Repentance Topics – Lesson 1 – Two Paths of Repentance
This transcription was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- The purpose of the series and the difficulty in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance
- What is “Jewish law,” and where does it stand in relation to thought and morality
- Concepts that can’t be defined: quality, criteria, and neural networks
- Maimonides’ introduction and the unusual features of the Laws of Repentance
- Maimonides on righteous–intermediate–wicked and the questions about the Ten Days of Repentance
- Two answers in the later authorities as two conceptions of repentance: Emek Berakhah and Siftei Chaim
- Two mechanisms of repentance: erasing sins versus changing one’s spiritual direction
- The Maharal, the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, and the distinction between “The Lord, the Lord” and “and He cleanses”
- Proofs from the Talmud: Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya and Kiddushin, “perhaps he contemplated repentance in his heart”
- The Laws of Repentance versus “the thought of repentance,” and the halakhic implications of essential repentance
Summary
General Overview
The speaker opens a series on the essence of repentance following a question from a Yoma lecture, and presents a fundamental difficulty in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance: the work is called “laws,” but much of it looks more like philosophy, ethics, and discussions of the World to Come than technical halakhic instructions, and sometimes it does not even seem directly related to repentance. Through an analysis of Maimonides and the difficulty surrounding the categories righteous–intermediate–wicked and the Ten Days of Repentance, he proposes that the phenomenon should be understood through a distinction between two different mechanisms of repentance: a formal, accounting-style repentance that works according to rules and procedures for erasing sins, and an essential repentance consisting of a reversal of spiritual direction and becoming a different person. He strengthens this distinction through the Maharal’s interpretation of two attributes within the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy (“The Lord, the Lord” and “and He cleanses”), and brings proof from aggadic stories and legal rulings (Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya and Kiddushin’s “perhaps he contemplated repentance in his heart”) that there exists a form of repentance that does not depend on the full halakhic process, yet still has halakhic consequences.
The purpose of the series and the difficulty in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance
The speaker wants to deal with the essence of repentance and arrive at points that intersect with the topic, and begins with a general impression that Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance are hard to read as a collection of “laws.” He points out that at the beginning of the book there are halakhic elements such as confession, the atonement of the scapegoat, and the categories of atonement, but very quickly the book moves to definitions of complete repentance, descriptions such as “crying out constantly before God with tears and supplications,” praise for public confession, and the special significance of the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He describes how later on there appear laws of righteous–intermediate–wicked regarding an individual, a country, and the world; the hint contained in shofar blowing (“Awake, sleepers, from your sleep”); lists of heretics and those who cause the public to sin who have no share in the World to Come; and twenty-four things that hinder repentance. He emphasizes that entire chapters deal with free choice, knowledge and choice, and the Raavad’s objections, with verses and prayers of righteous people and prophets being cited; and from there the book moves on to matters of the World to Come, reward and punishment, the messianic era, and serving for its own sake out of love rather than for reward, to the point that he calls the work “very, very strange.”
What is “Jewish law,” and where does it stand in relation to thought and morality
The speaker asks what the very definition of “Jewish law” is, and raises an attempt to formulate a binding criterion, mentioning Rabbi Wolbe in Alei Shur and circular definitions such as “whatever appears in the Rif,” comparing this to the paradox of defining art as “what is found in a museum.” He argues that there is a category outside Jewish law that cannot be denied, and illustrates this through Eight Chapters, Guide for the Perplexed, and the inclusion of Aristotelian physics in Maimonides’ Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, saying sharply that studying the first four chapters there is, in his view, “a complete waste of Torah study,” even though he opposes censorship. He distinguishes between Jewish law and morality, arguing that morality does not belong to Jewish law as a category, even if there are verses such as “and you shall walk in His ways,” “and you shall do what is right and good,” and “you shall be holy,” and notes positions such as Nachmanides and the Maggid Mishneh in the Laws of Neighbors.
Concepts that can’t be defined: quality, criteria, and neural networks
The speaker uses Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to argue that the Greek attempt to ground reality in precise definition is not obligatory, and brings up the character Phaedrus, who searches for a definition of “quality” through grading essays. He argues that a concept can be understood intuitively even without conceptualizing it in words and formulating rules, and even demonstrates how neural networks can learn imitation and pattern matching without explicit rules, including a personal memory of a primitive network that guessed 0–1 sequences with fairly high accuracy. From this he concludes that even if it is hard to define “Jewish law” as against “aggadah,” it can still be identified in practice, and an automatic system could be taught to classify passages even if a person could not formulate the full definition.
Maimonides’ introduction and the unusual features of the Laws of Repentance
The speaker notes that in his introduction to the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides himself says in advance that he will also discuss “the principles that follow along with repentance and because of it,” and from this there is some justification for combining non-halakhic matters. He argues that repentance cannot be merely technical, but must be accompanied by thought, and yet a double difficulty remains: why this is called “Laws of Repentance,” and why some sections seem unrelated to repentance. He presents this as the opening point for attacking the topic and understanding repentance through trying to understand this phenomenon, and distinguishes between the tendency of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) to deal with Jewish law and more poetic/thought-oriented works such as Rabbeinu Yonah’s Shaarei Teshuvah and similar works, in which the thought of repentance seems to go far beyond the technical details.
Maimonides on righteous–intermediate–wicked and the questions about the Ten Days of Repentance
The speaker quotes Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 3 on weighing merits and sins in an individual, a country, and the world, and on the statement that one whose sins are more numerous “immediately dies in his wickedness,” and then brings the next law about one who regrets his earlier deeds and thereby loses his merits, and about judgment being weighed on Rosh Hashanah with the intermediate person suspended until Yom Kippur. He asks how this fits with “immediately dies in his wickedness,” and then focuses on another question: if the intermediate person is suspended until Yom Kippur, why not simply add commandments and become righteous, instead of repentance being the criterion (“if he repented he is sealed for life, and if not he is sealed for death”)? He cites the Lechem Mishneh, who says that the sin of not repenting is itself what tips the balance toward guilt, and asks that even then one could add commandments and outweigh it. He raises the famous difficulty about the very existence of an “intermediate” person if it means exact equality of merits and sins, and rejects the solution that “they are weighed only according to the knowledge of the God of knowledge” as referring merely to weighting by significance rather than number, because even a weighted sum would almost never come out exactly equal, so “the chance… is zero,” and therefore seemingly there is nothing to fear about being intermediate.
Two answers in the later authorities as two conceptions of repentance: Emek Berakhah and Siftei Chaim
The speaker presents two directions for answering the question “why only repentance and not commandments,” and argues that they express two different assumptions about the essence of repentance. He cites Emek Berakhah by Rabbi Baruch Ber Pomeranchik in the name of a yeshiva-style answer: Rosh Hashanah seals the outgoing year, and commandments done during the Ten Days of Repentance belong to the new year and therefore do not change the balance of the previous year, whereas repentance erases sins from the previous year and can therefore turn an intermediate person into a righteous one regarding the previous year. He criticizes this picture as too formal and accounting-like, like saying “office hours are over” even when on Yom Kippur the person is in fact in a better state, though he later says that if one chooses the formal track, then indeed one works by the rules of that track. He presents Siftei Chaim by Rabbi Chaim Friedlander as an essential explanation: “righteous–wicked–intermediate” is not the sum of commandments and sins, but a determination of the person’s overall spiritual direction as a whole, to the point that a righteous person may fail often and still be “righteous” because his direction is positive, while a wicked person may perform many commandments for reasons of honor and still be sealed for death because his direction is negative; the intermediate person is someone who has not chosen a direction.
Two mechanisms of repentance: erasing sins versus changing one’s spiritual direction
The speaker formulates in principle that there are “two mechanisms of repentance,” and says that the disagreement between Emek Berakhah and Rabbi Chaim Friedlander is not really a disagreement, but two existing channels. He describes accounting-formal repentance as a procedure of abandoning the sin, regretting it, resolving for the future, and verbally confessing each sin separately, in a process of “erasing sins” and rewriting history. He describes essential repentance as a reversal of basic spiritual direction, turning from intermediate to righteous, in which the person becomes “a different person,” and therefore the judgment no longer belongs to the earlier phase. He argues that additional commandments do not decide matters on the essential track, because the main thing is changing direction and not counting, whereas on the formal track there are rules, conditions, and “office hours” in which an action helps only if it was done according to the proper procedure and at the proper time.
The Maharal, the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, and the distinction between “The Lord, the Lord” and “and He cleanses”
The speaker cites the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 17 on “The Lord, the Lord” meaning “I am He before a person sins, and I am He after a person sins and repents,” and the Talmud in Shevuot 39 on “and He cleanses, yet does not cleanse,” according to Rabbi Elazar: “He cleanses those who repent, and does not cleanse those who do not repent.” He presents the Maharal’s question in Netiv HaTeshuvah, chapter 6, as to why there are two attributes directed toward repentance, and the Maharal’s answer that “and He cleanses” deals with one who repents for some of his sins, while “The Lord, the Lord” deals with one who repents for all of his sins. He explains that the distinction is not quantitative-mathematical but essential: deep regret over rebellion against a command or over “something being wrong” cannot really be partial, so complete repentance is by definition for all transgressions; whereas “and He cleanses” describes the possibility of partial repentance that is formal, shallow, or motivated by considerations such as fear of punishment, and therefore can apply only to some transgressions. He concludes that the novelty of “and He cleanses” is not merely that someone who repents for one sin is cleansed of that one sin alone, but that there is such a thing at all as repentance aimed only at part of one’s sins.
Proofs from the Talmud: Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya and Kiddushin, “perhaps he contemplated repentance in his heart”
The speaker brings the story of Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya in Avodah Zarah 17: a man who did not leave a single prostitute in the world with whom he had not been, to whom it was said, “Thus, Elazar ben Dordaya is not accepted in repentance.” He sits between mountains and hills, turns to heaven and earth, to the sun and moon, to the stars and constellations, and then says, “The matter depends on no one but me,” sobs in tears until his soul departs, and a heavenly voice proclaims, “Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is destined for the life of the World to Come.” Rabbi then weeps and says, “There are those who acquire their world over many years, and those who acquire their world in one moment,” and “Not only are penitents accepted, they are even called Rabbi.” He argues that the story does not present a review of a list of sins and stages of formal repentance, but rather an essential repentance consisting of understanding the depth of his condition and undergoing an inner reversal, and therefore it is accepted immediately and even grants him the title “Rabbi,” in the sense of one who teaches. He adds the ruling in Kiddushin 49: “On condition that I am righteous—even if he is completely wicked, she is betrothed, perhaps he contemplated repentance in his heart,” and argues that this obviously cannot mean he had time to carry out all the formal procedures, but rather that a thought of repentance is enough to change status, as proof for the existence of a repentance not dependent on the detailed halakhic process.
