Teshuva: Its Meaning and Laws – Rabbi Michael Abraham – Lesson 1, Part A
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
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Table of Contents
- The tension between Jewish law and thought regarding repentance
- Maimonides: righteous, wicked, intermediate, and the judgment of Rosh Hashanah
- Internal difficulties: commandment, the intermediate person, and the role of repentance versus commandments
- First explanation: the Ten Days of Repentance as belonging to the coming year, and repentance as repairing the past
- Second explanation: Siftei Chaim—righteous/wicked/intermediate as a basic direction, and repentance as a change of direction
- The author of Tanya: extreme definitions and two tracks of repentance
- Critique of “petty” repentance and the proposal of two existing models
- The Maharal and the Thirteen Attributes: “The Lord, the Lord” versus “yet He does not cleanse completely”
- The four stages of repentance and the claim that there is no fully partial regret
- A continuum, not a dichotomy: the depth of regret as the breadth of repentance
Summary
General Overview
The text sets up a tension between the concept of repentance in halakhic literature, which focuses on details such as abandoning the sin, regret, commitment for the future, and discussion of the days of judgment, and the concept of repentance in philosophical/theological literature, which expands repentance into a broad and foundational idea, as in Rabbi Kook. It uses Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance as a point of departure for questions about the nature of the discussion on Rosh Hashanah, the status of the intermediate person, and why specifically repentance helps rather than adding commandments, and it presents two models of repentance: an “accounting” model that erases transgressions, and an “essential” model that changes the direction of one’s life. It suggests that the dichotomy between the two tracks is only an initial analytical tool, and that in practice there is a continuum in which the depth of regret determines the breadth of repentance and its power.
The tension between Jewish law and thought regarding repentance
The text states that in halakhic literature there is a relatively limited discussion of the laws of repentance, with details such as abandoning the sin, regret, commitment for the future, the status of a penitent, and the Ten Days of Repentance, whereas in philosophical/theological literature repentance takes on a much broader meaning, and especially in Rabbi Kook’s Orot HaTeshuvah it becomes a concept that embraces almost the entire Torah, and perhaps even more than the entire Torah. It argues that unlike other areas where Jewish law deals with “what to do” and thought deals with “why,” in the realm of repentance the philosophical layer overlaps with the conceptual one and exists on the same plane, not merely as two parallel aspects. It presents Maimonides as a springboard for clarifying the relationship between the “Laws of Repentance” and the concept of repentance itself, and the connection between what appears there and Jewish law.
Maimonides: righteous, wicked, intermediate, and the judgment of Rosh Hashanah
In chapter 3 of the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides defines a person, a country, and the whole world as righteous, wicked, or intermediate according to merits and sins, and adds that one whose sins outweigh his merits “immediately dies in his wickedness,” a country whose sins outweigh its merits “immediately perishes,” and the whole world, if its sins outweigh its merits, “is immediately destroyed.” He states that this reckoning is not according to the number of merits and sins but according to their magnitude, and that they are weighed only according to the knowledge of the “God of knowledge,” who knows how to evaluate merits against sins. He adds that one who regrets the commandments he performed and reconsiders his merits loses them all, and he applies the weighing of merits and sins to every year on Rosh Hashanah as well: the righteous are sealed for life, the wicked are sealed for death, and the intermediate are left hanging until Yom Kippur; if they repent, they are sealed for life, and if not, they are sealed for death. He then cites the continuation of Maimonides, who notes the custom to increase charity and good deeds from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, and to rise at night during these ten days for supplications.
Internal difficulties: commandment, the intermediate person, and the role of repentance versus commandments
The text cites the Lechem Mishneh, who says that according to Maimonides there is no commandment to repent; rather, the commandment is that when the sinner returns from his sin, he should confess. From this arises a difficulty: why does repentance help, and why does the absence of repentance lead to being sealed for death, if repentance does not “add a commandment”? It raises another difficulty: why specifically repentance helps the intermediate person rather than adding commandments, and it infers from Maimonides that only repentance can rescue an intermediate person because the reckoning is determined on Rosh Hashanah. It also raises the difficulty of how a state of “intermediate” is even possible if it means exact equality between merits and sins, and argues that even if this is a complex evaluation rather than arithmetic, the likelihood of equality is still negligible. It points to a gap between the slogans about the severity of judgment during the Ten Days of Repentance and the reality in which “masses of Jews” do not repent, presenting this as part of the tension between what we are told about these days and what people actually think about them.
First explanation: the Ten Days of Repentance as belonging to the coming year, and repentance as repairing the past
The text presents a common yeshiva-style explanation, attributed to Rabbi Aharon Kotler and other sources, according to which on Rosh Hashanah the balance of the past year is determined, while the Ten Days of Repentance already belong to the coming year. Therefore, commandments performed during them are credited to the coming year and do not change the judgment of Rosh Hashanah. Repentance, however, works differently because it repairs transgressions already committed, and can therefore “remove from the scale” sins from the previous year—not as an added merit, but as a rewriting of the past. It argues that this view portrays repentance as a kind of metaphysical hocus-pocus that repairs retroactively, and notes that it does not solve the difficulty of the intermediate person and also reduces the process to bookkeeping—“office hours” and “accounting.”
Second explanation: Siftei Chaim—righteous/wicked/intermediate as a basic direction, and repentance as a change of direction
The text cites Siftei Chaim by Rabbi Chaim Friedlander, who argues that the classification as righteous, wicked, or intermediate is not a count of commandments and sins, nor even a weighted sum, but rather a general characterization of the person’s condition: a righteous person is someone whose general direction is positive, a wicked person someone whose general direction is negative, and an intermediate person someone still sitting on the fence, who has not chosen a clear direction. According to this, a person can be righteous even with many sins if he wants the good and fails out of weakness, and a person can be wicked even with many commandments if there is no real commitment there to the service of God. According to this approach, it is clear why only repentance helps the intermediate person: repentance changes the basic direction and inner choice, whereas more commandments do not necessarily change one’s spiritual location in the overall picture.
