “for its own sake” from within his own system of values. Therefore, even when he “persuades himself,” the thing is not really well defined: if he has already been persuaded, then he does not need to change, and if he has not been persuaded, then he has no internal basis from which to change. It concludes that repentance describes an intentional act by a person who changes himself, but this does not sit easily with the question, “Who is the self that changes, and who is the self that is changed?”

Repentance as choice, and the reason choice appears in the Laws of Repentance

The text argues that the discussion of free choice is located in the Laws of Repentance because the act of repentance is the activation of choice, or “returning to being a chooser,” and the demand to repent is an expectation that the person will be a chooser. It says that repentance is “a synonym for choice,” and that is why choice appears in the Torah in the context of repentance and likewise in Maimonides. It states that one cannot command choice just as one cannot command repentance, and adds that even “choose life” is not counted as a commandment, because a person’s being subject to command depends on his being a chooser. It ends by saying that the conceptual problematic of repentance and choice has still not been solved, and that further clarification is needed as to how a person changes himself within a “loop” that is not conceptually well defined.

A new series dealing with choice. This is a topic with all kinds of aspects. A significant part of them is not something you can approach in the usual way; it’s not something people treat as a Torah discussion. It’s a philosophical, scientific, or other kind of discussion. But you know, the moment we write it in Rashi script inside a Humash with gold letters on the cover, then it becomes Torah study, that’s fine. And that’s basically what you have in the other books too—it’s the same thing. So I’ll start, though, with the Torah side of it, and maybe we’ll end there too.

The Torah in Parashat Nitzavim says as follows: “And it shall be, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse that I have set before you, and you take it to heart among all the nations where the Lord your God has driven you. And you return to the Lord your God, and obey His voice, according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul.” “And you return to the Lord your God”—that is repentance, the commandment of repentance. Nachmanides says this is literally a commandment; Maimonides does not. By the way, on several of these points we’ve already spoken in the past in various contexts. I’m going to do a bit of integration here too; that’s part of the point.

“And the Lord your God will restore your captivity and have compassion on you, and He will again gather you from all the peoples where the Lord your God scattered you.” And then it goes on—ingathering of the exiles and so on, bringing us to the Land. “And you shall return and obey the voice of the Lord and perform all His commandments that I command you today.” Again repentance. And then some kind of blessing follows: “For you shall obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep His commandments and His statutes written in this book of the Torah, when you return to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” Again, the topic of the section is basically repentance.

And then there is the famous verse: “For this commandment that I command you today is not too wondrous for you, nor is it far off.” What is “this commandment”? There is a dispute among the commentators here. On the plain sense it seems like the commandment of repentance, because that is the topic of this chapter. Others say it refers to all the commandments in general. There’s a discussion here about what exactly “this commandment” means. “It is not in heaven,” and so on, “nor is it beyond the sea.” Then in verse 15 apparently a new section begins: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. That I command you today, to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, to keep His commandments and His statutes and His laws, so that you may live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land to which you are coming to possess it. But if your heart turns away…” and so on, idolatry.

And then the section ends: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; and you shall choose life, so that you and your offspring may live. To love the Lord your God, to obey His voice, and to cleave to Him,” and so on. So here the section ends with some kind of command—or I don’t know—a passage about choice, free choice. They place before us good and evil, death and life, and “choose life.” Not for nothing, I think, this echoes what appears in Maimonides, Laws of Repentance.

Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance—we’ve spoken about them more than once already—are a very strange set of laws in Maimonides. On the face of it, it doesn’t look like a halakhic collection. It contains all sorts of conceptual matters, and it’s not entirely clear what gathers all these points into one place. There’s idolatry, the World to Come, Torah study for its own sake, the Messiah, and choice. And at the beginning there are several chapters about repentance, but a significant part of them are not laws of repentance at all, but the greatness of repentance—how important it is, what it means to repent, its significance, and the like. But within Laws of Repentance, four chapters in, the fifth chapter devotes two chapters to the issue of choice.

“The permission of every person is granted to him. If he wishes to incline himself to the good path and be righteous, the permission is in his hand; and if he wishes to incline himself to the bad path and be wicked, the permission is in his hand. This is what is written in the Torah: ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.’ That is to say, this species of man was unique in the world, and there is no other species like it in this respect: that he himself, by his own knowledge and thought, knows good and evil and does whatever he desires, and there is no one to restrain him from doing either good or evil.” And since this is so, and so on, “lest he stretch forth his hand.”

And then he continues with that question: if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance, then how do we have free choice? He answers what he answers. And in chapter 6 he talks about repentance and choice in the prophets, their significance, how important they are, and so on. The Holy One, blessed be He, hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so how can it be that he is punished? Yes, the parallel question to what happens in chapter 5. So right in the middle of Laws of Repentance, suddenly two chapters appear—mainly chapter 5, chapter 6 a bit less, but still—that deal with choice. The question is why it is located here. Why is it not located, I don’t know, in the laws of redeeming a firstborn donkey? Because there too we have free choice, and a person should know that he can freely choose to redeem a firstborn donkey. If we didn’t have free choice, there would be no point commanding us about it. So why isn’t it located there? Why is it located דווקא in Laws of Repentance? Intuitively it seems very obvious, because it’s a bit funny to place it in the laws of redeeming a firstborn donkey. But when you think about it at first glance—why not, really? What is special about the commandment of repentance that needs a discussion of free choice? Why specifically here?

So first of all, before I speak about it a bit more, I want to return the discussion to the Torah itself. The Torah itself located things this way. The Torah itself, within the chapter that deals with repentance—“and you shall return to the Lord your God,” “and He will restore your captivity and have compassion on you,” and this whole discussion of repentance—“for you shall return to the Lord your God,” everything we read at the beginning—suddenly right after that comes the discussion of “behold, I place before you good and evil, death and life, and choose life.” This command too—to act, to choose freely—appears in the context of repentance. I think that’s no accident; Maimonides too places his discussion of choice in the middle of Laws of Repentance simply because he took it from the Torah.