The Laws of Repentance versus “the thought of repentance,” and the halakhic implications of essential repentance
The speaker states that the laws and procedures are “Laws of Repentance” in the sense of the formal track, whereas “the thought of repentance” is not merely the conceptual background to those laws but a description of an alternative path of repentance that is not halakhic. He argues that works such as Rabbeinu Yonah’s Shaarei Teshuvah and Orot HaTeshuvah are not explaining the foundation of the formal procedure, but presenting a different, broader, and deeper mechanism of repentance. He adds that essential repentance has real halakhic ramifications, such as the return to fitness of a slaughterer or witness who had been disqualified due to wickedness after repenting, and hints that there is evidence in the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and in the Shulchan Arukh that in certain places full repentance allows return to halakhic fitness without requiring all the stages of formal repentance. He concludes practically that someone who has undergone essential repentance is “exempt from all the laws of repentance” in the sense that discussions about order, what is indispensable, and what is not indispensable are no longer relevant to him, because he is already “a different person” and everything has been “erased,” and he announces that the continuation of the lectures will deal with the implications, with openings such as “I will sin and repent,” and with the distinction behind statements such as “He dug a tunnel beneath the Throne of Glory.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In this series I want to deal with matters of repentance, apropos of Doron’s question from the Yoma lecture. It seems to me I gave this last year, as far as I—this I do remember giving, I think. In any case, I want to deal a bit with the essence of repentance and get to various points that also intersect with this issue of repentance. I’ll start, maybe, with some general impression. When we look at Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance, it’s pretty hard to find laws in them. Maybe you know what? Come on, as you can see, let me open it here for a moment. Okay, look. Right, so in law 1: all the commandments of the Torah, whether positive commandments or prohibitions—if a person transgressed one of them, when he repents and returns from his sin he is obligated to confess, and so on. This is the essence of confession, and whoever increases confession is praiseworthy. Law 2: the scapegoat—we talked a bit about that in the Yoma lectures—that it atones. Nowadays, when there is no Temple, there is only repentance. There are sins that are atoned for immediately—here these are relatively halakhic matters, although once again at the end of this law, about sufferings, the four categories of atonement. To what extent are categories of atonement actually Jewish law? Maybe they are. After that in law 2: what is complete repentance? It is when the matter in which he sinned comes to him again, and he has the ability to do it, but he refrains and does not do it because of repentance, not out of fear and not because his strength has failed, and so on. And then: if he only repented in old age—yes, here—and at a time when he can no longer do what he used to do, even though it is not the finest repentance, it is effective and he is a penitent. Even if he sinned all his days and repented on the day of his death and died, all his sins are forgiven, as it says, “before the sun grows dark,” and so on. And what is repentance? That the sinner abandon his sin and remove it from his thoughts. Anyone who confesses verbally but has not resolved in his heart to abandon it is like one who immerses with a creeping thing in his hand. Among the ways of repentance is that the penitent constantly cries out before God in tears and supplications. Already here we’re starting to move a bit beyond what looks like Jewish law. And it is greatly praiseworthy for the penitent to confess publicly. Although repentance and crying out are always good, during the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur they are especially good. Yom Kippur is a time of repentance for all. Confession, again, some categories of atonement, but sins between man and his fellow and between man and God—he needs to seek reconciliation. That finishes chapter 2. Now the definitions of righteous, intermediate, and wicked. Law 1 defines righteous, intermediate, and wicked in a person, in a country. Law 2: immediately he dies in his wickedness. All of this so far is not really Jewish law, I would say. And also a country, and they are weighed only according to the knowledge of the God of knowledge. Anyone who regrets the commandments—right, goes back and, as they say, goes secular—then he lost them all and no merit is mentioned for him. Intermediate, righteous, and wicked during the Ten Days of Repentance. A bit about shofar blowing: it is a hint, “Awake, sleepers, from your sleep.” As though the laws of shofar blowing have their own separate section; here it is only mentioned in the aspect of repentance. When a person’s sins are weighed against his merits, they don’t count the first sin he committed, only the third and onward. All kinds of things like that, and these are all things that the Holy One, blessed be He, does in heaven. Now it moves on to those who have no share in the World to Come but are cut off and lost. That too is somewhat related, because these are people for whom repentance seemingly does not help. Five are called sectarians, three are called heretics, two are apostates, those who cause the public to sin, one who separates from the ways of the community, informers, those who impose fear on the public. Every one of these twenty-four people, even though they are part of the Jewish people, has no share in the World to Come. The question is what happens—does repentance still help in the end? That’s his claim in the conclusion. Up to chapter 3, relatively okay. Twenty-four things hinder repentance. Five things lock the paths of repentance. That already isn’t Jewish law, I’d say. Five things such that one who does them cannot repent completely. He has no presumption of returning from them—light matters. Again, this is not Jewish law. Hard to separate from them. They hinder, they don’t prevent; they hinder repentance but don’t prevent it. In principle, if he does repent, he is atoned for. Now chapter 5, chapter 6—no connection to Jewish law. It all deals with questions of free will. Permission is granted to every person: if he wishes to incline himself to a good path—do not let this thought pass through your mind, the thing foolish gentiles and most undeveloped Jews say, that there is a decree beforehand whether one will be righteous or wicked. And this matter is a great principle. Then his famous question in law 5 about knowledge and choice, the Raavad’s objections. Chapter 6: many verses in the Torah and in the words of the prophets appear to contradict this principle, the principle of free choice. And this is a completely thought-oriented work, with no connection to Jewish law. Righteous people, prophets in their prayers, King David—he brings proofs that we have free choice. Law 7: since every person has permission granted to him, a person should strive to repent and confess his sins verbally. A person should always see himself as leaning toward death. Do not say that repentance applies only to sins involving action. And a penitent should not imagine that he is far from the level of the righteous. He comforts us. All the prophets commanded repentance, and the Jewish people will be redeemed only through repentance. Great is repentance, for it brings a person close. We’ve moved into an ethics book—meaning chapters 5 and 6 are basically philosophy, right, free choice. Chapter 7 is an ethics book—how exalted the level of repentance is. Yesterday he was separated from God, and today he is attached to the Divine Presence. All these things—their way is to be lowly and humble. Chapter 8: the goodness hidden away for the righteous. Suddenly we’ve moved into matters of the World to Come, back to thought, matters of the World to Come. In the World to Come there is no body or physical form, only the souls of the righteous. Every soul mentioned in this matter, and so on. Various names, the Name, the Place, the names of the Place, the mountain of the Lord, His holy place, the holy way. What is karet? Reward for commandments, longing for the World to Come, nice homiletic lines about the World to Come. For the next sheva berakhot nearby, you can take material from here. In chapter 9, reward and punishment. Right, all kinds of matters about the messianic era apart from the World to Come. Two long laws. And chapter 10, matters of serving for its own sake. To serve out of love, to serve for its own sake and not for reward and not to avoid punishment. Love of God, fear of God, Torah study for its own sake, not to act in order to receive reward. In short, this collection of laws is very, very strange. Very, very strange. I don’t see the connection between it and Jewish law. In almost every collection of laws in Maimonides you can see at the end—or in many of them you can see at the end—a few words of aggadah, about the meaning of that collection of laws. So that’s common, yes, in many of Maimonides’ law collections. But in the Laws of Repentance, half the collection of laws is actually devoted to things that are not Jewish law. But not only are they not Jewish law—they also are not connected to repentance, at least not directly. The World to Come, serving for its own sake, free will, all kinds of philosophical issues, thought-oriented issues. How is that connected to the Laws of Repentance? Why is this even called the Laws of Repentance?
[Speaker B] What’s the definition of Jewish law? Something that demands something of me?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In principle yes, although there are also non-obligatory commandments fulfilled by doing them. But something that, if you do it, say, it gets registered to your credit or your debit as part of the halakhic obligations and merits. That’s of course a somewhat circular definition, but you know… Rabbi Wolbe writes in Alei Shur, what is the definition of Jewish law—where in the Talmud do you know that you are in a halakhic passage and where not? Whatever appears in the Rif. It’s a bit reminiscent of Duchamp’s definition of what art is. Art is what’s in a museum. The question, of course, is how the museum curator decides what to put into the museum and what not. Meaning, he doesn’t yet have those things in the museum, so how does he decide what to put there? Same thing, I can ask about Rabbi Wolbe: how did the Rif decide what to write and what not to write? Not to mention that this criterion is, of course, wrong, because there are halakhic things that appear in the Rif and non-halakhic things that also appear in the Rif; the criterion is simply not correct. So the definition here is…
[Speaker B] Could be the definition of Jewish law is different—that maybe it’s something that obligates me, but reality can also obligate me. It’s not only a question of what I’m required to do.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning reality obligates me.
[Speaker B] Like there are laws of nature, there are laws of…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Halakhic laws—but the question is what halakhic laws are.
[Speaker B] Maybe someone having a share in the World to Come, and this idea of having a share in the World to Come, is totally not Jewish law. Maybe it’s not called laws at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s a spiritual law?
[Speaker B] What does that have to do with Jewish law?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maimonides himself, by the way—in the fourteenth principle, when he argues with the Bahag—the Bahag counts those liable to karet in his count of the commandments. So Maimonides asks him: are you counting for the Holy One, blessed be He, the commandments of whom He has to cut off and whom not? What does that have to do with counting the commandments?
[Speaker B] Is Jewish law specifically commandments?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Commandments are one of the criteria—not the only one, but a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. What isn’t Jewish law won’t enter into the commandments. Not every halakhic matter enters the count of commandments, but what is not Jewish law isn’t there.
[Speaker B] If it’s a system I have to respond to, maybe that does somehow count as belonging to the world of Jewish law.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. Morality too—you have to respond to it, and morality is not Jewish law. There are many things placed upon us in some non-halakhic sense.
[Speaker B] If I have to respond, doesn’t that come from Jewish law? Huh? Even morality—what we need to respond to—is that because Jewish law obligates it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not at all. Morality has nothing to do with Jewish law.
[Speaker B] “And you shall walk in His ways”?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “And you shall walk in His ways” means cleaving to the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He—that’s not it, that’s something else. Morality does not belong to Jewish law. They are different categories, morality and Jewish law. And what about “and you shall do what is right and good,” “you shall be holy”? The famous Nachmanides, yes, the Maggid Mishneh in the Laws of Neighbors—no, that’s not Jewish law.
[Speaker B] According to Maimonides’ conception, if we’re talking about Maimonides’ conception of Jewish law, could there be something outside Jewish law that one has to relate to?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously. What do you mean? Is Eight Chapters Jewish law? Not to mention—I’m not even talking about Maimonides’ Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, where he brings me all this Aristotelian physics. Right, but he understands that this is mistaken Aristotelian physics.