The author of Tanya: extreme definitions and two tracks of repentance
The text cites the author of Tanya, who takes this direction more radically: a righteous person is someone who has no evil inclination at all, an intermediate person is someone who never sins at all but still has an evil inclination and overcomes it, and this is presented as implausible, though connected to the line of thought about inner direction. It notes that in Iggeret HaTeshuvah, the author of Tanya speaks of two tracks of repentance—higher repentance and lower repentance—and connects this to the rabbinic question about sins for which repentance does not suffice, so that repentance from the root can work where repentance “for each individual sin” is limited.
Critique of “petty” repentance and the proposal of two existing models
The text argues that the accounting explanation turns judgment into a petty procedure in which a person can arrive at Yom Kippur with a surplus of commandments and still be cut off for death simply because he did not repent “in the right format,” even though in terms of his present state he could be seen as righteous. It formulates a question about the very meaning of a recurring yearly judgment and the source for designating Rosh Hashanah as a day of judgment, suggesting verses and prayers such as “For it is a statute for Israel, a judgment of the God of Jacob” and “the day the world was conceived,” but emphasizing that the source is not explicit in the Torah in the way people imagine. It proposes that in practice there are two real models of repentance: small/accounting repentance, which erases sins through an orderly procedure, and great/essential repentance, which changes one’s spiritual direction. The relationship of judgment to the individual depends on which track he chooses.
The Maharal and the Thirteen Attributes: “The Lord, the Lord” versus “yet He does not cleanse completely”
The text cites the Talmud in tractate Rosh Hashanah 17 on “The Lord, the Lord” as meaning: “I am He before a person sins, and I am He after a person sins and repents,” and the Talmud in tractate Shevuot 39 on “yet He does not cleanse completely,” according to Rabbi Elazar: “He cleanses those who repent, and does not cleanse those who do not repent.” It cites the Maharal, who says that these two attributes address two different kinds of repentance: “The Lord, the Lord” refers to a person who repents from all his sin, while “yet He does not cleanse completely” refers to a person who repents from only some of his sin. It sharpens the point that “He cleanses those who repent” is interpreted here as: “regarding what you repented of, you are cleansed; regarding what you did not repent of, you are not cleansed,” whereas in the all-encompassing repentance of “The Lord, the Lord,” there is no place to speak of partial cleansing, because that repentance is, by definition, on everything.
The four stages of repentance and the claim that there is no fully partial regret
The text presents the structure of repentance found in the medieval authorities (Rishonim) as consisting of four stages: abandoning the sin, regret, commitment for the future, and verbal confession. It focuses on regret and argues that true regret cannot be only about one particular sin, because the essence of regret is regret over violating the will of God, and if one truly regrets violating the will of God, there is no essential distinction between this sin and another. It explains that a person can be complex and regret things at different levels, but partial regret is necessarily incomplete; therefore, private repentance “sin by sin” is accepted as an act of grace within a procedure, whereas deep and complete regret by definition brings repentance for everything and a change of direction. It ties this to the Maharal by saying that the repentance of “The Lord, the Lord” is the great, essential repentance, while the repentance of “and He cleanses” is the procedural, partial repentance, in which cleansing applies only to what was actually processed.
A continuum, not a dichotomy: the depth of regret as the breadth of repentance
The text presents the yeshiva-style conceptual inquiry as two extreme sides, but states that the dichotomy is not fully correct, because in reality there is a continuum in which “the deeper the regret, the broader the repentance.” It describes small repentance at one end, where the regret is almost lip service, and great repentance at the other end, where the regret is full and therefore covers everything and produces an essential change, with many stages of inner movement in between. It emphasizes that the “Brisker” analysis is important as a starting point, but not as an endpoint, and that one must move from it toward a synthesis that contains both dimensions within one picture.
Full Transcript
[Speaker A] Only
[Speaker B] those sitting in the first row.
[Speaker A] The letter
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the second letter of “a person” until “an eternal testimony.”
[Speaker B] One more time. Wait, did you turn on the lights? Huh? It’s… fine. We’ll repent.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A few years ago
[Speaker B] we dealt with this, I
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] don’t remember exactly what we did with it anymore. So if you don’t remember, then we certainly don’t remember. So you can say everything from the beginning—it doesn’t matter. I want to start with some kind of look at the process of repentance, and within that to try to see what the Laws of Repentance are, what their meaning is, what appears there in Maimonides, whether this is even called “laws” at all or not called laws, and why it’s called the Laws of Repentance. But the question is, what is the connection between what is there and actual law? And we’ll see various other issues that perhaps, as we approach Rosh Hashanah, will also connect a bit to the meaning of this day. Fine. There’s a certain tension between looking at the concept of repentance in books of thought or theology and in halakhic literature. In halakhic literature there is discussion—admittedly not a very extensive one—but there is discussion of the laws of repentance, with various details: abandoning the sin, regret, commitment for the future, the status of a penitent, the Ten Days of Repentance. There are certain halakhic aspects to it, not many, by the way, but there are some. But the concept of repentance in philosophical/theological literature gets a much, much broader meaning. This is especially true in Rabbi Kook’s Orot HaTeshuvah, where it turns into some kind of concept that encompasses—I don’t know—almost the entire Torah, and maybe even more than the entire Torah. And the question is: how, what is the relationship between these two things? Usually, when we talk about a halakhic description and a conceptual description of a given topic, that should mean, at least, attacking the topic on two different levels. There’s the halakhic level: what one must do, what one must not do. And there’s the conceptual level of why it is that way—why one must not do it or must do it. In the world of repentance, it seems to me that the philosophical layer gets mixed into the conceptual layer. Meaning, they belong to the same plane, or at least you can see them as belonging to the same plane, and not just as two aspects living side by side. And maybe I’ll begin with Maimonides as a point of departure. My goal isn’t to interpret Maimonides, but it’s a good starting point in order to present this matter. Maimonides, in chapter 3 of the Laws of Repentance, writes as follows: “Every single human being has merits and sins. One whose merits exceed his sins is righteous, and one whose sins exceed his merits is wicked; if they are half-and-half, he is intermediate. And so too with a country: if the merits of all its inhabitants exceed their sins, it is righteous; if their sins exceed, it is wicked. And so too with the whole world.” Meaning, there is a discussion in widening circles, and each such circle falls into one of three categories: righteous, wicked, or intermediate, according to the quantity of commandments or transgressions. Now Maimonides goes on and says—this is law 1. In law 2 Maimonides writes: “A person whose sins exceed his merits immediately dies in his wickedness, as it is said: ‘because of the multitude of your iniquity.’ And similarly, a country whose sins exceed immediately perishes, as it is said: ‘the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great.’ And so too the whole world: if its sins exceed its merits, they are immediately destroyed, as it is said: ‘And the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great.’” So each such circle has an outcome to the discussion. After each such circle is classified as righteous, wicked, or intermediate, there is a consequence: it is immediately wiped out if it is wicked, and if it is righteous then not. Interesting how a person can be wiped out in one circle and still remain in existence in another circle. We’ll talk about that later too, but not right now. “And this reckoning is not according to the number of merits and sins, but according to their magnitude.” It’s not a count, not an arithmetic tally of how many commandments and how many sins you have, but something more complex. “Rather according to their magnitude. There is a merit that counts against several sins, as it is said: ‘because some good thing was found in him’; and there is a sin that counts against several merits, as it is said: ‘one sinner destroys much good.’ And they are weighed only according to the knowledge of the God of knowledge, and He knows how to arrange the merits against the sins.” So the Holy One, blessed be He, knows how much each thing weighs, how to weigh this matter, how this judgment is actually conducted. What is each commandment worth, each thing, each merit and sin. Commandment and transgression is too specific. There are things that aren’t commandments and transgressions, and yet they still have evaluative significance. And it seems those too are placed on the scale. In short: complicated. Law 3: “Anyone who regrets the commandments he performed and reconsiders his merits and says in his heart, ‘What did I gain by doing them? If only I had not done them,’ this person has lost them all, and no merit at all is mentioned for him in this world, as it is said: ‘And the righteousness of the righteous shall not save him on the day of his wickedness.’ This applies only to one who regrets the former things.” I’ll come back to that later, yes? This is talking about someone who leaves religion, becomes non-religious—whatever you want to call it—so he has lost his merits. And that’s already in tractate Kiddushin. “And just as a person’s merits and sins are weighed at the time of his death, so too each and every year the sins of every inhabitant of the world are weighed against his merits on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. One who is found righteous is sealed for life, and one who is found wicked is sealed for death, and the intermediate person is left hanging until Yom Kippur.” They hang him metaphorically. “If he repents, he is sealed for life, and if not, he is sealed for death.” So the intermediate person remains suspended—if he repents by Yom Kippur, then fine; and if not, then not fine. From Maimonides’ words here at the end of law 3, it follows that someone who did not repent is sealed for death. An intermediate person who did not repent during the Ten Days of Repentance is sealed for death. More than that, it also seems from his words that in order to leave this status of intermediate, doing more commandments will not help. Ostensibly, fine, it’s balanced right now—do a few more commandments and tip the scale. If it’s completely balanced, then you don’t even need to know the weighing of the God of knowledge that he mentioned above, and if it’s balanced then any additional merit tips the scale. But Maimonides says no: if he repented, good; and if not, he is sealed for death. And it seems—as several later authorities infer from his words—that only repentance can help. Meaning, doing more commandments will not help. You’ll be sealed for death even though by Yom Kippur you have a majority of merits.
[Speaker D] Because the point at which the calculation is made is Rosh Hashanah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The calculation is made on Rosh Hashanah and that’s it. Meaning, after that only repentance can help. And therefore in law 4 he elaborates there and says: “Because of this matter all the house of Israel have the custom”—sorry—“and because of this matter all the house of Israel have the custom to increase charity and good deeds and to occupy themselves with commandments from Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur more than during the rest of the year, and they all have the custom to rise at night during these ten days to pray in synagogues with words of supplication and entreaty until daybreak.” So they already point out here: you see that people do have the custom to do commandments. We said earlier that only repentance helps and commandments don’t help. The claim is no—you do commandments as part of the process of repentance, not in order to add commandments to the scale that will tip the scale of merits, but because the way to repent is also bound up with doing commandments and avoiding transgressions, not so that those things count independently. Fine. So there are several difficulties in these laws. The Lechem Mishneh comments that according to Maimonides there is no commandment to repent. We’ll talk about that later too. There is no commandment to repent, at least not a formally structured commandment like that. “When the sinner returns from his sin, he should confess”—that’s how Maimonides counts it in the Sefer HaMitzvot—but it is not a commandment to repent. So he says: then why, if someone repents, does that help? What good does it do that he repents? It doesn’t add another commandment to his account. And why, if he does not repent, is he sealed for death? Neither side of the coin is clear here.
[Speaker D] He changes the transgressions. What? He changes the transgressions.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but in a moment we’ll see the standard explanation. Another thing: why specifically repentance and not other commandments? Why can only repentance rescue the intermediate person from his state? There’s another difficulty: how is a state of intermediate even possible at all? Yes, the well-known difficulty—what are the odds that I’m intermediate? The odds are zero, right? Meaning, it can’t be made exact. What are the odds that all my commandments and all my merits and all my liabilities over the course of the year are exactly balanced?
[Speaker D] For someone whose account isn’t balanced, he’s righteous, so he doesn’t need to repent. Someone righteous doesn’t need to repent?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not the point, because he does need to repent, but his judgment for this year doesn’t depend on that.