Fine, but that’s like an English-English dictionary. The question is why this is right. It isn’t resolved just because the Torah does it too. Fine, so why does the Torah do it? What is the connection between these two things?

So here it seems to me there is a commandment to choose the good. What? Because to choose the good. Okay. What’s the question? Why is it located in Laws of Repentance specifically? Because repentance is the way to go back to the beginning. Repentance means that if you did something bad, you can still go back to being good, and so that you won’t say… The intuition you’re expressing isn’t only if you did… I agree. In a second I’ll sharpen that a little more.

In Minhat Hinukh, he writes that there is a contradiction in Maimonides regarding the commandment of repentance. As I mentioned, we’ve already brought up some of these points before. At the beginning of Laws of Repentance, Maimonides—after all, at the beginning of every set of laws he relates to the count of the commandments—writes there: one positive commandment, namely that the sinner should return from his sin before God and confess. So it seems there is one commandment that includes two details: to return from the sin and to confess. We know that within the commandment of repentance there are several parts: abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, and verbal confession. So confession is one of the details of the commandment of repentance. Yes, there are commandments with several details, like the four species. There are four details, but it is still one commandment. So in Maimonides here it seems there is a commandment to repent and to confess.

In Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 73, Maimonides writes that there is a commandment that when the sinner returns from his sin, he should confess. The wording there sounds as though the commandment is that when you repent, you must confess. But there is no commandment to repent. The commandment to repent does not exist. Meaning: if you repent, then confess. And that’s like—I don’t know—if you wear a four-cornered garment, then put fringes on it. If you do not wear a four-cornered garment, nothing has happened. So therefore there is really no commandment to wear a four-cornered garment. Wearing a four-cornered garment is only the circumstance or condition under which the commandment of fringes applies to me. And here too, apparently, repentance itself is not the commandment; rather, it is the circumstance such that if I do it, then I must confess. Yes, it’s more than a condition. It’s not more than a condition; it’s not even a condition—without it, you’re not obligated. It isn’t a matter of condition. Right, it’s like when you eat to satisfaction, you must recite Grace after Meals. Okay? There is no commandment to eat to satisfaction. The commandment to recite Grace after Meals applies to you when you have eaten to satisfaction. So… so here too, the commandment to confess applies to you when you repent. Whether you repent or not is your decision; that is not itself a commandment.

So there seems to be a contradiction in wording between Maimonides in Sefer HaMitzvot and Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah. It seems to me that the resolution of this contradiction lies in the question of how we understand Maimonides’ count of the commandments, and what the role of Sefer HaMitzvot is as opposed to the role of the Mishneh Torah. I’ve already said this once, so I’ll do it briefly.

In several places in Maimonides you can see that in his count of the commandments, only what appears in the Torah is included—only something that the Torah explicitly commands. If the Torah does not command it, or even if it commands it only indirectly—for example, if it is derived through one of the thirteen hermeneutic principles from a verse in the Torah—that is not explicit enough in the Torah to be counted among Maimonides’ commandments. Something learned from interpretation certainly won’t be counted, and all the more so something that does not appear at all but emerges from reasoning or from any other source. But that does not mean that such a thing is necessarily not a commandment. There can be obligations, things derived from interpretation; clearly we are obligated in them, they are part of Jewish law. In the count of the commandments they will not appear. Or things that emerge from reasoning, because a commandment in its literal sense is something on which there is a command. If it doesn’t appear in the Torah, there is no command. There may be another source that clarifies that we have to do it, that it is expected of us, but as long as there is no command, it will not appear in the count of the commandments.

But of course in the Mishneh Torah everything we are obligated to do is supposed to appear—not only if there is an explicit command or not; it includes all of Jewish law. Everything one is obligated in by Jewish law should appear in the Mishneh Torah. Hanukkah and Purim, for example—yes, there is a set of laws in the Mishneh Torah dealing with Hanukkah and Purim. There is no Torah command for them. They are rabbinic commandments. You could say, through “do not turn aside” perhaps, put them under the laws of “do not turn aside,” under Laws of Rebels. Then why are there laws of Hanukkah and Purim? Because laws of Hanukkah and Purim are part of Jewish law. It doesn’t matter whether there is an explicit command or not. Rabbinic laws are part of Jewish law. Therefore in the Mishneh Torah they appear. In Sefer HaMitzvot, however, there is no commandment for Hanukkah and Purim. Why not? Because there is no Torah command for them. “Do not turn aside” appears, but not the laws of Hanukkah and Purim.

What happens with repentance? I quoted earlier the verse “and you shall return to the Lord your God.” Nachmanides says that there is a commandment here to repent, a verse commanding us to repent. But Maimonides—in chapter 7 he brings this verse—he says, chapter 7, law 5: “All the prophets commanded repentance, and Israel is redeemed only through repentance, and the Torah already promised that in the end Israel will repent at the end of its exile and immediately be redeemed, as it says: ‘And it shall be, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse that I have set before you, and you take it to heart among all the nations… and you shall return to the Lord your God and obey His voice.’ And the Lord your God will restore your captivity and have compassion on you.” He brings the whole passage I read earlier.

And this passage is brought here as part of “the Torah already promised that in the end Israel will repent.” Meaning, Maimonides reads this verse as a promise, not as a command. “And you shall return to the Lord your God.” Therefore, from Maimonides’ perspective, unlike what Nachmanides says, there is no commandment to repent. This verse is a promise; it is not a command. There is no command in the Torah. If so, then in his count of the commandments such a commandment cannot appear, because what has no Torah command does not appear in the count of the commandments.