[Speaker B] He understands it as the commandments of love of God, fear of God, knowledge of God.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everything is the commandments of love of God. So if that’s the case, then every physics book can go into the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah? So everything is Jewish law? When I study Sears and Zemansky in mechanics, is that Jewish law? There’s a limit to everything.
[Speaker B] The question is what Maimonides would say. I don’t know what I…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m pretty sure not. Maimonides would not say that. Even Guide for the Perplexed is not Jewish law. It isn’t Jewish law. Clearly there is a category outside Jewish law—you can’t deny that. There’s, you know, that book by Pirsig, once a cult book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of the themes of that book is that the wicked Greeks messed up our minds. Meaning, the hero of the book is Phaedrus—that’s the name of a Platonic dialogue—who is a rhetoric lecturer in an American college. And the whole book is basically a chase after the definition of the concept of quality. When he grades his students’ essays, he gives them grades. Suddenly he starts asking himself: wait, on what basis do I decide which essay is good and which isn’t, and how good it is? And in this way, according to some scale, you can’t just do whatever you want. He gives grades to students. And at some point in the book he reaches the conclusion that the wicked Greeks messed up our minds. Meaning—right, that’s my expression, of course. What does that mean? The point is that the Greeks, somewhat like that Maimonidean thing I spoke about in the first Yoma lecture, basically told us that anything that cannot be defined does not exist. Meaning, if you can’t define this concept, then there is no such concept. A bit like the logical positivists in the twentieth century.
[Speaker C] Are you sure they didn’t just mean that there’s no point addressing it, and only an agnostic… Could be they meant an agnostic position about whether it really exists and only…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even among the positivists there are these two conceptions. Some say there is no such thing, and some say—Wittgenstein, at least early Wittgenstein—say there’s no point addressing it, or that it doesn’t exist. In both shades. And I claim that both shades are wrong. Just like when you grade the… that was Phaedrus’s conclusion there in the book: when you grade students, true, I can’t give you the exact criteria by which I decided how good this essay is, and whether it is better or worse than another essay. But still, it is better or worse than another essay. Not everything can I give you criteria for, and still I understand that there is such a concept, and intuitively I understand it. I know when it exists and when it doesn’t, even if I don’t know how to conceptualize it and formulate it in words. Does the Rabbi agree that it’s really that immeasurable? What?
[Speaker C] Does the Rabbi agree that text analysis on the level of grading essays is so impossible to measure?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not entirely. You can suggest some criteria. In composition classes they even tell you some criteria. But you understand that it’s nonsense. Those criteria are some very, very general framework within which you still have many, many degrees of freedom. You need an introduction, body, and conclusion. But whether the introduction is good or not good—you have criteria for that too. So they tell you roughly what the introduction should include. And if someone did it differently but did it brilliantly, then it would still be a good introduction. The rules give you some general direction, some framework, but within it there are many, many degrees of freedom.
[Speaker C] In the end, then, the question is whether one day there’ll be a very sophisticated word processor that can compose an essay. That’s really the decisive question.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, not at all. In the age of thinking networks, neural networks and artificial intelligence, you can see that you don’t need to formulate all the rules and conceptualize them in order to teach an automatic system to do it. But does that mean there are no rules? I don’t know if there aren’t, but we can’t conceptualize them. I don’t know if there aren’t. But even though we don’t know how to conceptualize them, it doesn’t matter. We can teach an automatic system to do it and bypass the need to formulate the rules. Let the automatic system imitate me. Because if you know a bit about neural networks—I don’t know—this is how it works. You don’t give it—it’s not classical software, in the sense that you give it instructions explicitly and tell it what to do with various ifs. If you see this, do that; if you see this, do that; go to this, go to that. That’s classical software, the kind everyone learns in school.
[Speaker C] But in the end the software is built out of such choices, and if you look at its code after it’s fully built and responds excellently, you will be able to decipher strict criteria; they’ll just be extremely complex.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, of course not. In a neural network you won’t manage to define any rules. In a neural network, the network learns. The network, for example, learns—when neural networks began, by the way, it came from physics. I was at the stage of my doctorate when it started. Then it sort of reached our department, and a friend of mine—today he’s a professor in the department—showed me some simple neural network, and showed me how it managed to guess the next number when I, say, made sequences of zeros and ones. Just arbitrarily I decide: zero zero one zero one zero zero one—completely arbitrary. And at a fairly early stage, after five, six, seven keystrokes, the network starts guessing the next number I’m going to type even before I type it. Not 100 percent, of course, but at fairly high percentages. A really primitive network. I mean, a few dozen neurons, something like that, nothing much. And it was pretty amazing. Now at a certain point, when I understood a bit how the whole thing works, you realize that the network somehow synchronizes its neurons in response to my previous keystrokes, and little by little it gets closer to imitating what I myself am doing. Now if I look at the network, I still won’t be able to know or formulate explicitly how exactly I decide each keystroke. And the fact is that the network also doesn’t capture all my keystrokes, only some percentage above fifty, which is what I’d expect from an arbitrary network. So therefore, even when a neural network succeeds in learning some subject, that doesn’t mean I’ll now be able to conceptualize and formulate rules. And then teach it in school—how to do this. Absolutely not. The whole idea of a neural network is to skip the need to do that. Okay, we drifted a bit. I just want to argue that even if I don’t know how to conceptualize and formulate for you exactly what is called Jewish law, to define the concept of Jewish law as against aggadah, say, or against other concepts—that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing. When we encounter the thing, we know what it is. Even without formulating the rules explicitly. And therefore a neural network too—you could teach it, when it looks at a certain passage, whether it is a halakhic passage or a non-halakhic one, without your being able to formulate explicitly the exact definitions. And it’s pretty hard to formulate the exact definitions here, if it’s possible at all. Okay, but let’s leave that.
[Speaker B] The truth is that Maimonides, in the introduction to the Laws of Repentance, already says in advance that here it will be different, right? Because he writes that here he will also speak about the principles that follow along with repentance and because of it. Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the point is that there is something here that gets brought in—I’m saying again, in Maimonides in general there are several such deviations, like in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah where he puts in all kinds of things that seem completely bizarre to me. Studying the first four chapters of the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah is a complete waste of Torah study. I mean, they should simply be torn out of the book. But Maimonides puts in such things too—not not to read them because they’re invalid, but because they’re unnecessary. What a waste of time. I’m against censorship. In any case, the point is that… this law collection, the Laws of Repentance, is very unusual. Other law collections are collections of laws that deal with laws—the laws of Grace after Meals, Torah study, the Sabbath, sacrifices, ritual impurity and purity, damages, whatever, all sorts of things like that. The Laws of Repentance have these thought-oriented discussions of one kind or another. Why is this the Laws of Repentance? Put it in the Guide for the Perplexed. What is it doing here?
[Speaker D] Repentance—repentance is not a technical thing. Repentance cannot be a technical thing; it has to be accompanied by thought.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll see in a minute, we’ll see—that’s exactly where I’m heading. It’s problematic both in terms of defining it as connected to repentance and in terms of why this is the Laws of Repentance. Meaning, it’s not Jewish law, and it’s also not connected to repentance. So there is something very strange in Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance. I want to approach this issue, start approaching this issue from that point, to explain the concept of repentance through trying to understand this phenomenon. And maybe I’ll bring additional examples. The medieval authorities (Rishonim) generally don’t tend to deal much with thought; they deal—the classical medieval authorities—deal with halakhic topics. When they get to repentance, there is Rabbeinu Yonah’s Shaarei Teshuvah. Various works like that that speak in a poetic way about the concept of repentance. There are thought-oriented works on repentance. Usually the impression—or the relationship between thought-oriented works and halakhic works—seems to be that the thought-oriented works are trying to provide the background from which the Jewish law described in the halakhic works grew. Meaning, if you understand the background, the goals, the purposes, the reasons, maybe you’ll be able—very optimistic, but let’s say—you’ll be able to understand all the halakhic details you encounter. But in the Laws of Repentance, somehow it seems that the thought of repentance and the laws of repentance are two different things. There, it’s something else. The thought of repentance goes much farther than the technical details of the laws of repentance, which you could maybe summarize in ten laws or something like that, even fewer. And I really want to talk about that point, about the relation between Jewish law and thought in repentance. But to begin with this issue, I want to start maybe with an interesting law in Maimonides in chapter 3. At the beginning of chapter 3, Maimonides defines intermediate, righteous, and wicked. Every single person has merits and sins. One whose merits exceed his sins is righteous, and one whose sins exceed his merits is wicked. Half and half—intermediate. And so too a country: if the merits of all its inhabitants are greater than their sins, then it is righteous; and if their sins are greater, then it is wicked. And so too the whole world. Fine. Law 2: a person whose sins are greater than his merits immediately dies in his wickedness, as it says, “because of the greatness of your iniquity,” and so too a country whose sins are greater is immediately destroyed, as it says, “the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah,” and so on, and likewise the whole world. Fine. And now in law 3: anyone who regrets the commandments he performed and reconsiders his merits and says in his heart, what benefit did I get from doing them? If only I had not done them—such a person has lost them all, and no merit of his is mentioned in the world, as it says, “the righteousness of the righteous shall not save him on the day of his wickedness.” Wait, you’re not sharing at all, right? Sorry. No. Okay, sorry. Anyone who regrets the commandments he performed and reconsiders his merits and says in his heart, what benefit did I get from doing them? If only I had not done them—such a person has lost them all, and no merit of his is mentioned in the world, as it says, “the righteousness of the righteous shall not save him on the day of his wickedness.” This applies only to one who regrets his earlier deeds. And just as a person’s merits and sins are weighed at the time of his death, so each and every year the sins of every human being are weighed on the festival of Rosh Hashanah. One found righteous is sealed for life, and one found wicked is sealed for death, and the intermediate person is suspended until Yom Kippur. If he repented, he is sealed for life, and if not, he is sealed for death. How does that fit with what he said above, that one who is found wicked immediately dies in his wickedness? So what, he won’t even make it to Rosh Hashanah if he’s wicked? Okay, there’s a lot to analyze in these things. But I want to deal with the point that closes law 3. If the intermediate people, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—if they repented, they are sealed for life, and if not, they are sealed for death. So the question is: why not do more commandments? Once I have more commandments than sins, then I’m righteous. So if I’m suspended as an intermediate person, I’ll do a few more commandments, and then I become righteous and I’m sealed for life. Why “if he repented,” good, and if not then he is sealed for death, no matter what else he did? Especially since Maimonides writes that in those days one increases repentance, prayer, and charity, and they avert the evil decree—meaning there is some significance to good deeds beyond repentance. The Lechem Mishneh, who asks this question, says that one who did not repent—that itself is the sin that seals him for death. That’s also how he answers another question. He says: suppose you didn’t repent. Then you remained intermediate. Why are you sealed for death? You stayed in the same status you had on Rosh Hashanah. To that he says that if he did not repent, that sin itself makes him wicked and he is sealed for death. Then of course the question comes up again: fine, so let him do a few more commandments, and they’ll outweigh that, and he’ll still be sealed for life. Another difficulty—and this is a famous one—how can there even be such a thing as an intermediate person? I mean, how can the number of my sins and merits be exactly equal? How would that happen? The chance of that is zero.