[Speaker D] No, if there’s no commandment to repent,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] then why does he need to repent? He’s righteous. A general question: what is the status of repentance if it’s not a commandment? We’ll talk about it. But that he needs to repent—that’s clear, he needs to repent. It’s just not a condition for his being sealed for life. Fine, he’s righteous, so okay. So the question is, yes: how can there even be an intermediate person? The likelihood of there being an intermediate person is zero. So in practice, true, we can’t know, but if you have to bet, there’s no reason from this point of view to do anything during the Ten Days of Repentance. Meaning, either I’m righteous or I’m wicked, and being exactly balanced has no chance at all. Some say that the reckoning is according to the knowledge of the God of knowledge, and therefore it’s more complicated and not arithmetic. That doesn’t help at all, of course, because even a weighted sum of the two sides—the chance that it will end up at exactly the same level is still zero, whether it’s a weighted sum or an ordinary sum. It has no significance. Therefore, we need to understand how an intermediate person is even possible. So that’s another difficulty here. So I want to begin with this topic. Again, I’m saying: I’m not coming, at least not at this stage, to resolve Maimonides. I’m using him as a springboard for a distinction between two types.
[Speaker D] There’s also one more small difficulty: between us, we’ve seen masses of Jews who don’t repent at all between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s not a difficulty—we’re already used to not being guided by facts. Yes, that’s the biggest difficulty in the matter, but maybe I’ll say something about that too. So I spoke a bit about that last year—or two years ago, I don’t remember anymore. I spoke about this, Elul 5779, that’s already passed, that was once—whether a year ago or two years ago, I don’t remember. I spoke a bit about the relation between what we’re taught, what we’re constantly told, regarding the meaning of these days, and what we actually think about them. A rather weak relation, I would say. Fine. But for now let’s stay on the level of what we’re told, and maybe we’ll also touch a bit on what it really is. There are two explanations for the question why specifically repentance helps—why won’t it help to do more commandments that tip the scale? Why specifically repentance? So the standard explanation—yes, in yeshivot this is the standard explanation, and I once saw it quoted in the name of Rabbi Aharon Kotler; I don’t know whether he was the first source for it, but it’s the standard explanation, a somewhat conceptual yeshiva-style explanation. And this explanation basically says that on Rosh Hashanah the Holy One, blessed be He, makes the balance sheet. And that’s where it is determined whether I’m intermediate, righteous, or wicked. The Ten Days of Repentance, in essence, already belong to the coming year. The judgment takes place on Rosh Hashanah for the year that ended on Rosh Hashanah. What happens during the Ten Days of Repentance? During the Ten Days of Repentance they give me a second chance. But it’s not a second chance to add more commandments or transgressions to the scale. Commandments or transgressions that I do during those ten days go onto the scale of the coming year, because those ten days belong to the coming year. So what can be done during those ten days? As their name indicates, one can repent. How does repentance help? Because repentance—as I mentioned before, according to Maimonides there isn’t even a commandment to repent—so what is this thing called repentance? It serves to repair transgressions, or a state created as a result of the transgressions I committed. If so, then it’s clear why only repentance can help. Because repentance can remove from the scale sins or liabilities that are already there from last year, because it repairs what was. Repentance is not added here as one more merit—because I repented, that tips the scale. If that were the case, then it couldn’t work. That would be a merit relevant to the judgment of the next Rosh Hashanah, like any other commandment I do during those days. All repentance can do is repair one transgression or certain transgressions that are lying on the scale, and in that way change the situation retroactively—yes, rewrite history.
[Speaker D] Meaning, the Ten Days of Repentance go in a double direction—also to next year and also to repair.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If they are part of a process of repentance, yes. But if not, then not. It could be that you can repent; you can do commandments without repenting for last year—then it won’t be a double direction. So they say it’s not really a double direction; rather, if you do commandments, that also helps you repent. The commandment as such. In any case, that is the first perspective, the first explanation of the matter. In Siftei Chaim by Rabbi Chaim Friedlander, he writes differently. He argues that repentance—the classification actually begins with the question of classifying someone as righteous, intermediate, or wicked. And he basically says that righteous, intermediate, and wicked are not an ordinary sum and not even a weighted sum. It’s some kind of way of looking at your overall condition. Meaning, if I have to characterize a person in one word—righteous, intermediate, or wicked—obviously each of us has many facets, he has done lots of things this way and that way, but in the end you have to aggregate it all, gather it all, summarize it all, and say: what is this person, where does this person stand? So if the overall picture, the general outlook on him, is positive, then he is righteous. If the overall outlook on him is negative, then he is wicked. And if he’s kind of sitting on the fence, still hasn’t clearly chosen a direction, then he is intermediate. This is not a matter of counting commandments and transgressions, nor even weighted counting, but a kind of overall view of a person.
[Speaker D] And therefore he says—and that isn’t what Maimonides says.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, I said I’m not yet explaining Maimonides. We’ll get to Maimonides. Later on I do think this can also explain Maimonides, but for that I need more. Basically, I’ll formulate it differently. I’d say it this way: the classification as righteous, intermediate, or wicked is actually according to your basic direction. You might have more sins than commandments—not just in the arithmetic sense, but even in a weighted sense, okay? You might have more sins than commandments and still be righteous. Why would you be righteous? Because in the end your direction is positive. You failed many times, you had an inclination, you were weak, but you want the positive thing, you are basically aimed in the positive direction—that’s what you want. Maybe you don’t want it enough, and that’s why there is failure. Maybe the urges prevail.