Now the question is: do we need to repent? Of course we do. There may be no explicit command, but we must. Why must we? For example, reasoning. Reasoning says that if you can repair… a prophetic command. He writes, “the prophets commanded.” Yes, but then it would only be rabbinic law, or what is called law from the prophetic writings. But clearly there is also reasoning here. It’s Torah-level. The reasoning simply says that if there is a way to repair the sins you committed, then simple reasoning says you should repair them. Therefore, if you ask whether one must repent or not, the answer is certainly yes. The question is whether there is a commandment in which the Torah commands it. According to Maimonides, no, because this verse is read as a promise and not as a commandment. Therefore in Maimonides’ Sefer HaMitzvot there will be no commandment to repent, because there is no explicit command. But in the Mishneh Torah, where he describes everything that needs to be done, he also talks about repentance—we have to repent. So it seems to me that this is the explanation of the contradiction between Sefer HaMitzvot and the Mishneh Torah.

What does it actually mean to repent? Someone outside the system—is that the heretic, a gentile, a non-religious person, or someone who committed a particular sin? I said: abandoning the sin, regret over what you did, resolving for the future never to return to that sin, and verbal confession. There is a definition of what repentance is.

Okay, you committed a sin, don’t do it again. No, that’s separate; there is a command. So if I once drove through a red light, it is still forbidden for me to drive through a red light; that doesn’t mean I repented just because I didn’t do it again. I’ll explain, I’ll explain. The question you’re asking is asked by Meshekh Hokhmah on this passage, and he basically says—this is how he proposes to explain Maimonides—why Maimonides doesn’t count this commandment. He says: what would be the point of commanding it? Clearly, the moment the Torah said to keep the Sabbath, there is already a commandment not to continue desecrating the Sabbath. Meaning, why do I need a special commandment for repentance? The ordinary halakhic commands already cover this issue. The Torah doesn’t want me to desecrate the Sabbath, so obviously I’m not supposed to continue desecrating it even if I’ve already done it. So that is the explanation he offers for why Maimonides does not count the commandment to repent.

But that explanation is problematic. It’s problematic because the commandment to repent does not mean simply not to go back to desecrating the Sabbath. That is one of the details of repentance, and in fact it is the trivial detail, the one that doesn’t need a command. But who said one must regret what happened? Fine, I did it, I did it. Or confess. Or, I don’t know, resolve for the future not to do it—true, I must not do it from now on. But must I actively accept upon myself not to return to that sin ever again? Why, does that emerge from reasoning? Is that something that follows from the mere fact that I am commanded to keep the Sabbath? I don’t see how I would learn these things if the Torah did not command them. Therefore I think Meshekh Hokhmah’s explanation is only partial; it really doesn’t hold up.

Fine, but the reasoning is not that simple—the kind of reasoning I wanted to claim. Indeed, the reasoning that the obligation to repent emerges from the very fact that we are commanded in commandments is not such a simple argument. The reasoning I’m talking about is different. Once we have a mechanism of repentance—a mechanism of repentance means that if someone repents, he repairs the sin he committed. That’s a fact. A new idea introduced by the Torah. So not commands, not whether one must repent or not—first of all, what is introduced in the Torah is that there is such a thing as returning: “and you shall return to the Lord your God.” This means there is such a thing as returning. What does that mean? This is how the Sages and the medieval authorities explain it. Again, you could interpret the verses differently, but they understand repentance to mean repairing what you did, not just doing well from now on. Repairing. How does one repair? The four stages of repentance—abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, and verbal confession.

Now, assuming we understand that such a mechanism exists for repairing the past, here there is a simple argument that one must do it. This does not follow from the very fact that I am commanded to keep the Sabbath. That doesn’t mean I have to regret having failed to keep the Sabbath; it means I have to keep the Sabbath from now on. From where does it follow that I must regret, or commit myself not to repeat it in the future, or confess verbally? Because that is the procedure that repairs the sin I committed. And if there is a procedure that repairs the sin I committed, then obviously reason says I should use it.

This is Rabbenu Yonah at the beginning of Shaarei Teshuvah. He gives a parable there: a king comes to a prison and sees that all the prisoners have escaped, but one man is still inside. So he says to him: listen, there’s a tunnel dug out in front of you, they dug a passage here, everyone escaped—why are you staying in prison when you have a way out? He says the same thing is true about repentance. Meaning, if you have some way to get out of prison, to repair your situation, then what, you won’t use such a path? If we know that such a path exists, that is enough for us to understand that one must use it. And in that sense I really do think there is a rational argument here. The argument is that if there is a way to repair what you did, then certainly one must take it. And that is explicit in the Torah. What? So I’m saying: it says in the Torah “and you shall return to the Lord your God,” “and He will restore and have compassion on you,” “when you return,” this whole passage. The question is what that means. You can read “return” as meaning simply to go back and keep the commandments from now on. The Sages in the Talmud and the medieval authorities interpreted it differently: return means a mechanism of repentance. I think on that point there is no dispute. The dispute is whether there is a commandment to repent, but there is no dispute that there is some mechanism here that repairs sins. Right? Once we accept this tradition that there is such a mechanism, then reason says to use it. That is obvious, so in that sense no command is needed.

But it seems to me there is something more fundamental here, and it really brings me back to that question about why the discussion of free choice is located within Laws of Repentance. On this too I think we’ve spoken before. I said that some see—apparently in Maimonides too, but also elsewhere, in the Maharal and others—that there are two mechanisms of repentance. One mechanism is formal repentance. Formal repentance: abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, verbal confession. There are discussions among the halakhic authorities, among the medieval authorities, in what order to do this, what is indispensable, what is not indispensable—like any formal legal topic.

But beyond that there are several indications that there is another path of repentance, one that does not fit into the legal framework. I’ll give maybe one or two examples just to sharpen it. The Talmud says that if someone betroths a woman, in tractate Kiddushin, saying “on condition that I am perfectly righteous,” then we are concerned about the validity of the betrothal even though he is not known as perfectly righteous. We are concerned about the betrothal—why? Perhaps he had a thought of repentance.