[Speaker B] He said at the beginning that it’s not according to our reckoning.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What he said there isn’t relevant to our issue. A lot of people answer it that way; I think that’s wrong. Because look, you can see here in this Jewish law: “This evaluation is not according to the number of merits and sins, but according to their magnitude. There is a merit that outweighs several sins, as it is said: ‘because some good thing was found in him.’ And there is a sin that outweighs several merits, as it is said: ‘and one sinner destroys much good.’ And they are weighed only according to the knowledge of the God of knowledge, and He knows how merits are arranged against sins.” So some people want to argue: you see, here you don’t know the calculation, and it actually could come out equal. But that doesn’t answer the question. Because basically what Maimonides is saying here is that the total of my sins and merits is not a simple arithmetic sum, but a weighted sum. It’s different here, and therefore I could even write some mathematical expression for it. I’d say: you go over all the commandments and transgressions, but you total them with weighting. The sum of every transgression times its weight, the sum of every commandment times its weight, and then I compare one against the other. But even when you define weighted sums, the chance that they come out identical is exactly the same chance. It’s still zero. There’s no difference at all. In the end, the chance that two such complicated sums over the course of a year come out exactly equal is simply negligible. In Jewish law we follow the majority; here it’s not even a majority, here it’s just one hundred percent. So what—why should I even worry that maybe I’m intermediate? There’s no chance at all that I’m intermediate. On Rosh Hashanah, whatever happened happened; after that I can go to the beach. Or whoever wants to enjoy himself can stay at home in the air conditioning. What do I have to worry about, and why should I repent and work until Yom Kippur? And ostensibly we assume that all of us are in the category of intermediates, right? After all, everyone is apparently called upon to do these things during the Ten Days of Repentance in order to reach Yom Kippur and receive atonement. Why? On Rosh Hashanah the story was already decreed, either for good or for bad, and the chance that I’m intermediate is zero. How are we supposed to relate to that?
Here I want to bring two possible explanations that I know of that appear in the later authorities (Acharonim), and I think each one assumes a different premise about the concept of repentance. The question I asked on Maimonides—my goal is not to answer that question. It’s only didactic, in order to present two directions for resolving it, and those two directions are really going to be my topic. So the first direction: there’s a book called Emek Berakha, by Rabbi Pomeranchik, a student of the Brisker Rav, who died young. He was in Petah Tikva in the 1950s, I think, when he died. He left several books behind. One of them is Emek Berakha. Now he explains—this is an answer that circulates in yeshivas; I once heard it in the name of Rabbi Aharon Kotler, but that’s where I found it written down. And he says as follows. He says that basically on Rosh Hashanah… if on Rosh Hashanah I came out intermediate, righteous, or wicked—let’s say intermediate—then that is my status regarding the year that ended. However, judgment is suspended until Yom Kippur. If I repent, then some of the sins of the previous year are erased, and therefore by the time I reach Yom Kippur I’m righteous. That’s why repentance helps. We asked: why does only repentance help, and not doing more commandments? Because if you do more commandments, those commandments already belong to the new year. We’re already in the year after Rosh Hashanah, in the new year, so that can’t be placed on the scale of the previous year. On Rosh Hashanah our judgment is determined regarding what happened with us in the year that passed, 5780. This coming Rosh Hashanah will judge our state in 5780. Commandments that I do on the 4th of Tishrei already belong to 5781, so for those I’ll be judged on Rosh Hashanah of 5782. Therefore no commandment done during the Ten Days of Repentance will help change the decree of Rosh Hashanah. Only if I repent will it help. Why? Because repentance has a special property: it erases sins that were done in the previous year, it removes them from the scale, and then it can turn me from intermediate into righteous regarding the previous year. That’s the claim. Truthfully, it’s a sharp and clever answer.
[Speaker F] That still doesn’t answer—it still doesn’t answer the question that the probability of being intermediate is completely tiny. To that he didn’t respond. Right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He answers the question why only repentance helps and not doing other commandments. So indeed the difficulty remains: what are the odds of being intermediate? And in a moment I’ll explain that according to his approach that difficulty gets much stronger. But beyond that, there’s still something problematic here. From the Holy One, blessed be He, I would expect more—sorry for speaking so directly. In the end, I arrive at Rosh Hashanah and I’m found to be intermediate. Someone who is intermediate is not sealed for death, because the Holy One, blessed be He, ostensibly inclines toward kindness. Surely He won’t seal me for death. But He also won’t seal me for life; He leaves me hanging in the balance. Now I did a few commandments during the Ten Days of Repentance. I reached Yom Kippur—commandments, not repentance. I got to Yom Kippur, and they tell me: look, these commandments belong to next year. But when I judge what you did last year, you were intermediate, and now you’re sealed for death because you didn’t repent. I say to the Holy One, blessed be He: look, if You would put everything I now have on the scales, I’d come out righteous. So what are You telling me? Office hours ended on Rosh Hashanah, and therefore You seal me for death. According to Maimonides I’m sealed immediately—I die at once in my wickedness. So I won’t even make it to next Rosh Hashanah. What is this bureaucratic pedantry? This bookkeeping where the Holy One, blessed be He, says, wait, wait, office hours are over; these commandments go in the other bag, and with this bag we remain as we are, so you’re sealed for death. Wait—but look at my actual state now. After all, You are sealing me for death on the 10th of Tishrei. On the 10th of Tishrei I am already in a state where I really am righteous—how can You seal me for death? Office hours are over? You’re here, You’re judging my fate—what does it mean that office hours are over? We’re here, we’re talking about it. So why are You ignoring the commandments that I did during the Ten Days of Repentance?
I’m presenting the question this way, but really the question is much broader. The picture that Emek Berakha presents is an incredibly formal and bookkeeping-oriented picture. Basically you count commandments, count sins, if you’re tied then you’re intermediate. Office hours ended; if you repent, then you can take something out of the bag. If you don’t repent, you’re finished. Did you do other commandments? Fine, next year we’ll open another bag—but office hours are over. This is a kind of judging that I find hard to accept as the way the Holy One, blessed be He, actually determines people’s fates. It’s not serious. I wouldn’t do that.
[Speaker C] Why? It doesn’t sound fair, Rabbi?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, because in the end You’re sentencing me to death in a state where in fact I’m righteous by Your own criteria. After all, right now, on the 10th of Tishrei, my commandments outnumber my sins—only some of them were done after the 1st of Tishrei. So what? You sentence to death someone who is essentially righteous by Your own criteria? That isn’t fair. Just because office hours ended? What would you say to a clerk who told you something like that while he was still there? Fine, if the clerk isn’t there, then okay, there’s no one to talk to, he went home, he also has to eat lunch. But no—he’s still there. And you say to him, wait, wait, wait, listen, I’m losing the… I’m going to die. Right, and he says, but we distribute those medicines only until one o’clock. Meaning that’s it, office hours are over, nothing can be done, die now, and next year come back and I’ll give you the medicine and then you’ll live again—and that’s for the resurrection of the dead. I don’t know exactly what. What would you say about such a clerk? I’d hang him.
[Speaker C] I’m just clarifying: there wouldn’t be a problem if both happened at the same time, the judgment and the decree.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, because then it’s okay—at some point you have to draw the line, so the Holy One, blessed be He, warned me that the line passes on Rosh Hashanah. I should have taken into account that I needed to arrive at Rosh Hashanah in the proper state. But here the Holy One, blessed be He, tells me: look, your judgment remains suspended until Yom Kippur; on Yom Kippur I will judge. Now I come to Him on Yom Kippur—office hours are over, sorry, which means you are sentenced to death. And I’m intermediate at most; even by the bureaucratic criteria I’m intermediate. I did a number of commandments equal to the number of sins. By the real criteria I’m actually righteous, because after all I also did a few more commandments—maybe I even did them properly together with repentance. And for that You kill me? Listen, it’s not serious. Okay, so it’s sharp, it’s clever, it’s nice, it resolves the difficulty elegantly—but somehow, I don’t know, I’m not buying it. That’s one direction.
Another direction appears in Siftei Chaim by Rabbi Chaim Friedlander, the mashgiach of Ponevezh. So Rabbi Chaim Friedlander writes there that basically—and this is the point—he has a completely different picture from the picture of Emek Berakha in the essential sense. It’s not just another answer, and that’s why I’m bringing them both. He basically argues that the state of intermediate or righteous starts from my second question. Again, I’m reconstructing him now, and that reconstruction begins from my second question: how can there even be such a thing as an intermediate person? What are the odds that the weighted sum Maimonides describes lands on exactly the same total? You can’t get that exact even in Jewish law. And this is called in the hands of Heaven, not in the hands of man, even though these are commandments and sins that people choose; still, the exactness is in the hands of Heaven. So you can’t get that exact—how can there be an intermediate person?
So Rabbi Chaim Friedlander says like this: intermediate, righteous, and wicked are not a sum, not even a weighted sum, of commandments and sins. When Maimonides writes there that this judgment is according to the judgment of the God of knowledge and we do not know the weight of a transgression and a commandment, he does not mean a weighted sum, what I described before—yes, sigma over x-sub-i times a-sub-i: commandment x1 times its weight a1, x2 times weight a2, and so on. Not a weighted sum. The point is that the Holy One, blessed be He, looks at me as a whole. He says to Himself: where does this Jew stand? Broadly speaking, is he heading in a positive direction—is he a positive person? Then he is righteous. Is he a negative person? Then he is wicked. Is he someone sitting on the fence, who still hasn’t decided what direction he’s taking in life? Then he is intermediate. It’s not the number of commandments and sins, but the question of what my basic direction in life is. Am I fundamentally striving to do good? Then I’m righteous. The difficulty was that this isn’t the plain meaning of the words. Just one second.