[Speaker D] What determines it isn’t the value but the derivative. What? What determines it isn’t the value but the derivative.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll talk about that too. Maybe, though that’s not exactly the same thing. The question is what you want, even if that doesn’t necessarily have a practical impact on the derivative. Penitents versus complete righteous people—we spoke about that once. “Where penitents stand, even complete righteous people do not stand”—that means the derivative determines, not the function. But the claim is that the classification as righteous, intermediate, or wicked—this is what Rabbi Chaim Friedlander says—is determined by the basic direction, what your direction is. Not by the question of what you did quantitatively. What you did—“the greater one is than his fellow, the greater his inclination.” And it may be that precisely because you are more righteous, you also have stronger inclinations. That’s not necessarily mysticism, by the way; I think there are also simple explanations for it. And therefore you fail a lot—it can happen. But your direction is positive, you want the positive, so you are righteous, you are written for life. Even though you have many transgressions. You can also have the opposite case: you have more commandments, but okay, because it’s pleasant for you to do them. But it’s not really the service of God, it’s not really something of commitment to the commandments and refraining from transgressions. Rather, you just don’t have a strong inclination, or you don’t feel like it, or I don’t know—whatever—it just didn’t come up. But bottom line, you have more commandments than transgressions and yet you are wicked. The number of commandments and transgressions doesn’t matter, nor even the weighted number. And if your direction is one in which you still haven’t chosen, still haven’t decided on your direction, then you are intermediate. That’s the principle. If so, says Rabbi Chaim Friedlander, if that is the classification between righteous, intermediate, and wicked, then it’s clear why only repentance can help. A second explanation. Since only repentance—and repentance in this sense is of course something a little different from what I was speaking about before; in a moment we’ll come back to that—repentance changes your basic direction. Doing more commandments or more transgressions—what difference does that make? You’ll have more commandments, but you’re in the same place in the spiritual whole, when they look at you in one survey, “like sheep,” all your deeds passing before Him like sheep. So you’re in the same place. What does it matter if you did a few more commandments? Or transgressions in the opposite direction. It doesn’t matter. What you need in order to move from the status of intermediate to the status of righteous is to choose. To decide. To change your basic direction. Not to do more commandments. Only repentance does that. Therefore only repentance can help, and not the doing of commandments. That is the second explanation. Let’s look for a moment at both of the—actually no, before I look at both of them—regarding the author of Tanya, he takes this idea in a more—sorry, I’m jumping a bit here—the author of Tanya takes this idea in a more extreme direction. His views are well known. He wants to claim that a righteous person is someone who has slaughtered the inclination, who has no evil inclination at all. Not just that he doesn’t fail—he has no evil inclination whatsoever. The righteous person is someone who has only a good inclination, who has already slaughtered the evil inclination. An intermediate person is someone who never sins at all. At all. Not that he has a majority of commandments. He never sins at all—he just has the evil inclination. He constantly overcomes it, and he has the evil inclination. That’s an intermediate person. And someone who also sins—then I don’t know what his status is; I’m not sufficiently expert in all the details of Tanya. But his terminology takes it too far, in my opinion. It sounds completely implausible to me. But the direction is similar to what Rabbi Chaim Friedlander says. I think Rabbi Chaim Friedlander’s formulation is much more reasonable.
[Speaker D] Tanya itself is a book for
[Speaker E] intermediate people.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? A book for intermediate people. Yes. When he defines what an intermediate person is, that’s what he does there.
[Speaker D] And is the judgment also at the end of life, or specifically on Rosh Hashanah? What Rabbi Chaim Friedlander writes—is that about the judgment on Rosh Hashanah, or also the judgment of a person at the end of life?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I have no idea. He explains this passage in Maimonides; I don’t even remember, because I saw it so many years ago. Maybe he writes something there, I don’t know. You’d have to look there. Siftei Chaim. In any case, these two directions actually reflect two kinds of outlook. Because in fact, in the first outlook, when I say that repentance repairs the transgressions backward, that’s basically some kind of metaphysical hocus-pocus. Meaning, you committed sins; if afterward you repent, then it is repaired retroactively. It repairs last year for you. You are already in the next year, during the Ten Days of Repentance, the beginning of the next year. But repentance has some kind of quality whereby it repairs history. Like Stalin’s dream in life—if he had had a way to rewrite history—well, here you have it, you can repent. Not that he wasn’t trying to rewrite history. In any case, there’s some sort of metaphysical hocus-pocus here, or however you want to see it. In the second outlook, there’s no need to get to that at all, right? In the second outlook repentance is not something that works backward, but something that fixes things now. Meaning, now you change direction. When you reach Yom Kippur, if your direction is a positive direction, they don’t kill a person who is now righteous. So what if on Rosh Hashanah he was wicked—or intermediate, sorry, not wicked. He was intermediate. But on Yom Kippur he’s righteous. What, will they kill a righteous person? No, they don’t kill a righteous person. So there is no need to assume that repentance works backward.
[Speaker D] So according to that explanation, why is the wicked person sealed for death already on Rosh Hashanah, while he—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He’s sealed for death and they’ve already killed him? Why wait for him to repent? First of all, ignore reality—that wicked people don’t die. I’m
[Speaker E] speaking only on the logical level.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he’s already dead, that’s it, there’s no reason to take him into account anymore—the wicked person is no longer with us. Maybe “the wicked die” is actually a good way to judge everyone favorably? Whoever is still with us is apparently not wicked—how could it be that he’s still alive? Fine, I wouldn’t take that too far.
[Speaker B] You could go with that. You could go with that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe the defender of Israel.
[Speaker B] Not only Israel, in general. There’s a world, not just Israel; there are other things too. But there’s some sort of general accounting.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The defender—there
[Speaker B] could be that the overall accounting is like that, because there are many who already left us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Maybe. I’m not sure, but maybe. Fine. In any case, I don’t know the statistics on mortality, but let me guess that mortality during the Ten Days of Repentance is no higher than during any other ten days of the year. I assume. I haven’t checked.