Now, does merely having a thought of repentance turn him from a wicked person—or whatever kind of person he was—into a perfectly righteous person? On the face of it, that isn’t how it works, through mere thought. You need verbal confession, regret, resolution for the future, of course abandoning the sin. Did he do all that within the sentence “Behold, you are betrothed to me with this ring”? In that short moment did he go through all the sins he committed, confess, abandon, resolve for the future, and of course do it all verbally? It doesn’t sound like that’s what is meant. The Talmud says “he had a thought of repentance,” perhaps he had a thought of repentance. And in the simple sense, that means he thought to himself that he should repent, that he is a penitent, that he regretted everything he did in a general way—not necessarily a specific list of sins—and that makes him perfectly righteous. Why? Where are all the stages: abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, verbal confession—all the rules that are indispensable for repentance? That is how repentance is defined halakhically. So you see that no—there is another mechanism of repentance.

Or another example: what? He is now in a state of having repented; that means the thought of repentance he had is still with him, and now he no longer continues committing those sins. So he is righteous now, and what was wicked remains in the past? He was wicked and remains wicked in the past; in the past he remains wicked, only now he is righteous. Then why is he punished? After all, a person is punished for sins he committed. If he is righteous now, who says he is punished? I don’t know, but right now he is not judged as wicked; he repented, which means that now he has accepted upon himself not to commit more sins, so now if he comes before a religious court or comes to betroth a woman he is considered someone who is part of the public, part of the… I think that explanation is problematic.

For example, even in monetary law, when we talk about penitents regaining legal fitness for testimony and judging, clearly they have to repent. Meaning, it is not enough simply to start behaving decently, to stop the sin—you have to actually repent in order to regain fitness. You do not revert to being righteous without that. And because we don’t trust him, it’s a matter of whether the public can trust him. No, not because of trust; it’s a substantive requirement, not because of trust. But there is concern that afterward he might go back. Right now he decided to be righteous, so now he is righteous. It could be that two minutes from now he’ll be wicked again because he won’t hold up. It isn’t certain. If we know with certainty that he is righteous, we say maybe he repented, maybe he had a thought of repentance. No, obviously it’s only uncertain because we don’t know whether he had such a thought. But on the possibility that he did, she is certainly betrothed. Meaning, the doubt in the betrothal is only because we don’t know whether he had such a thought. But it sounds from the Talmud that if Elijah were to come and tell us, “this man had a thought of repentance,” she would certainly be betrothed, not doubtfully. So it isn’t the problem of… he himself is enough.

Rabbi, in judging too it would be the same. If we knew with certainty, if someone from heaven told us that this man… Not clear at all, not clear at all. Look in Hoshen Mishpat, section 34, it’s not clear at all. There are contradictions and distinctions depending on what type of sins. In the simple conception, it’s not true. Even if we knew with certainty, it would not help; one has to perform the act of repentance itself in order to regain fitness.

In any case, the second indication is the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, who did not leave a single sin in the world that he did not commit. Then either his fringes flew up or he passed gas—there are different versions of the story—and he suddenly came to his senses and cried, cried, said “Heavens, ask mercy for me,” and so on. No one helps, no one. “The matter depends on no one but me.” He cried and his soul left him. And a heavenly voice came forth and said: “Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is destined for the life of the World to Come.” Again: a man who committed every sin in the world. He sat and cried for a certain time until he died. It is not described there that he went through a list of sins—and I assume he didn’t have a complete list of all the sins he had done—and then worked through each one with the four stages of repentance. Rather, clearly, the moment he truly decided to repent, it was forgiven him, and he became Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, because at that point he atoned and became “Rabbi.” And that means that the stages the halakhic tradition lists in the procedure of repentance—Saadia Gaon, I think, was the first to present them—those stages characterize a technical mechanism of repentance, formal repentance. But there is substantive repentance, where those mechanisms are not required.

What is substantive repentance? I said one of the stages of repentance is regret. One must regret having committed the sin. Now what does that mean? If you think about it a bit—say I selected food on the Sabbath, I don’t know, on the Sabbath of Parashat Ki Tavo in some year. Okay? Now I want to regret that; I want to repent for it. So I regret—but what exactly do I regret? That I selected food on the Sabbath of Parashat Ki Tavo? Obviously not. I regret that I committed a sin. And the fact that selecting is forbidden by Jewish law is the reason I regret it. I don’t regret an act as such; I regret the act because it is defined as a sin, because it is defined as a legal transgression.

Now if that is really so, then it means that when I regret a very specific transgression, if the regret is complete regret, I am actually regretting all transgressions. It is impossible to regret just one transgression. I quoted the Maharal. In Netivot HaTeshuvah, the Maharal brings Talmudic passages that on the one hand discuss the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy—“The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious God.” And the Talmud says: “I am the Lord before he sins; I am the Lord after he sins and repents.” Meaning, the two initial divine names are responsible for repentance, for the attribute of repentance. And afterward there is “and He cleanses.” Fine. The Talmud in tractate Shevuot says: “‘and He cleanses’—yet does not cleanse. He cleanses those who repent, and does not cleanse those who do not repent.” So the Maharal asks: why do we need two different divine names, or two different attributes, to describe the mechanism of repentance? Why both “The Lord, the Lord” and “and He cleanses”? Why two?

The answer is that through “and He cleanses” you repent for one sin or several sins, not all of them. Now, on the face of it, that is only a quantitative difference. Do the repentance of “and He cleanses” a thousand times and in the end it will become the repentance of “The Lord, the Lord,” because you will have covered all sins. Clearly he means two different mechanisms. And these two mechanisms are: when you do formal repentance—abandoning the sin, regret, resolution for the future, verbal confession—then for every sin regarding which you performed that repentance, it is atoned for. Then you move on to the next sin, perform that procedure for it, and it too is atoned for.

But if you truly regret in a substantive way, even one of those sins, substantive regret is never regret for one isolated sin. It is always regret for all sins. Because what are you regretting? You are regretting that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded something and you did not obey, or you did something else. So it is not a problem of selecting on the Sabbath. The same would apply to honoring parents, or eating non-kosher food, or whatever you like. In the end, substantive regret does not distinguish between this sin and that sin, and certainly not between the Sabbath of Parashat Ki Tavo and the Sabbath of Parashat Noah. It makes no difference. I regret the very fact that I was capable of disobeying the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore real regret in its essence is regret over all the commandments.