[Speaker B] If fundamentally—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If fundamentally I strive to do good, then I’m righteous. If fundamentally I strive to do evil, then I’m wicked. Okay, now it could be that a righteous person has more sins than commandments. “Whoever is greater than his fellow, his evil inclination is greater than his.” So I have a strong evil inclination and I don’t manage to overcome it, and I fall many times, but basically I strive to do good—that’s my direction in life. So I’m righteous and I’m sealed for life, even though the number of my sins, including the weighted total with their severity, is greater than the number of my commandments. And the reverse as well: if my basic direction is negative, but my craving for honor and publicity also causes me to give lots of charity and things like that, so my evil inclination led me to do many commandments. Okay, so the number of my commandments is greater than the number of my sins, but fundamentally I’m a negative person. So the moment I’m a negative person, I’m wicked, I’m sealed for death, and it doesn’t matter even if the number of my commandments is greater than the number of my sins. In the place where I’m sitting on the fence—one foot here, one foot there, as the poet says—then I’m intermediate. I have no basic direction. Sometimes I’m like this, sometimes like that. You know, like the comedy trio says: the child goes with father, goes with mother, and Shaike says, I don’t know, I went with the guys. Okay, meaning sometimes this way, sometimes that way, I have no defined direction in life. In such a state, that’s what’s called intermediate—someone who hasn’t chosen a meaningful direction in life. That’s Rabbi Chaim Friedlander’s claim. As for the question of how much this fits into Maimonides’ language, I agree with the remark, although it may fit. I’m not ruling it out. I agree that it’s not the plain meaning of Maimonides’ language, but that doesn’t matter—the reasoning certainly sounds right.
[Speaker G] Can I suggest a solution? I didn’t understand. No, I just have some solution for how this fits into Maimonides’ language. It could be that the measuring is done in a kind of quantum way. Suppose that instead of every commandment having a number that could be any number on the continuum of rational numbers, there are simply levels. You can get, say, only one point for every twenty or thirty commandments. No half-points. And then there are lots of intermediates, because a great many fall with equality.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then I go back to the bookkeeping question. Why do it that way? Measure truly. What, the Holy One, blessed be He, can’t do the calculation?
[Speaker G] Why define my state artificially?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why bring quantums into this?
[Speaker G] Conceptually I’m drawing on Rabbi Chaim Friedlander’s idea, because from his perspective this formal calculation is simply a way of representing the fact that the person is equal, even though he has a few more sins.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what I meant, really—leave aside the quantums—that’s what I basically meant. The possibility of fitting it into Maimonides is simply to say that the weighting of the commandments and sins is not measuring how much the commandment is worth, but how much it testifies to my spiritual state.
[Speaker G] Yes, but there is significance to that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The result is supposed to determine what my spiritual state is—whether I’m righteous or wicked.
[Speaker G] Yes, but there’s still a difference between what I’m saying and what you’re saying. Because according to your premise, there could be a person who committed only sins and is still righteous, right? Because his direction is positive. No, but according to what I’m saying, not so. According to my scoring method, that can’t happen.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but why get to that scoring method? There’s no logic in it.
[Speaker G] It explains the spirit that emerges from the plain meaning of Maimonides’ words, that one does count majority and minority.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That spirit maybe explains Maimonides’ words, gives them context.
[Speaker G] No, but not just the words. It’s the way the Holy One, blessed be He, determines your direction. He bases it on actions, because it makes a lot of sense to base it on actions and not just on some detached idea.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, to base it on actions as an indication of my state—but the Holy One, blessed be He, can know my state even if in the end I never managed to cope in any situation and I have only sins. He can still understand from that what my true state is. After all, He has no problem discovering that. So why does He need all kinds of mathematical models that limit Him? Let it really reflect what my state is.
[Speaker G] I think the claim is that actions have an importance that can’t be waived; it doesn’t matter that your intentions are good.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s important and one can argue about it. It doesn’t seem logical to me, but fine. Either way, these are the two directions that come up in this context. So Rabbi Chaim Friedlander says—Maimonides—one second, no, Rabbi Chaim Friedlander says that according to his approach it’s also clear why only repentance helps and not doing more commandments. If you do more commandments, what exactly will that help? It will increase your number of commandments. But the question is what your spiritual direction is, not how many commandments you did. But notice that what follows from his approach is that if I repented, why does that help? There too he does not explain it like Emek Berakha. Emek Berakha explains that if I repented, that erased some sins from the scale. Rabbi Chaim Friedlander understands the concept of repentance differently. It’s not a formal concept of repentance that erases sins I committed. I have a sin, I performed the details of repentance for it, and it’s erased. Repentance means changing spiritual direction. If you changed your spiritual direction, you chose a positive direction, then you really are judged for life. But that’s only if you repented, not if you just did a few more commandments and increased the number of commandments on the scale. The concept of repentance Rabbi Chaim Friedlander is talking about is not the concept of repentance Emek Berakha is talking about. It’s not only a difference in the answer. It’s a different concept of repentance. Emek Berakha describes repentance as a formal matter. I committed a sin, I do abandoning the sin, regret, confession, acceptance for the future, and the sin is erased. Everything’s fine, move on to the next sin, do the procedure, that too is erased. I have a procedure for erasing sins. Rabbi Chaim Friedlander, by contrast, speaks of repentance as a mechanism for changing one’s basic spiritual direction. I turn from intermediate into righteous. That is called repentance.
[Speaker B] But it’s still not clear why, if he doesn’t repent and didn’t do anything, they kill him.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. That I didn’t answer. The point is, first, how can there be an intermediate person, and second, why does only repentance help. Okay? The question is why they really kill him. Fine, you can discuss that. Maybe it’s what the Lechem Mishneh says: that for not repenting for that sin itself you are judged, and that depends on the question whether there is a commandment to repent, perhaps, although even if there isn’t a commandment, it could still be that they have a claim against you if you didn’t repent. But we’ll discuss that later on. In any case, the important point for our purposes is—leave aside Maimonides and how this fits into him and whether it fits into him. Now I’m saying this—not Maimonides, okay? I’m saying that there are basically two mechanisms of repentance. And ostensibly what appears as a dispute between Rabbi Chaim Friedlander and Emek Berakha, I claim is not a dispute. There are two mechanisms. There is a repentance mechanism that is a bookkeeping mechanism, a mechanism that works with defined procedures and with counting—the formalities of sins and weighted commandments, it doesn’t matter, but still counting. And repentance is a procedure whose purpose is to erase a sin that I committed; the Holy One, blessed be He, allows me to erase sins, to rewrite history. Okay. And the second possibility, or another mechanism of repentance, says that repentance is a change of spiritual direction. Okay? That’s the claim.
Now I want to show this. The Maharal writes as follows. There is a Talmudic passage in tractate Rosh Hashanah 17a. The Talmud says: “‘The Lord, the Lord’—I am He before a person sins, and I am He after a person sins and repents.” There they go over the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy: “The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious,” and so on. So what is “the Lord, the Lord”? Those first two words: “I am He before a person sins, and I am He after a person sins and repents.” So the attribute of “the Lord, the Lord” is basically responsible for repentance.
Now the Talmud in Shevuot 39a goes through all the other attributes and reaches “and He cleanses.” And then it says: what is “and He cleanses”? But isn’t it written, “and He cleanses, but does not cleanse”? That verse is needed for Rabbi Elazar’s teaching. As it was taught: Rabbi Elazar says, it is impossible to say “He cleanses,” since it is already said “does not cleanse”; and it is impossible to say “does not cleanse,” since it is already said “He cleanses.” How so? He cleanses those who repent, and He does not cleanse those who do not repent. So the Talmud says that the attribute of “and He cleanses”—why does it say “He cleanses, but does not cleanse”? He cleanses those who repent and does not cleanse those who do not repent. Or in other words, says the Maharal, the attribute of “and He cleanses” is also an attribute responsible for repentance.
So the Maharal says: then why do we need two attributes in the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy that are both responsible for repentance? Both “the Lord, the Lord” and “and He cleanses.” That reminds me of a nice little joke. I was in—there’s a Passover Haggadah of Brisk called MiBeit Levi, and there when it brings the piyut “Who Knows Thirteen?”—yes, what are the thirteen? It says these are thirteen middaya. What does “thirteen middaya” mean? If you look in Hasidic Haggadot, I’m sure in almost all of them you’ll find that it means the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy: “The Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious.” What do you think appears in the Brisk Haggadah? The thirteen hermeneutical principles by which the Torah is expounded. You ask why it says “thirteen measures.” Anyway, that’s just in parentheses.
So the Maharal asks why there are really two. Wait—can I take a question?
[Speaker C] Yes. Why didn’t the Sages ever consider interpreting it in a literary way? “He cleanses, but does not cleanse,” in the sense that we understand it to mean “does not cleanse.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, that’s just a question about the exposition. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not dealing with that Talmudic passage right now; I don’t know. Look there in the Talmud. But for our purposes, what the Talmud there says is that the attribute of “and He cleanses” is also responsible for repentance, like the attribute of “the Lord, the Lord.” And the Maharal asks: why do we need two attributes? So he gives a very strange answer. He says that—can one share, or what?
[Speaker B] If it’s possible to share the screen, or is it not critical?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m not bringing the source; I don’t have the source in front of me. I can look a little at the summary I made—I’ll send it to you, I’ll upload it to the site, and then you can also see the summary there. There’s no point summarizing it so you can read along with me; that’s not it. So the Maharal argues in Netiv HaTeshuvah, chapter 6, that the attribute of “and He cleanses” deals with someone who repents only for some of his sins, while “the Lord, the Lord” deals with a person who repents for all his sins. Now on its face that’s very strange. Why is it strange? Because the question still remains: why do you need these two attributes? Just repeat the attribute of “and He cleanses” a few times until you cover all the sins. Sorry that today I’m working like a mathematician; my whole goal is to show that this is not mathematics. So I’m trying to make the mathematics look absurd, okay? Just so you understand the context. In other words, the point is: this quantitative difference is what determines it? So if I repented for half my sins, that’s the attribute of “and He cleanses”? Then I’ll just do “and He cleanses” twice and that becomes “the Lord, the Lord.” Why do I need the attribute of “the Lord, the Lord” separately?
I think what he means is something completely different. Let’s try to think for a moment what the process of repentance actually is. The process of repentance: abandoning the sin, regret, acceptance for the future, and verbal confession. You have to say it out loud. Now let’s focus for a moment on regret, okay? When I regret—suppose I selected on the Sabbath of Noah, okay, in the year we’re dealing with. I selected on the Sabbath. And I regret that as part of the repentance process. Am I regretting that I performed an act of selecting? What is bad about performing an act of selecting? I regret that I did an action that the Holy One, blessed be He, prohibited. That’s what I regret, right? Not the act of selecting itself. What’s the problem—that I moved my hands and selected? Obviously the regret is not directed at the action. It is directed at the fact that the action is contrary to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, that I committed the transgression involved in it. I regret that I committed this transgression of selecting. And I ask: deep regret, full regret—can it even be about a single sin? Obviously not. Conceptually.