[Speaker B] No, the fact that he says a person is judged for death doesn’t mean he dies that very moment. He dies on Rosh Hashanah.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Immediately? He dies immediately. Not only that—if he doesn’t die immediately on Rosh Hashanah, then why wait for Sukkot? Then why repent on Yom Kippur? If the wicked person repents—if He’s not going to kill him, then kill him on Passover. He’s already righteous like the intermediate person. Why should I care what was in the past? Fine. That too is part of the relationship between the slogans and what actually happens. That bothered me then, and maybe I’ll come back to it at some point. In any case, each of these two conceptions of repentance has certain difficulties. Let’s begin with the first explanation. The first explanation—what Rabbi Baruch Kotler and the Beit HaLevi… Emek Berakhah brings it, several later authorities bring it, this is the standard yeshiva line. The main difficulty that arises in my view is, of course, first, that it didn’t solve the difficulty of who counts as intermediate. Second, it turns the process into something too small. A kind of bookkeeping of commandments and transgressions. Reception hours are over because you’re wicked, and that’s it—on Rosh Hashanah the office closed. If you repent, it fixes things retroactively, so no problem—you managed to slip in through the door before it closed and everything is fine. In the end, if you look at someone who does more commandments as basically righteous, then it’s really hard to accept that the Holy One, blessed be He, say—suppose I was intermediate, fine? And now I did commandments but didn’t repent. Now in the simple, small, accounting view, I’m intermediate and I did a few more commandments. Now I arrive at Yom Kippur and the Holy One, blessed be He, looks: commandment plus commandment, only repentance is missing here. Fine, I’m righteous now. But if I had been in that very same state on Rosh Hashanah, everything would have been wonderful, right? But on Rosh Hashanah I wasn’t in that state; the office hours had passed. So now I come to Yom Kippur and the Holy One, blessed be He, decides to kill me. Why? But if I had come in this exact same condition on Rosh Hashanah, I would have been sealed for life. Now I’m righteous—do You kill righteous people? “Will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” Why should it matter that I did this now? Bottom line, the moment You kill me—if You had already killed me on Rosh Hashanah, then fine, I’m already no longer with you. But I’m talking about the intermediate person—the intermediate person is left hanging until Yom Kippur, right? He wasn’t killed. So when he arrives at Yom Kippur, and he did more commandments but didn’t repent, what exactly is the problem? Bottom line, on Yom Kippur he’s righteous. Why kill him? It’s a bit odd. Again, you understand the logic, you can define it, and everything is fine. But it’s petty—let’s call it that. Strange. If that really is the definition of righteous, intermediate, and wicked, then there is something here that in my view is problematic.
[Speaker D] What is the meaning, in general, of judging after a year? What is there about a year that means we need to be judged? What? What is the significance of a year? Why judge after a year, every Rosh Hashanah? Why not judge a person on his birthday? After a year in which he worked.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why after a year and not after two weeks?
[Speaker D] There’s something fixed here, what Hannah said—a year, I don’t know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I already said I don’t know where this determination comes from. I spoke about that in that earlier lecture, about the hint for Elul. Where did the whole notion even come from that Rosh Hashanah is the Day of Judgment? It’s not really something explicit in the Torah. Maybe “the day the world was conceived” in the prayer. There’s some verse, I think, but really not something you can hang a solid source on. Fine. Maybe I’ll talk more about that later.
[Speaker E] So therefore the difficulty in the first explanation is that there is “Blow the shofar at the new moon, at the covered time for our festival day. For it is a statute for Israel, a judgment of the God of Jacob.”
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Could be. Basically, the conception here in Emek Berakhah from Rabbi Kotler is a conception that sees repentance—and the whole process, not just repentance—as nothing more than accounting. You count commandments, you count transgressions. Who is more righteous, who is less wicked. If you repented, they remove that commandment—sorry, that transgression—from your account, they count again, and everything is fine. In short, the whole business is a bit childish, something too small. On the other hand, as Shmuel correctly noted, in the plain sense of Maimonides it doesn’t look like he means much else. There is some kind of weighted sum there, but it is still a sum of commandments and transgressions. Therefore, what I want to argue today is that we are dealing here with two models of repentance, both of which exist. These are not two opinions in understanding the concept of repentance; rather, they are two actual models of repentance, two legal frameworks, and both exist. We choose which one to follow. And in fact, to formulate it a bit more sharply: repentance of the accounting kind—let’s call it small repentance—that really is a repentance that works with bookkeeping. You count commandments and transgressions, and then repentance erases one transgression or another and lowers the total, and then you are judged according to your updated condition on Yom Kippur. So that is procedure, and that procedure really does work with office hours and all the rest. Whoever chooses the route of great repentance, essential repentance, a change in spiritual direction—not the deletion of this or that transgression from the scale—then he is not treated in a petty bookkeeping way. It doesn’t work like accounting. It’s another matter. And everything depends on which track we choose. For now I’m presenting them as two extreme poles. Later I’ll try to place both of them into one picture.
[Speaker E] That’s also in the author of Tanya. In Iggeret HaTeshuvah he talks about two such tracks: higher repentance and lower repentance. He says there, for example, another question: there are transgressions in the words of the Sages for which there is no repentance, and for which repentance does not atone. So he says: someone who really does lower repentance—that is, repents for each and every transgression—about that, the Sages really were speaking. But someone who repents from the root, higher repentance, that really does atone even for that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Does he have some sort of link for that?
[Speaker E] Iggeret HaTeshuvah, by the author of Tanya. Iggeret HaTeshuvah?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll check at home, I think. Okay, I’ll look there; I’m not familiar with it. In any case, so there’s the track of small-scale repentance, or the bookkeeping, scribal kind, and then there’s essential repentance. Small repentance means fixing one transgression at a time. That is: stopping, accepting for the future, regret, verbal confession—the procedure of repentance. I cleaned it up, checked the box, one particular transgression has been erased. Another transgression, and that’s how I take sins off the scale. That’s the bookkeeping move. Then there’s the essential move, which is to change my basic direction in life, like Haim Friedman said: what do I want? To make decisions about what I really want. It seems to me these ideas have a source in the Maharal’s words. When the Maharal explains the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy—“The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth,” and so on—then in the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 17, the Talmud says this: “The Lord, the Lord”—when it explains these attributes—“I am He before a person sins, and I am He after a person sins and repents.” And the two names of God are one before the sin and one after the sin—after the sin and repentance. And “The Lord, the Lord” is basically the attribute responsible for repentance. In the Talmud in Shevuot 39, the Talmud explains there the attribute of “and He cleanses.” “The Lord, the Lord” opens the Thirteen Attributes, and “and He cleanses” closes them: “and He cleanses; He does not cleanse.” So the Talmud says there: “But isn’t it written, ‘and He cleanses; He does not cleanse’?” That is needed for the teaching of Rabbi Elazar, as it was taught: Rabbi Elazar says, it is impossible to say ‘He cleanses,’ because ‘He does not cleanse’ has already been said; it is impossible to say ‘He does not cleanse,’ because ‘He cleanses’ has already been said. How so? He cleanses those who repent, and He does not cleanse those who do not repent. Fine, so that sounds a little banal, okay? He cleanses those who repent and doesn’t cleanse those who don’t repent—okay, obvious. What would you want, that He should cleanse? What’s the novelty here in ‘He cleanses; He does not cleanse’? The initial assumption would be that He cleanses everyone automatically, or the initial assumption would be that He cleanses no one, including even if you repented. That’s a better initial assumption. This is the well-known midrash, where repentance comes before the Holy One, blessed be He, and says, a sinner—right? I don’t remember the exact wording there—a sinner, what is his punishment? I don’t remember; there’s some midrash in the Talmud about this matter. It asked Torah, it asked wisdom, and it asked the Holy One, blessed be He.