And what I want to claim is that the attribute of “The Lord, the Lord” really deals with substantive repentance, with fundamental regret. And as such, it is truly repentance that by definition applies to all the commandments. By definition, it is impossible to do that kind of repentance for only one transgression. That kind of repentance is always for all the commandments, all the sins. By contrast, repentance of “and He cleanses”—that is what the Talmud says: “He cleanses those who repent, and does not cleanse those who do not repent.” Meaning, here it goes sin by sin. The sin you repented for was cleansed; the sin you did not repent for was not cleansed. Why? Because that is repentance for individual sins. You performed the procedure, and so it was newly established that this too cleanses the particular sin you committed.

Basically I think these two attributes are responsible for the two mechanisms I described earlier: formal repentance with the four stages, and substantive repentance, the inner reversal. That inner reversal, that regret, that says: I no longer see myself as someone capable of sinning—and then I become a penitent with respect to all sins. Then all the stages—regret, resolution for the future, confession, and all those things—are no longer needed. A mere thought of repentance is enough, as we saw earlier, and you basically become righteous.

My claim is that if we knew such a thing had happened inside a person, then all the laws in Shulhan Arukh, Hoshen Mishpat section 34, about regaining legal fitness for testimony and judging, would not apply to such a person. Meaning, if it were clear to us somehow what was in a person’s heart—that he really was a true penitent—he would not need all the stages. He would become fit again for testimony and judging and everything else. The laws stem from the fact that we can never know what is in a person’s heart, so a formal procedure of repentance was established.

I wanted to ask whether this concept exists in the broader world, not the Jewish world—in Western culture, among ordinary gentiles and so on—is there a concept of repentance there? I think so. Why not? The question of its source is another question, but why wouldn’t there be? Christians confessing to a priest—that too is some kind of repentance, no? He confesses, “I sinned,” and resolution for the future… But not as a religious concept; just in the world of general Western values—is there value in regretting a sin? Yes. Right, because we need to understand this in order to distinguish whether it is Torah-level or really just comes from command. Does the average person living by non-religious values do this… is it something of the soul… You asked two different questions here: whether the average person living by secular values actually does it, and whether it is proper to do it even in a secular context, not a religious one. Those are two different things. Because not everything people do reflects what is truly right.

I don’t know exactly what people… I think that even people who don’t believe in anything, when they realize they did something wrong, they regret it. People may say this is a secularization of religious ideas. It could be, I don’t know. All secularity is some kind of secularization of religious ideas. But bottom line, I think that even in a secular society people see this as a value, and a person does it. Should he regret? Yes. Right. So that shows that it is indeed a rational intuition. That when a person does something bad, he naturally feels bad about himself. This brings us back to the beginning of the class, to what he asked earlier: whether there is a rational basis to say one must regret, or whether reason only says not to continue sinning. There I said that at least if the regret repairs the past, then there is a rational basis. The command itself does not say I must regret. But if it repairs, then you are only broadening that. You’re saying maybe even apart from actual repair—not the metaphysical concept of repair—but simply because I am obligated to regret because I was in the wrong. Okay.

In any case, what happens is that we have two mechanisms of repentance, and one of them is the real, substantive repentance—the inner reversal. Formal repentance is a technical repentance, intended for those who did not manage to achieve the overall, sweeping, deep mechanism, or for legal contexts in which we cannot judge what is in a person’s heart and therefore need external indications in order to decide whether the person counts for us as a penitent or not. But in substance, the concept of repentance is the other one—the concept of inner reversal.

What does that inner reversal actually mean? That inner reversal means, yes, this is what Maimonides writes… The mechanism of this does have a psychological aspect, but if it is only technical… No, obviously. I spoke about the fact that this is really a continuous spectrum. It’s not either this or that. The deeper the regret, the deeper the repentance. And when the regret is complete, that is total repentance. When the regret is minimal, it is repentance for one isolated sin. We all fall somewhere in the middle, obviously. This is only a typology.

Yes, there are Maimonides’ well-known words, in chapter 2 law 4: “Among the ways of repentance is that the penitent should constantly cry out before God with weeping and supplication, and give charity according to his ability, and distance himself greatly from the thing in which he sinned, and change his name, as if to say: I am someone else, and not the same person who committed those deeds. And he changes all his actions for the good and toward the right path, and exiles himself from his place,” and so on.

I think this law really describes the inner reversal I spoke about earlier. I am someone else. I am not the same person who committed those acts for which I repent. I basically become a different person; I am turned over. And this turning over, it seems to me, is in its essence an act of choice. The moment you decide on a different path from the one by which you have conducted yourself until now, that is basically an expression of the fact that you chose.

Now here, though, it still is not essentially different from the decision to recite Grace after Meals. The decision to recite Grace after Meals is also a decision: I decide, and then I do what I decided, and that is an expression of my free will, my decision. But in repentance there is something deeper. In order to understand the meaning of repentance, one has to understand the meaning of sin. Repentance means changing your previous state, in which you were a sinner. What does that really mean?

Suppose you had some particular set of values by which you lived. And at a certain stage you decide to repent. Again, I’m not talking about a “baal teshuvah” in the contemporary sense, someone who becomes religious from secular. Even regret, even repentance for a particular sin or sins of a religious person—even there, in the end, if he did those acts, apparently his value system dictated that kind of conduct, and he has to reverse himself.

We spoke—I’ll sharpen it a bit more—I think we once spoke about weakness of will. Weakness of will. Donald Davidson, an American philosopher—many have written about this—presents it like this: the problem of weakness of will. When a person sins, he often gives himself an explanation that “my will was weak. I was weak and couldn’t stand up to it, and so I fell, and so I sinned. Our Father in Heaven, it is revealed and known before You that our will is to do Your will, but what can we do? The yeast in the dough prevents us.” Our evil inclination—we fell. We really wanted to do the right thing, but okay, it didn’t work; the inclination was stronger than we were.