[Speaker B] Unless it’s a certain kind of sin—there are sins like murder, for example. A person who murdered—is that only because God said so?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Otherwise it isn’t repentance. Repentance is only repentance about the religious dimension. Moral repentance is another whole topic. Here I’m dealing with repentance—
[Speaker H] There could be—there could be repentance not for the violation of the command itself, but because the command expresses some idea that is deeply disappointing, and he really wants to repent for—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —for having missed the idea.
[Speaker H] The idea.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Very nice, but in the end a commandment is constituted by a command.
[Speaker H] Not only the command. It’s not like if I tell my son, if you do this you’ll get candy, then it’s purely a command. In commandments there’s something beyond commandment and command.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Of course there is. There is, and we’ll get to that as well. Of course there is. But obviously part of the transgression—I’ll come back later precisely to that distinction between the two parts in every commandment and transgression. But obviously part of the issue is violating the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. Or if you want, even in your language, the regret is over the fact that I did something wrong. Leave aside the command. Fine? But even when I trapped on the Sabbath of Vayera—I’m refreshing the examples a bit; one time I select, one time I trap—so when I trapped on the Sabbath of Vayera, it’s the same regret. There too I did something wrong, or something against the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. So no, no, no—I regret only the selecting on the Sabbath of Noah. The trapping in Vayera was excellent, that I don’t regret at all, that was wonderful. With that I’m sticking. You understand that this isn’t serious. In other words, someone who regrets regrets the very fact that he was not okay. The very fact that he defied the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. So by definition, when you regret, you are in fact regretting all the sins. There is no regret for only some of the sins; there is no such creature. It is simply not conceptually defined. Not psychologically—conceptually. The moment you regret, you regret the very fact that you did something wrong or something against the command, as Chaim said earlier—Chaim, right? Something wrong or something against the command, whichever formulation you want. But still, that applies equally to all the commandments. There is no such thing as regret over one sin or over five sins. The moment you truly regret, regret all the way through—if you regret all the way through, then you regret all the sins. There is no such thing as partial regret.
[Speaker C] So then, Rabbi, isn’t it more fitting to have a certain kind of regret for certain types of sins? Let’s say a person sinned in the same sin twice, once for one reason because he was wicked, and another time for another reason because he was forgetful. Shouldn’t he repent differently in the two cases?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the regret won’t be different. The treatment of it, the acceptance for the future—or the treatment involved in acceptance for the future—could be different. Because the question of what caused the sin, the analysis of what caused the sin, will help me ensure that in the future it won’t happen. But the regret itself over the fact that I committed a sin—what difference does it make why I came to it? I regret the very fact that I came to do something wrong. So regret in its essence is regret over all sins—or if I phrase it more generally, repentance in the basic sense, deep repentance, full repentance, is repentance that by definition is over all sins. That’s what the Maharal is saying.
What then is the repentance of “and He cleanses”? That’s the great novelty. So look, this is what the Talmud says there in Shevuot: “He cleanses, but does not cleanse”—He cleanses those who repent and does not cleanse those who do not repent. Does that need explanation? No, that’s obvious. He cleanses those who repent and doesn’t cleanse those who do not repent. If I repented for this sin, I’m cleansed of it; if I didn’t repent for another sin, then I’m not atoned for it. Well, that’s obvious—why do I need to be told that? That’s not what it’s talking about. The attribute of “and He cleanses” says that there is a repentance that can apply to one sin and not to another. Consequently, one can also gain atonement for one sin and not for another. The novelty is not that if I repented for sin A and not for sin B, then my repentance for sin A is accepted and for sin B it is not. That doesn’t need a novelty. The novelty is that there is such a thing as repenting only for sin A and not for sin B. Because repentance, conceptually, really addresses all sins. So what is the attribute of “and He cleanses”? The attribute of “and He cleanses” is bookkeeping repentance. What does that mean? I have a list of sins, like they usually draw it for us, right? I have a list of sins—say I made a list of everything I did. Now I go through sin A: selecting on the Sabbath of Noah. Fine—regret, acceptance for the future, abandoning the sin, regret, acceptance for the future, verbal confession, I check the box, I erase that sin, move on to trapping on the Sabbath of Vayera. Some honoring of parents in Lech Lecha, after that I don’t know what—do whatever you like. Okay, in the list of sins I go through each one, perform the procedure of Rav Saadia Gaon, go through the stages of repentance, and erase each sin one by one from the balance. That is the repentance of “and He cleanses.” And therefore the Talmud says: the repentance of “and He cleanses” is a repentance that cleanses those who repent and does not cleanse those who do not repent. Why? Because it is not a complete repentance; it is a repentance that can relate only to part of the sins. So for that part He will cleanse you, and for another part He will not cleanse you. That is what the Maharal says.
And then really what—wait, let me explain, I’ll explain—no, let me finish for a moment, afterward maybe it will settle the questions too. Maybe yes, maybe no. The point is that what I said earlier, that full regret is by definition over all sins—what does that mean? What do you do with regret in the kind of repentance called “and He cleanses”? After all, if I did the four stages of repentance, one of them is regret, and regret by definition is over all sins. So how can repentance of the “and He cleanses” type exist? The point is this: in a case where I am not really regretting fully. For example, I just don’t want to receive the Gehinnom that comes with the matter. Then it could be that I regret a severe sin, while a minor one—okay, not so terrible. Or something like that. Or this one was worth it to me, that one wasn’t; the punishment is too severe; here you can start making distinctions. Then you can have partial regret. When the regret is not full, not deep, you didn’t turn yourself around in the process of repentance, it can also relate only to some of the sins—as a kind of procedure, and the regret is really some formal act: yes, I regret it, it’s not okay, you’re right—I didn’t really turn over inside. We all know that after processes of repentance, including regret, we return to the same sins. How does that happen? It happens because we didn’t really turn around in an essential way. Regret of that sort, or repentance of that sort, is what is called the repentance of “and He cleanses,” and it can be done only for some sins and not all of them. And the novelty of the two different attributes within the Attributes of Mercy—“the Lord, the Lord” and “and He cleanses”—is that there are two mechanisms of repentance.
And I claim that these are the same two mechanisms of repentance that I defined earlier. There is the repentance mechanism of Emek Berakha, which is a bookkeeping repentance mechanism. I have a procedure defined by Rav Saadia Gaon, and I can go sin by sin and erase it from the scale. And that is what Emek Berakha says: if I did that, a sin was erased from my scale and therefore I am judged for life—I became righteous with respect to the previous year, because one sin came off the scale; I repented for it. What Rabbi Chaim Friedlander says—what we discussed earlier—he is speaking about a different kind of repentance: an inner reversal. I turn from intermediate to righteous. What does that mean? I am in a state where I am no longer willing to violate the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, or to do something wrong. So of course that is repentance of the “the Lord, the Lord” type. That is repentance done for all sins. Okay? And therefore there Rabbi Chaim Friedlander says: if I did that repentance, I am judged for life on Yom Kippur because I really am righteous. It doesn’t matter how many sins and how many commandments I did. Even if I add more commandments, it won’t help; without doing repentance, without the inner reversal, it won’t help.
And I think that’s also what the Maharal meant, and that’s also what the Maharal says: that these are two different attributes inside the same list of the Thirteen Attributes. Therefore it’s not a dispute. Each is talking about a different mechanism. There are two mechanisms of repentance. One mechanism is the formal mechanism of Rav Saadia Gaon and of Emek Berakha. The second mechanism is the essential mechanism of Rabbi Chaim Friedlander and of “the Lord, the Lord”—“and He cleanses” and “the Lord, the Lord.” These are two mechanisms of repentance. One can work with either of them, both with “and He cleanses” and with—Shlomo, did you want to comment on something?
[Speaker B] Yes, now I understand.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay.
[Speaker C] Rabbi, Rabbi Eliash, two questions. First, why should such a repentance be valid—the bookkeeping repentance? It doesn’t sound serious at all.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. It’s an act of kindness by the Holy One, blessed be He: that someone who at least does some action, shows some degree of attention—not all of us succeed in making inner revolutions, so He says, fine, I’m willing to forgive a certain sin if you performed the procedure for it. You tried. You didn’t reach deep and fundamental inner transformations—fine, I’ll erase that sin for you. But then do that work for each and every sin. Okay?
[Speaker C] So you really have to do it specifically for each and every sin, and not for all of them together?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. Those are the implications I’ll get to in just a moment.
[Speaker C] Okay. And second, you said that in the second one, one of the differences between the first and second is that in the second you won’t return to your wickedness. But Maimonides says that only repentance—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —of that kind is valid, such that “the Knower of hidden things will testify concerning him that he will never return to this sin again.” After all, the question of the later authorities is famous: we all return to this sin, most of us at least, or many of us. So what does it mean? At that moment, he will never return to that sin again. That’s it. That is the inner reversal.
[Speaker C] So only the second is like that. According to Maimonides, the first one, which doesn’t contain that element, isn’t halakhically valid, because you’ll return—even at that moment.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. If I undergo an inner reversal, then at that moment I will not return to that sin ever again. But even if I underwent an inner reversal, I can sin afterward, as I referred to earlier.
[Speaker C] Yes, I understand. So you’re saying why the first, without the inner reversal, should be valid—I understand. But the second one doesn’t even have that same element that at that moment he won’t return.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s a special kindness, as I said in the analysis earlier. A special kindness from the Holy One, blessed be He, that even though we didn’t undergo a full inner reversal, but only carried out a formal procedure, the Holy One, blessed be He, says to us: fine, then I forgive you for a sin for which you did the procedure, beyond the strict letter of the law. Yes, correct, that is a special kindness. That is the novelty of the attribute of “and He cleanses,” that He cleanses those who repent and does not cleanse those who do not repent.
[Speaker C] Wow. Okay, then.
[Speaker G] I didn’t understand how regret over a single sin is possible. What does that mean? Conceptually, how is that possible?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Simply—Shlomo’s question—full regret. You say, I selected on the Sabbath of Noah, okay? I’m not really looking into the depth—how did I come to do something wrong, or something against the command? Well, I slipped there, really that wasn’t okay, I regret it. Okay, acceptance for the future, verbal confession, and we move on.
[Speaker G] But if you really regret it, then you—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Regret everything you selected. So “really regret”—there are different levels of depth in the process of regret. It’s not really regret. There are—
[Speaker G] But it’s binary. No, there’s a conceptual problem here, like you explained before.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s my claim—that it’s not binary. It’s not binary.
[Speaker G] The level of pain you feel is not binary, that’s true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can be very distressed—no, the depth of regret, not the level of pain. The cognitive depth, not the psychological depth.