[Speaker D] That the Holy One, blessed be He, came to repentance and to wisdom?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, “A sinner—what is his punishment?” I don’t remember the exact wording of the midrash. “The wicked, there shall be for them…”
[Speaker B] “The wicked,” something bad… “What should the sinner do? Let him repent and he will be forgiven,” something like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Something bad, something… here, they opened that verse. So the Maharal asks there: why do we need two attributes in this list, both of which are responsible for repentance? Both “The Lord, the Lord” and “and He cleanses”? And then he says that the attribute of “The Lord, the Lord” deals with a person who repents from all his sin, while the attribute of “and He cleanses; He does not cleanse” deals with a person who repents from part of his sin—not a completely righteous person. On the face of it, that’s not clear, because why do you need two attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, for this? Just activate the attribute of “and He cleanses” several times until you’ve cleansed all the sins. What is this, a quantitative issue? What difference does it make whether you repent for all the sins or repent only for some of them?
[Speaker B] I don’t remember them. Huh? I don’t remember them. You did a lot of them anyway; a whole year passed. I hitchhiked.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what if you don’t remember? And therefore what?
[Speaker B] It’s hard to clean molecule by molecule; you clean everything. I didn’t understand—physically, what?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He says, he—
[Speaker B] —gives you, if there is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —you, if—
[Speaker B] —you can clean everything like that.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes? You can clean everything like that. So why do you need the second one? Because if you can, then clean everything. It seems to me the point is this: let’s look for a moment at the process of repentance. The process of repentance, when a person repents for a sin—the medieval authorities already, from Rav Saadia Gaon, I think that’s where it starts—say that this involves four components, four stages. The first stage is abandoning the sin. The second stage is regret—not just abandoning the sin without regretting it. Not to sin: regret. Acceptance for the future—not to continue sinning, not to return to the sin. And verbal confession—what’s called bringing it out verbally. Okay, these are the four stages of repentance. Now the question is: what does it mean to regret? Let’s talk for a moment—let’s focus for a moment on regret. Abandoning the sin, fine: I sorted on the Sabbath, I stopped sorting on the Sabbath, but I keep trapping on the Sabbath. I stopped sorting. Okay, so you can abandon a sin; you can abandon just one transgression and not abandon another, though all transgressions of that type count as abandoned if I violated, say, sorting on the Sabbath several times. Meaning, you can divide this among types of transgressions. But what does it mean to regret one transgression? To regret one transgression, in my opinion, is impossible. There’s no such thing. Not impossible because it’s hard; it’s undefined. You regret that you trapped on the Sabbath, that you sorted on the Sabbath—okay, so what are you regretting? The trapping? You regret that you did something forbidden, something the Holy One, blessed be He, prohibited, right? So then by that you’ve regretted all transgressions. What are you regretting only—that you violated God’s will not to sort on the Sabbath, but the fact that He wants me not to trap—I have no problem that I trapped? Why? What? After all, if the point is not the trapping or the sorting on the Sabbath—the point is that there was a violation of God’s will here. So if the real problem is that there was a violation of God’s will here, then how can one regret only one transgression at all? There’s no such thing as regretting one transgression; it’s nonsense.
[Speaker E] Like, for sorting it wasn’t worth violating God’s will, but for trapping it was?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what are you regretting? To regret means that I don’t want this, that I’m not in a state where I’m willing to violate God’s will. Okay, we’ll come back to this a bit; I’m presenting it in an extreme form on purpose. Therefore, when I regret, in essence, a particular transgression, once you think about it, it’s clear that this is regret for all transgressions. There is no regret over one commandment or one sin, over one transgression or part of the transgressions. Regret, in its essence, is over everything. There’s no partial regret; there’s no such thing. If you regret partially, you didn’t regret. Therefore this process of repentance—the four stages—that people do as though for every act of repentance, for every transgression, excuse me: you do the four stages, check the box, and move on to the next transgression—there’s no such thing. The moment I did it for one, I did it for all of them. So what, because I didn’t abandon the other transgressions, in what sense did I regret them? I started with regret, but really it’s all of it. Because if true regret is regret for all transgressions, then clearly if I truly regretted, I also abandon all the transgressions, and I also decide not to do it in the future. After all, that’s part of regret. It’s hard to detach these processes from one another if I’m doing it genuinely all the way through. Okay, therefore it seems to me there’s no choice but to say this: in practice, even when you look at a person who regrets an act he did, you can regret on many levels. A person is a complex creature; it’s not that either you regretted or you didn’t regret. Suddenly a certain thought passes through me—the prices, as you said earlier—that price really isn’t worth it for me to commit a transgression. At another price—that one is really tasty, that pork there—and not this; that I’m continuing. Fine. A person is a complex creature. It’s not this simple logic of either you regretted and then you’re a servant of God completely, or you didn’t—no. There is some dimension of regret here, but it is not complete. It has to be that way, otherwise there’s no such thing as one transgression. If that’s the case, then in truth you didn’t really regret. So why does the Holy One, blessed be He, nevertheless accept such a thing, where you did it only for one transgression? There’s some kindness here, beyond the letter of the law, where the Holy One, blessed be He, says: if you do this procedure, the transgression you did it for will be erased. Okay. Now if you commit other transgressions, fine—you’ll have to do this procedure for each one of them in order to erase it. Why? Because the truth is that you didn’t really free yourself of that transgression. Fine, but this—do it according to the rules. You want to work with some kind of renewed rules? Fine. If you worked according to the rules, I’m willing to accept it.