Donald Davidson argues that there is no such thing. That this is simply not true. Because either way, if you really wanted to, then why didn’t you do it? Did the evil inclination force you? Then you were coerced. There is no need to repent for something done under coercion. It didn’t force you? Fine, so if it didn’t force you, why did you obey it? Apparently you wanted to. If you wanted to, then why tell me stories that you didn’t want to? You wanted to.

Basically what he says is this. Davidson’s formulation is: first assumption—what a person thinks is proper to do, that is what he wants to do. Proper, again, from his standpoint—proper all things considered. That’s what he wants to do. Second assumption: if nothing interferes with a person’s doing what he wants, then he will do what he wants, right? If you want to do something and nothing else interferes and all the conditions allow it, then you’ll do it.

The combination of these two assumptions means that there cannot be a state he calls weakness of will. There cannot be such a state, because that state means I did what I did not want to do. That cannot happen. Or, let’s put it this way: I did what I did not think proper to do, without coercion. Because what I think proper to do is what I want to do. What I want to do is what I do, unless something coerces me. If nothing coerces me, then what I think proper to do is what I will do. And if I didn’t do it, one of two things is true: either something coerced me and therefore I could not do what I wanted, in which case I was forced—or I didn’t really want it and I’m telling myself stories.

Let’s say I’m not talking about religious sin, let’s talk about dieting. Fine? A person decided to keep a diet, not to eat fattening food. Okay? Then at some point he sees some cream cake he just can’t resist, and he eats it. Then he says, “Ugh, I was so weak. I so wanted to keep my diet and I fell, the inclination got the better of me, the yeast in the dough—not sourdough, I mean things that hold me back from better things—got in the way.” So the question is how to understand that.

Basically what Davidson says to him—and I bring this specifically so you’ll see that it isn’t only connected to morality or Jewish law or religious commandments, but to human decisions in general—how did the person come to eat that cake? One of two things. If you ate it, then apparently that’s what you wanted to do—unless something forced you. If the inclination forced you, then there is nothing to regret, you were coerced, you couldn’t stand up to it. What is there to regret? Maybe you can be sorry. Fine. You ate it—in every sense. But there is nothing to regret. When I speak of regret, I mean regret in the sense that I could have done otherwise and nevertheless fell.

And it’s also not a case where he has only one desire. Right, that is exactly what I want to discuss, but it doesn’t solve the problem. So what really happened there? The point is very simple. Of course you want to keep a diet, but no less, you also want to eat tasty things. You want both. Now the question is what you want more. Apparently—empirically apparently—it turns out that what matters more to you is eating tasty things than keeping the diet. Meaning that on your scale of values, you did exactly what you wanted. So why all these stories? In exactly the same situation, but the next day, he won’t eat. In exactly the same situation the next day? If he won’t eat, then apparently in that situation tomorrow morning the inclination or desire to eat matters less to him. Fine. Then in that situation, that is what he wanted. The fact that tomorrow morning he’ll want differently—so what? Tomorrow morning he is a different person. But right now, if he did it, then that is what he wanted.

We often fool ourselves because there are things we… I’m not saying he didn’t want to keep a diet. Of course he did. It’s just that he equally wanted to eat something tasty. It’s not as though I only want to keep a diet and everything else is “inclinations,” things acting on me from outside, forcing me or preventing me from doing what I want. Not true. I have many desires, and those desires often conflict with one another. In the end, what determines whether I go right or left in a conflict? The question is the hierarchy among the desires—what matters more to me. And if it matters more to me to eat something tasty than to keep the diet, then that is what I did.

But if that’s what I did, then what are all these stories about the yeast in the dough getting in the way? I did exactly what I wanted. What do you mean by “what matters more to me”? Who is this “I” to whom it matters? Some inner decision that says this matters to me. That is the foundation. If you believe in psychological forces, then that really is what determines it—the thing that weighs the different desires. Right, that’s what I’m talking about, that thing.

You know, there was once a psychologist at Bar-Ilan—there was, I don’t know if there still is—named Rabinovitch. I once saw an article of his—I don’t know him personally—in which he tried to identify, in the Tanya and in Rabbi Tzadok, I don’t remember exactly, where the “self” is. In the psychoanalytic map of a person, what is considered the self? He tried somehow to map the psyche and locate what exactly that thing is to which we refer as the self. My feeling—and I don’t know whose feeling this is, but it was my feeling—was that this search is problematic. It is based on a conceptual mistake. Because the psychoanalytic map is a map that describes the self. You can’t “find” the self there. It’s like looking at a globe and asking, “Wait, but where is the Earth on this? Is it in Oceania? South America? Where is it located?” This map describes the Earth. And when you ask who the self is, the self is the one described by this entire psychic complex. It is the bearer of the qualities. It is not one of the stages within the psychic structure; it is the one that the structure describes. Therefore it isn’t supposed to be found inside that map.

Yes, apropos who the self is: the self is that primary point that weighs all the pressures and desires and values and interests and everything, and makes decisions. Now when it makes decisions, even when some pressure acts on you, one must distinguish one of two things. If that pressure is something you cannot withstand, then you are coerced. If you can withstand it, then the fact that you went with it is because you wanted to go with it, or at least wanted that more than you wanted to resist it. So in the final analysis, you always do what you want. Therefore the whole story of failure, or weakness of will, weakness of inclination that overcomes you—that is a story we tell ourselves. That is Davidson’s claim.

Basically, in the end there is no such thing. When you did something, you did what you wanted. And therefore, if I carry this further—and I’ll qualify it later, I don’t agree with him—it seems to me that that is really what follows. And if we really understand sin that way, then in the end, understand this: this is a completely different picture from the usual one. In the end, a sinner is always wicked. Always wicked. There is no such thing as someone who isn’t wicked but just fell into sin. Again, by “wicked” I do not mean absolutely wicked, of course, but wicked in some sense—in this specific sense. With respect to that act, he was wicked. He wanted to do the bad act, and therefore he did it. He did not merely fall into it.