[Speaker G] But what is cognitive depth? The question is whether you would do it again or not. That’s a binary question; it can only have—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No. In a case where you enter a consciousness in which it is impossible to violate the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, that is full regret. If you say, listen, there I wasn’t okay, I understand that, really not okay, okay, I moved on—that is not full regret. Not psychologically—cognitively. No, it isn’t. Why not? Because for example it’s only that I want to avoid punishment and not really—
[Speaker G] So that’s something else. You’re talking about the motives for the regret.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Many considerations, including motives, distinguish between these two kinds of regret, even though motive-based considerations—
[Speaker G] So now you’re adding another novelty: that someone who regrets only because of fear of punishment cannot do this repentance?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I already said that additional novelty earlier. I said that sometimes I regret a certain severe transgression because I’m not willing to endure that punishment. Fine, there can be many things that cause the act I’m doing not to be truly deep all the way through, not to be full. A human being is a complex creature. There is no such thing as “he does regret” or “he doesn’t regret.” It’s not binary. There are different levels of regret. And therefore when you do regret on a superficial level—I’ll talk about this later—this is a continuum of levels. Not only is it not binary, it’s a whole continuum.
[Speaker G] I have no problem with it being a continuum, but I think the continuum lies on the emotional level and not—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t think so.
[Speaker G] I just want to suggest another solution that you didn’t mention: that the difference lies only in acceptance for the future. That is, the regret is the same regret in both, only the person is incapable now of committing himself not to commit any transgression anymore; he can only commit himself not to repeat this one. So only the sin of that transgression is erased for him. But he is incapable of committing himself—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But if he’s incapable, then why not do “and He cleanses” 613 times instead of the attribute of “the Lord, the Lord”?
[Speaker G] Yes, that’s what—okay, so as a solution to that question, one could say that there are really two novelties. If only one attribute had been written, we would have taken the smaller novelty, that one can do it only for—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “And He cleanses, but does not cleanse” — that it should write only “And He cleanses, but does not cleanse.” “And He cleanses, but does not cleanse” cannot be explained by the great repentance. It’s like resident and hired laborer in tractate Kiddushin 4. If you had only one, you would apply it to resident and not to hired laborer. Yes, fine. In any case, for our purposes, the claim is essentially that the Holy One, blessed be He, opens before us two channels of repentance. One channel is a formal channel. And that’s the channel the Emek Berakhah is talking about. If you carry out the procedure for a particular transgression, it gets erased. There is another channel, which is an essential channel. You truly become a different person. There’s no point in turning around and judging you for something that you no longer are. You are already a different person, “I am not the same person,” as Maimonides says — we’ll still get to that. Okay? There’s no point in judging you for an earlier phase of yourself that has already passed. Therefore, this works globally across all the transgressions, and that is the attribute of “The Lord, the Lord.” As opposed to the attribute of “And He cleanses, but does not cleanse.”
Now, I asked earlier that the Emek Berakhah presents the Holy One, blessed be He, in a somewhat low-level accounting way. After all, I appear before Him when I am, by his definitions, righteous. So how can He seal me for death if I did a few more commandments during the Ten Days of Repentance? What, office hours are over? Now I’m saying: the answer is yes, office hours are over. What does that mean? You chose the accounting-style repentance channel. Right? That’s what you chose. You didn’t do complete repentance. You did accounting-style repentance. If you chose that channel, then we deal with you through that channel. In that channel you work according to the rules. There are the four stages of repentance. You do it for each and every transgression. A transgression you dealt with, you dealt with; a transgression you didn’t deal with, you didn’t deal with. Did you do it on time? Excellent. Didn’t you do it on time? Then you’re done for. You’re working with the formal rules, so these are the formal rules. And that is what’s called the laws of repentance — the formal rules.
If you go by the path of the Divrei Chaim — of the Siftei Chaim, sorry, of Rabbi Chaim Friedlander — then in fact that’s not true. There it doesn’t matter what you did and when you did it. If you are now a different person, then you are a different person, so obviously you are judged according to what you are now. “As he is there,” so to speak. And not according to what you were before. So therefore my complaint against the Emek Berakhah — that he basically turns the Holy One, blessed be He, into a bookkeeper — is actually no complaint at all. On the contrary, that’s the whole idea. The whole point of his repentance mechanism is that there is a repentance that is formal, accounting-style repentance. And that one has to be done according to the rules. If you did it according to the rules, excellent. If you didn’t do it according to the rules, then no. He cleanses those who repent, and does not cleanse one who does not repent. But “The Lord, the Lord,” which is essential repentance — there, if you did it, then you did it. Everything is erased, that’s it. You don’t have to go over every transgression, you don’t need anything. In a moment I’ll show you that you don’t need anything. I’ll bring you two implications of this.
The Talmud in Avodah Zarah 17 tells about Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya. They said about Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya — let me share this.
[Speaker I] Rabbi, we can’t hear you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I’m not speaking. There’s some feature of the interface around me that when I’m not speaking it doesn’t produce sound. Everyone with his own craziness. Here’s the Gemara. “And it was taught: They said about Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya that he did not leave a single prostitute in the world with whom he had not had relations. Once he heard of one prostitute in the cities by the sea who charged… Just as this breath does not return to its place, so Elazar ben Dordaya will not be accepted in repentance. He went and sat between two mountains and hills. He said: Mountains and hills, ask mercy for me. They said to him: Before we ask for you, let us ask for ourselves, as it is said: ‘For the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed.’” Fine, that doesn’t work. He said: “Heaven and earth, ask mercy for me.” They said: “Before we ask for you, let us ask for ourselves, as it is said: ‘For the heavens shall vanish like smoke, and the earth shall wear out like a garment.’” Sun and moon, ask mercy for me; stars and constellations, etc. He said: “The matter depends only…” He said: “The matter depends only on me.” He placed his head between his knees and cried bitterly until his soul departed. A heavenly voice came forth and said: “Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is destined for the life of the World to Come.”
All right, now they answer something about the Gemara above. Rabbi wept and said: “There are those who acquire their world in many years, and there are those who acquire their world in a single moment.” And Rabbi said: “Not only are penitents accepted, they are even called ‘Rabbi.’”
Now the interesting question is: while Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya was crying there — “The matter depends only on me,” he placed his head between his knees and cried bitterly — he still had a lot of work to do before placing his head between his knees and crying bitterly. He was supposed to go over all the transgressions he had committed, which was probably not a negligible number. And for each of them, go through the four stages of repentance according to Rav Saadia Gaon, right? Abandoning the sin, remorse, resolution for the future, verbal confession. And only after about two years of carrying out that procedure could he have placed his head between his knees and cried bitterly. The Gemara certainly doesn’t imply that he did all those stages, right? And still he is accepted, his repentance is accepted immediately, and not only that, he is called “Rabbi.” Not enough that he acquires his world in one moment — he is also called “Rabbi.” And over this Rabbi cried, right? I, Rabbi, devote my whole life to Torah, and this Jew enjoyed himself his whole life; one hour he cries, and immediately they call him “Rabbi” too. Just like me.
Do you know the famous Lithuanian joke about Rabbi Shlomo Kluger? Rabbi Shlomo Kluger was the rabbi of Brody. Once, two Jews came to him from some village near Brody — Brody and the surrounding area, yes? So two Jews came to him from some village to ask a Jewish law question. He sits and thinks, thinks, thinks, searches, doesn’t find it. He says to them: Listen, it’s a hard question, I don’t have an answer. Fine, they return to their village mournful and downcast. They go to the village rabbi, some young kollel fellow, and say to him: Listen, we have some question — what do you say, maybe you have some answer for us? He goes into the room, and after an hour or so comes out and gives them the answer. The fellows are amazed — this young guy answered what Rabbi Shlomo Kluger couldn’t answer. They return to Rabbi Shlomo Kluger and tell him the story. Wow… such a gem in a village next to us, and I didn’t know? Call him to me.
So the fellow comes to Rabbi Shlomo Kluger trembling. Rabbi Shlomo Kluger says to him: Listen, on that question I sat seven clean days and couldn’t find an answer. I heard that you went into a room for an hour and came out with an answer. So this young fellow says to Rabbi Shlomo Kluger: Listen, Rabbi, I’ll tell you what happened there. I went into the room completely at a loss. I cried before the Holy One, blessed be He, that He should open my eyes to this answer; there was no chance I’d reach it on my own. Then my eyes fell on some book that stood out to me on the Jewish bookshelf. He pulls out the book, opens it — exactly! It was some responsa that answered exactly this question. So Rabbi Shlomo Kluger said to him: Get out of my sight. I thought you knew how to learn; all you know how to do is cry. In short, that’s a Lithuanian joke.
In any case, Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is the rabbi who taught… Rabbi was Lithuanian, yes? He cries over Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya — he cries for Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya. He sat for one hour, cried bitterly, and became “Rabbi.” I work on this all my life, study Torah all my life, and this Jew enjoyed himself the whole time. One hour of bitter crying — yes, apparently the Hasidim are right after all. He can play the flute on Yom Kippur and his repentance is accepted and his prayer is accepted; you don’t have to be Rabbi for that.
[Speaker C] But wasn’t he already a rabbi before he committed all those transgressions?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They called him “Rabbi”? No.
[Speaker E] They called him “Rabbi.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Afterward, yes.
[Speaker C] So he wasn’t some other kind of person before?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The Gemara even… it doesn’t say “Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya.” Only afterward a heavenly voice came forth and said, “Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is destined for the life of the World to Come.” And over this Rabbi cries and says, “Not only that, but they call them ‘Rabbi.’” Meaning, he was appointed “Rabbi” after he did this.
I think, by the way, what actually happened here? We’ll return to this story. What happened here in this story? What happened is that Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya understood the depth of his spiritual condition, his lowliness, his spiritual state, and then he simply turned to all the heavenly bodies. Nothing worked. He understood: “The matter depends only on me.” He underwent an inner reversal — the great repentance of “The Lord, the Lord” — and he was atoned for. That’s it. He didn’t need to do all four stages of repentance of Rav Saadia Gaon. The four stages of repentance of Rav Saadia Gaon apply when you do the formal repentance, the halakhic one. There there are rules — what to do, what not to do, for what you receive atonement and for what you do not, there is also acceptance. All the rules according to the rules of the Association of Certified Public Accountants, okay? But if you do essential repentance, then it doesn’t depend on any rules. You don’t need to do the four stages of repentance or anything. If you repented and underwent an inner transformation, then you have atonement, even if you did nothing from the four stages. That is, remorse you probably did have, but you didn’t do anything formal regarding any particular sin, and still you were atoned for without any need for all the stages. The laws of repentance were not said about you.