[Speaker A] There’s a story in the words of the Sages about someone who was mainly careful only about washing his hands. Meaning, he can distinguish between things—even though he says, I don’t keep all the commandments, I do keep one commandment. So I’m saying the same thing, just in the opposite direction: he can also regret only one commandment.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I didn’t say—but that can’t be full, genuine regret. We said that already: a person is a complex creature, so it can happen, but that is certainly not full regret. Full regret means that you leave everything. What is this kind of full regret that I didn’t wash my hands? I—there’s no such thing. It’s not defined at all.
[Speaker A] If that’s the only thing he does and he ignores everything else, then what? If he only does hand-washing, then what does it even mean to regret the other things?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, assuming he has other transgressions, but he regrets only this one.
[Speaker A] Because that’s the only transgression he’s particular about, and he’s not particular about the Sabbath, not anything. Why? I don’t know—that’s what got into his head.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What does he think—that the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t want the rest from him? If so, then he’s simply mistaken. Rather, what—he thinks the Holy One, blessed be He, wants all of it? So what are you regretting—hand-washing? That you violated God’s will? So what’s the difference between this will of God and that will of God? Rather, what? The fact that you didn’t wash your hands—that’s not the regret. The fact that you violated God’s will by not washing your hands—that’s the regret. Full regret cannot be about one transgression; it just won’t work. There’s no such thing. It’s simply undefined. Now, if I really carry the regret through to the end, then by definition it is regret over all transgressions. Repentance for all transgressions, right? That’s the difference in the Maharal between the repentance of “The Lord, the Lord” and the repentance of “and He cleanses.” The Maharal says that the repentance of “The Lord, the Lord” is repentance over all transgressions together, and the other is the quantitative one: if you regretted this transgression, and regretted it in an incomplete way for transgression A, and afterward for transgression B, and for transgression C, until you got to transgression number 365—yes, 365—and you regretted each one of them with this partial regret, you are not clean. True regret does everything at once—but only because it is true. The small regrets are small regrets that are accepted, but that doesn’t really change things; you haven’t changed direction, in Rabbi Haim Friedlander’s language. Therefore it seems to me that what the Maharal means is exactly the same distinction we saw earlier. The repentance of “The Lord, the Lord” is the repentance Rabbi Haim Friedlander is talking about—that is the great repentance. If you really did it, you changed direction; now you want the good; you’re no longer sitting on the fence. Such a state is, by definition, over all transgressions. It cannot be defined as something that speaks about one transgression or part of the transgressions; by definition it is about all transgressions. That is the repentance of “The Lord, the Lord.” The repentance of “and He cleanses” is a very great novelty. If you cannot carry out that essential revolution, then the Torah or the Holy One, blessed be He, allows you to do a petty, relative bookkeeping process, each person according to however much he can do. Almost technical regret, almost lip service—not completely, some regret, not deep. But then do the work in an orderly way, transgression by transgression. And that is what is written: “and He cleanses; He does not cleanse”—He cleanses one who repents, and He does not cleanse one who does not repent. What does that mean? Not one who repents and one who does not repent; rather, whatever you repented for, you are cleansed of, and whatever you did not repent for, you are not cleansed of. Therefore that’s what the Maharal means when he says this applies only to some of the transgressions and not all of them. He doesn’t mean people who repented and other people who did not repent. He means: what you repented for is cleansed for you; what you did not repent for is not cleansed for you. With “The Lord, the Lord,” you can’t say such a thing, because with “The Lord, the Lord,” if you repented, you repented for everything; there isn’t something for which you are not cleansed. That is the great repentance. Therefore the repentance of “The Lord, the Lord” and the repentance of “and He cleanses; He does not cleanse” are those same two mechanisms I spoke about earlier—those are the two types of repentance. And really the point is, if I now—and I’ll sharpen this a bit—usually when people describe a yeshiva-style conceptual inquiry, there are two options: either this or this, one possibility or the other possibility. Usually one of the things that is very strong in our generation is the disappointment with this naive Brisker analyticity that thinks there really are two options: either you’re here or you’re here. Usually the truth is some combination of the two options—usually something the Briskers are less willing to accept, but we’re already past that. A conceptual inquiry—we’ve already talked about this once, when I spoke about Talmudic conceptual analysis, a session on Talmudic analysis, I think—so I said there that it’s not right to give up on Brisker analysis, but it’s also not right to get stuck in it. Meaning, you have to begin with it, and then thesis and antithesis, and after that synthesis. So here too, it seems to me that this conceptual inquiry is a good one, and I really will continue with it, but already here I’ll say in advance that this dichotomous way of looking at things, in light of everything I explained, is not correct. There is a spectrum. Meaning: the deeper the regret, the broader the repentance. The more deeply and truly you regret, then the breadth of the repentance—yes, the number of transgressions, or the number of aspects in the soul that it covers—is wider. Full regret covers everything. And if you regretted deeply, all the way, then you don’t need to do it for every single transgression—it covers everything. If you do it partially, then it really is partial. So indeed, the depth of regret determines the breadth of the canvas of repentance. And that is really the point. Therefore, in practice, the two poles that I described are the two extreme ends of the scale. Obviously in the middle there is the whole spectrum. Meaning, the depth of regret—regret is the parameter that moves us between the pole of great repentance and the pole of small repentance. Completely small repentance, in the pure sense, is basically without any regret at all in the emotional sense. To say the words “I regret it,” but it’s nothing. Okay? The moment I begin to enter a little more deeply into the recesses of the soul, into the recesses of the sin, and to regret it inwardly, really—just a little, I begin to enter—I’m already in the middle of the scale, I’m already beginning to move forward. And when I arrive at full regret, I’m already in the realm of great repentance. So that’s the parameter that moves me along the scale. And therefore, really, there is a continuum of processes and not two. But for now—I’ll come back to this later—but for now I’m assuming there are two. Okay? Either the small one or the great one. And let’s try to see—and it’s important to understand this—the Brisker approach was very important to me.