If he fell into it—there can be a case where he falls into it because of an irresistible impulse, something you simply cannot withstand psychologically, and then you do something you don’t want—fine. But for that you don’t need to repent. The Torah says explicitly, “and to you shall be its desire, and you shall rule over it.” Yes—and when you can rule over it, it is sin if you do not. If you cannot rule over it, then you are coerced, and then you do not need to repent. It’s the same in law generally: you do not bear criminal responsibility when it was an irresistible impulse.

So obviously we are always talking about a situation in which I could have controlled the matter, and what I did was weigh the instinctive pressure too, and in the end conclude to go with it. And if I concluded to go with it, apparently it mattered more to me than doing the right thing. Therefore, in the end, when a person sins, he is always a person who wants to sin. There is no such thing as not wanting it but doing it anyway.

Now if that is really so, then what does it mean to repent? To repent means to change the will. Right? To change the will, meaning to want something else, so that I will no longer continue committing the sin. Meaning, to regret what happened means to change the will. Once my will is changed, then I can already say: okay, from now on I will also not do it, because after all when I do something, I do it because I want to do it. If my will has changed, then I will no longer do it. So regret and resolution for the future are two sides of the same coin, and basically what we’re talking about is what Maimonides says: I am not the same person. The person I was before wanted to do this act; the new person does not want to do this act. That is what substantive repentance means.

But this is very problematic. Conceptually problematic—not merely difficult to do. It is something not well defined on the logical level. You don’t want chocolate, you don’t want cake, you don’t want… Yes, one has to reach a point where I do not want chocolate, or want it less than I want to be thin and good-looking, okay? Or want to be healthy. It needs to matter more to be physically healthy than mentally indulged—meaning… What? How can you say, “I do not desire pork”? Rather: “I do desire it, but…” Yes, but the desire to do good has to overcome the inclination to eat pork or something like that. But that is the change I need to make. Not to erase the inclinations—I don’t think you can erase them. What you can do is change your scale of values. If my scale of values was that the desire for tasty food overrides the desire to be healthy or thin—whatever each person’s thing is—then now that needs to reverse. Okay? That is basically what it means to repent.

Meaning, if I analyze sin this way, then it follows that repentance has to deal with my fundamental desires; it is not something external. I need to change what I want. But understand that this thing—and now I’m getting even more to your question—now it’s really hard. But it isn’t static. In one minute he can decide that he… He can change back, fine, but right now I have to reach a point where I don’t want it. It isn’t stable. Fine, it isn’t stable—so what? “Man is like a driven leaf.” Yes, “man is a tree of the field.” Okay… To what level? To the level the Sages already say, the level they use in Maimonides’ language: one can testify about him. Meaning, if he reaches a point where one can testify about him that he will never return to this again—then we say that if right now he is in such a state that, were he in that situation, he would never return to that sin, then he has repented. What will happen tomorrow morning? What I said earlier: tomorrow morning he may be a different person. But right now he is a penitent. “That it will never happen again” is an indication of the depth of the repentance right now. And that is exactly what I said before: if you really have turned around and now want something different, then right now you are indeed someone who would never return to that sin. Then the repentance is genuine. What happens afterward? Fine, we are human beings; all kinds of things can happen.

But understand: if that is so… You ate the cake? What? If you ate the cake, you got the calories, you gained weight—that’s irreversible. You can repent, you can… No, you can diet afterward. But I’m not talking about that kind of repair; I’m talking about repairing the act. Repentance has nothing to do with the cake you ate. It has nothing to do with it? It erases the consequences of the cake you ate. Now you do a new act that erases the consequences of what the cake did. What are you talking about? We are talking about repentance for sin. A sin has no practical consequences; it has… Why not? It has consequences. What? Spiritual consequences. Right—we repair them. The spiritual consequence I can repair through… a physical consequence I can also repair. Rabbi Kook talks about repentance of the body. Right, right. A physical consequence I can repair physically, and a spiritual consequence I can repair spiritually. Okay. But a physical consequence—you need a spiritual decision in order to repair it. A person who decides to diet decides that in his head, not in his stomach. That’s the problem with surgeries—they don’t work on the head, they work on the stomach, I can tell you that. No, no. I agree with you about the matter of will, but it’s not relevant here, because when I regret, I am repairing what I did in the past. Fine. I don’t regret that I ate cake; I… So now I regret that I ate cake and I repair the sin of damaging the diet. Take the analogy less far. You aren’t repairing it; you are doing a new act. You’re not listening to me. I’m not talking about repairing my weight gain—you’re taking the example too far. I brought the example only if keeping the diet were itself a sin—let’s suppose it was a sin—now I repent for that sin. Not by going back and becoming thin. I’m using it only as an example of sin. When I regret, I regret the dietary lapse, not that I’m fat now, but that I was weak. I regret the weakness of character I revealed, not that I gained weight. And the question is whether I can repair that. That is fully parallel to repentance. But surely it isn’t similar, because I can’t repair that now. Repent and repair it. Want differently and repair it. You repaired the weakness of character that you had; now you have stronger character.

Our assumption is that in repentance I repair the past. I repair the character, what I did, the inner defect I had. Don’t drag me into the “past” issue, because we can talk about that separately. I’m repairing the psychological problem that was in me and that is still in me until the repair. Leave aside whether it works retroactively or not. I had a psychological problem that expressed itself in my sinning; I am now repairing it. Leave the past aside. Fine—that’s how I’m treating repentance for the moment. I said then, I think, that great repentance really works on… the small repentance is the one that works backward.

Now understand, if this is so, let’s try to close the circle. If this really is the description of sin and of repentance, now I no longer know what to answer to this question: who is it that repents? Because if I am some set of particular desires, the basic values by which I make decisions—okay?—and now I am supposed to change that basic set of values, then who is the one changing that basic set of values? According to what set of values is he operating—the old one or the new one?