I’ll bring you another proof. The Gemara in Kiddushin 49 says: “On condition that I am righteous — even if he is completely wicked, she is betrothed, perhaps he contemplated repentance in his heart.” Yes, someone betroths a woman and says, “Behold, you are betrothed to me on condition that I am righteous.” Now he is completely wicked, a first-rate one, publicly known as completely wicked. He gives a coin to a woman and says, “Behold, you are betrothed to me on condition that I am completely righteous.” Even though he is completely wicked, she is doubtfully betrothed. Why? Perhaps he contemplated repentance in his heart. By the way, the doubt is because maybe he contemplated it and maybe he didn’t, but on the side that we know he contemplated repentance in his heart, then she is certainly betrothed. It’s not that the contemplation only possibly helps; rather, the doubt is whether there was contemplation of repentance. But if there was contemplation of repentance, it certainly helps.
And again I ask: this Jew, while giving the ring, between the stage where he was a famous wicked person and the stage where he gave her the ring, while saying “Behold, you are betrothed to me,” managed — even though he was completely wicked, yes, like Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya — to go over all his transgressions: abandoning the sin, remorse, resolution for the future, and verbal confession for all the transgressions he committed? How did he suddenly become completely righteous? He didn’t do the stages of repentance at all. So why is she betrothed? Because the concern is that he did the essential repentance. Someone who did the essential repentance does not need to do the stages of repentance.
[Speaker G] I just want to note that even according to the accounting-style repentance, apparently you don’t need to specify every single sin if you committed it many times over.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but if he was completely wicked, we can presume that he did…
[Speaker G] So now it’s possible to reject both proofs. Yes, I understand, but if we want to be picky: with Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya we know only of one type of sin.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is fairly… maybe more, because maybe Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya really was only in matters of sexual transgression. I don’t know, maybe, although again I’m not sure, but maybe.
[Speaker G] And in the case of Kiddushin it’s a theoretical case; we aren’t talking…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So now you’re making an interpretive limitation in the Gemara in Kiddushin that this law of doubtful betrothal is true only for a person who is completely wicked in one transgression.
[Speaker G] Or two. Two is also fine. Or five.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We haven’t found anyone who makes that limitation.
[Speaker G] Fine, not finding someone doesn’t prove anything.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Everyone understands that there is no such limitation here. Any wicked person of any kind — it works, the betrothal works. And the question is why. And the answer I brought…
[Speaker C] Rabbi, this opens one huge door to “I will sin and then repent,” so to speak.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, we’ll get there, we’ll get to all the doors and to “I will sin and then repent,” everything, everything. Right now I’m just putting the players on the board. That’s what I’ll manage to do today. By “players” I mean the two paths of repentance.
In short, what I want to claim is the following claim: we have two channels of repentance. One channel is a formalistic channel, which works according to rules; it has laws of repentance, four stages. One can discuss whether their order matters, what the order is, whether each one is indispensable and to what extent it is indispensable. All these discussions are what is called the laws of repentance. The laws of repentance deal with the small formal repentance of the Emek ha-Shaveh. The thought of repentance — what I opened with, that there is some different kind of relation to the thought of repentance as opposed to the thought behind Grace after Meals. Okay? The thought of repentance — what appears at first glance to be the thought of repentance — is not the thought of repentance. It is a description of a different mechanism of repentance. The thought behind Grace after Meals is the thought that underlies the laws of Grace after Meals. The thought of repentance is not the thought that underlies the laws of repentance; rather, it is another channel of repentance, one that is not halakhic. It is a different channel; it is not the thought underlying the halakhic channel. It is an alternative channel, a non-halakhic channel.
Therefore, when Maimonides speaks about the laws of repentance, part of the laws of repentance speaks about the laws relevant to formal repentance — how to do it, what it atones for, when, in what order, and so on. Another part of his words, like “I am not the same person” and “he will never return to that sin again,” and so forth, speaks about the repentance that we may call the great repentance, or if you want, thought-based repentance. This is not the thought of repentance. It is an alternative to repentance, another alternative to repentance, which is not the small formal repentance.
Therefore the books Shaarei Teshuvah of Rabbenu Yonah, or Rabbi Kook’s book Orot HaTeshuvah, yes, or books of that kind — these are not books that come to explain the thought of repentance. Absolutely not, and it doesn’t even look that way. These books come to show you another mechanism of repentance, non-formal, which is generally much broader, much deeper, much greater, much more fundamental. This is not the repentance that the halakhic authorities are talking about when they say there are four stages of repentance. This is a different repentance. Not the philosophical foundation of the laws of repentance.
[Speaker E] It’s a different type of repentance, not the halakhic repentance.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It is found in Maimonides’ law book because Maimonides’ law book basically comes to describe all the mechanisms of repentance that exist. Part of that is the laws of repentance in the formal sense, and another part is a description of the other repentance mechanism, because one must know that even on the halakhic level, if you did that repentance, you don’t need to resort to all the laws of repentance described at the beginning. There are some hints in the Shulchan Arukh — one second — there are some hints in the Shulchan Arukh as well. Maybe I’ll get to that in one of the next classes.
After all, repentance has halakhic implications. For example, a ritual slaughterer or something like that who was disqualified from slaughtering — if he repented, he returns. If a witness was disqualified from testimony because of being wicked, if he repented, he returns. Now the question is: what repentance does he need to do? Does he need to do all four stages? There is evidence from the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and from the Shulchan Arukh that there are places where we see that if he did complete repentance, he does not need the stages of repentance. He returns and becomes fit for halakhic testimony. Meaning that the supposedly non-halakhic repentance has halakhic implications. There are halakhic ramifications to this repentance. Okay?
[Speaker E] And therefore Maimonides… what? Did I understand? Is this what is meant by “He dug a tunnel beneath the Throne of Glory”?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the question is: of which of the two repentances was that said? In Rabbenu Yonah apparently it is about…
[Speaker E] The essential repentance.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I think too, yes. In a moment — not in a moment, in the coming classes — we’ll see.
[Speaker C] Isn’t it more reasonable to say that everything they said, everything that… okay, next time.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In short, I’ll get to all these things — the tunnel, and going beyond the letter of the law, and regarding which of the two types of repentance each statement was said — but here I only want to finish with the point we’ve reached. Two mechanisms of repentance. One of them has laws of repentance, conditions for acceptance, office hours, there is a formalism of the laws of repentance. The other is essential repentance. The moment you’ve been transformed, then you’ve been transformed; you are a different person, everything is erased. That’s it. You don’t need laws of repentance; there’s no discussion of what is indispensable and what is not indispensable, when you did it and when you didn’t do it, none of that matters. The moment you did it, you are a different person and you are righteous. That’s all.
I’m saying this as a practical halakhic matter. What I’ve just said is a halakhic statement: someone who did this is exempt from all the laws of repentance. And all the discussions of what is indispensable and what the order is are irrelevant for him. He returns to being fit for testimony, returns to being fit for slaughtering, returns to being fit for judging, returns to everything — so long as we understand or assess that he truly did essential repentance. The question of how one reaches such assessments — maybe we’ll discuss that later, if I manage to get to it. Okay. If anyone wants to ask or comment, you can.
[Speaker C] Rabbi, isn’t it likely that what they said about a momentary return, that it helps for things — to turn him from wicked to righteous and so on — that this is talking about a minimum and not a norm, or more than that, about something that gets you all the way? Meaning, if you did that, that’s a sufficient minimum to turn you into a righteous person, but not about… no, no, but then that means it’s another path; there is the regular path, which everyone agrees on. One could say there’s also the Rabbi’s path, which is an innovative path, but it seems to me, it seems to me that one must posit a third path here: a return so minimal that it is enough to remove you from the category of a wicked person. Because I don’t see a reason to merge that path. What is it?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you need to do for it?
[Speaker C] A thought of repentance. You think, maybe I’ll repent? Boom — you’re no longer in the category of a completely wicked person.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Without the four stages you’re no longer in the category of a completely wicked person? And what’s still missing? Atonement. Everything is missing, but do you return to fitness? You don’t return to fitness for testimony, you don’t return to fitness for testimony. Why assume there is such a thing?
[Speaker C] Because in all those cases such a thought is enough to remove you from the category of wicked, only that in order to reach the status where your transgressions are properly atoned for in every respect and you become righteous — more than that — then you need to do a formal process.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the formal process certainly isn’t needed, because Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya didn’t do it, and he reached the end.
[Speaker C] Exactly, so he took the third one.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But he reached the end. Regarding Kiddushin, you can say he is righteous enough for her to be betrothed, the condition was fulfilled. He didn’t really return to fitness. But Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is more than that — he died. It somehow seems, again I’m saying only as an impression from the aggadah — of course these are aggadic words — but the impression from the aggadah is that he died because he finished the task, he reached the end. He had nothing more to do. They call him “Rabbi.” By the way, why do they call him “Rabbi”? A rabbi is someone who teaches us something. What did he teach us? That there is such a path of repentance. That there can be the repentance of “The Lord, the Lord,” and not only the halakhic repentance of “And He cleanses.”
[Speaker C] Maybe he was simply under duress; he intended to do the whole repentance process and didn’t manage to finish it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There could be such an opinion, but it doesn’t matter. You’re still telling me that de facto, anyone who undergoes a process of essential repentance — even if he dies immediately — everything is atoned for because he was under duress. So practically, that alone is enough.
[Speaker C] No, if you do the first process that’s enough to take you out of it, but if you don’t do the next steps then it isn’t serious, it’s mockery, it returns to the sta…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not mockery, because with Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya you’re telling me that he did the first stage and it was obvious he would also do all the rest. Who said? Maybe he wouldn’t do all the rest?
[Speaker C] Maybe it wouldn’t have continued? It’s not clear. “Anyone who intended to perform a commandment and was prevented and did not perform it,” and so on.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But who told you he intended to? After all, according to your view he did only the minimum. Who said he also intended to do the whole…
[Speaker C] The whole procedure for all…
[Speaker E] The transgressions? Who said he didn’t intend to? I don’t know — who said he did intend to? You’re telling me that because he died, then it’s obvious he was under duress. No, he wasn’t under duress; maybe if he
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] had lived, he wouldn’t have done all the rest? Who says he would? What are you really saying? That the moment he did the essential repentance, it was obvious he would also do all the rest.
[Speaker E] Meaning that someone who does essential repentance…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] has already undergone the transformation. So I don’t see a reason to create yet another distinction. Fine. His death was part of the point. The fact that he died showed that he went all the way on that track. Yes. Right. His very death basically shows the… right, that’s why I think the death is mentioned. The death is brought in order to show that in fact he reached its full expression, he taught us what repentance is, he reached the World to Come, he is called “Rabbi,” a complete person, he has nothing more to do. They took him from here. Right. Okay, so we’ll stop here. Whoever is participating in Yoma, at twelve we begin the next class. Okay. Goodbye.