If he operates according to the new set, then he no longer needs to change; he is already changed. If he operates according to the old set, then why should he change? After all, that is the set he wants, that is what he believes in. How, from within that, would he arrive… I think we once did this simulation. I told you: a point-donkey. Physicists, when they want to deal with a donkey, begin with a point-donkey. First it’s a simple thing, then you add ears and legs and it gets more complicated. A point-donkey we know how to handle.

So let’s take a kind of toy model of repentance. Suppose a person serves God not for its own sake. Fine? Meaning he does everything in order to get maximum reward and minimum punishment. That is all that guides him in life. Now the man is absolutely righteous, keeps every tiny legal clause in the Mishnah Berurah, satisfies every opinion, everything obsessive. Okay? All in order to avoid punishment and receive maximum reward. He has one principle in his world; that’s why I call it a toy model. One principle only: maximum benefit—spiritual benefit, spiritual reward and punishment.

Now I want to persuade him to serve God for His own sake. Not in order to receive reward or avoid punishment, but to serve for its own sake. How can I persuade him to do that? What argument can I raise that would change a person’s value system? This is an example of how a person’s value system changes. In his case he has a value system with one single value. That single value is maximum benefit, minimum punishment, maximum reward. Now how do you talk to such a person in order to persuade him not to work for benefit but to work for its own sake?

You understand there is no way to do it, right? At most, you can tell him: listen, you’ll get more reward if you serve for its own sake. You have to speak to him in his own conceptual system. You cannot speak to him in some other conceptual system. When you address someone, you have to speak in the language of principles he accepts. It’s like in an argument: if I bring you proofs based on my assumptions, it won’t persuade you. To persuade you, I have to bring you proofs based on your assumptions, right? But on the basis of his assumptions, you cannot persuade him. His assumptions are maximum reward, minimum punishment. Given that assumption, how will you bring him to serve for its own sake? It can’t be done.

So what does that actually mean? Now let’s think not about someone else trying to persuade him, but about him persuading himself. He wants to repent, to become one who serves God for its own sake, not for reward or avoiding punishment, but to serve for its own sake. You understand that this is completely undefined. If he already wants to persuade himself to serve for its own sake, then he already thinks one ought to serve for its own sake; he no longer needs to persuade himself, he is already persuaded. Right. And if he is not there, why would he himself, from within his own system, arrive at the conclusion that he should serve for its own sake? Meaning, either the change happened by itself, or it won’t happen at all. But repentance is supposed to be something done intentionally. If something happens to me on its own, I didn’t repent; I just became righteous—someone programmed me, I don’t know exactly what, hypnotized me. That isn’t called repenting. Repenting is an intentional act by a person who changes himself.

Meaning, I change myself—but who is the “I” that changes, and who is the “I” that is changed? The “I” that changes must already be there, and it takes the changed “I” there. But if I am already there, then who is the one who needs to take me there? I’m already there. That’s the choice, not the repentance. No, what isn’t understood here is choice. The point I really want to say is first of all that this is why the concept of repentance—the Torah and Maimonides go back to this—the discussion of choice is located in Laws of Repentance. Why? I asked: why not in the laws of Grace after Meals or redeeming a firstborn donkey? The explanation is that the act of repentance means activating choice. Or I would even say more than that, though I’ll need to get to that later: it means returning to being a chooser. The act of repentance means ceasing to conduct oneself in a non-choosing way, and returning to being a chooser. In other words, the act of repentance is to be a chooser—or the instruction to repent is the same as the instruction to be a chooser.

So if a person chooses not to be religious, is he a penitent? In a certain sense, yes—he has returned to being a chooser, he’s just choosing incorrectly. The question is whether such an option really exists, but I’ll have to discuss that more; I’ll get to these things. Usually when a person really chooses, he does the right thing. Meaning, when he does the wrong thing, there is something here… But that still doesn’t answer the question: who is the one who chooses to be a chooser? I didn’t answer it, I didn’t answer it. There is some difficulty here, and that is what I want to discuss further.

What? “Choose life.” If the point is that you begin choosing, the Torah says “choose life”—it isn’t enough merely to choose; you have to choose the right thing. Yes, but I think of it a little differently. I think that to choose means to live. One who doesn’t choose is just an animal. Meaning, a human being is human when he chooses. Even if he chooses evil—still, if he chooses it, then he is acting like a human being and not like an animal. Fine, we’ll talk more about that.

What I only want to say now, just to close the circle, is this: the discussion of choice appears in Laws of Repentance because there is an instruction to repent. There is no formal commandment of that sort, but the demand or expectation to repent means an expectation that the person be a chooser. Repentance is a synonym for choice. Therefore choice appears in the Torah in the context of repentance, and also in Maimonides in Laws of Repentance.

And from here it is also clear why there is no commandment to repent, just as there is no commandment to choose. Right? It’s impossible. “Choose life”—no authority who counts commandments includes this in the count of the commandments. Why not? “Choose life.” The explanation is that the condition for your fulfilling commandments, and for your being subject to command at all, is that you choose. You cannot command a person to choose. Meaning, if the person doesn’t choose, then that command won’t help him; then you can program him to choose. But if you want him to choose on his own initiative, there is no such thing as commanding a person to be a chooser.

Therefore there cannot be a commandment concerning choice, and by the same token there cannot be a commandment concerning repentance either. The point is that this is why Maimonides, in the count of the commandments, does not count the commandment to repent. In the Mishneh Torah he writes that one certainly needs to repent—but it has to come from us and from our own decision, not as a response to a command. In the end, though—and I’ll just finish with this—the problematic nature of the concept of repentance and the concept of choice that I described earlier has still not been solved. There is still something here—how a person changes himself—that is a kind of loop, something not conceptually defined. We may now understand why it cannot be commanded, but what exactly this thing is—that is something we will still have to clarify.