Q&A: Repentance
Repentance
Question
Hello Rabbi, recently—and really throughout my life—there have been sins, and especially one specific sin that keeps repeating itself again and again. I have no doubt that it is very bad, and I detest the act, but each time I can’t withstand the temptation and I do it. More accurately, I feel almost out of control in those moments, and only afterward do I come to my senses. Afterward I feel tremendous remorse, and I take it upon myself—and especially hope—that it won’t happen again, but in honest reflection I know that I’ll fall into it again. On the one hand I feel I have no control over it, but on the other hand the indication that I can deal with it is that there are periods when it happens frequently and periods when it happens less frequently. My question is: what is my repentance worth after the fact? On the one hand I am completely willing to stop, but on the other hand a few days later I can fall again, and even in the very moments of repentance I know, sadly, that I will probably fall again. And if the Rabbi has any tip to give me regardless, I’d be very happy.
Answer
The commentators on Maimonides have already noted that he defines repentance as a state in which the Knower of Hidden Things can testify about a person that he will never return to that sin again—and yet in practice we usually do return to it. They explain that at that moment there must be a genuine desire, and if afterward one returns to it, that does not invalidate the repentance. Similarly, a convert who accepts upon himself the yoke of the commandments and later sins is still a Jew who sinned, not a non-Jew.
In addition, the Sages already said that a penitent is preferable to a completely righteous person. (In fact this is a dispute in the Talmud, but usually people quote that view.) The meaning is that the process of repentance is not judged only by its results, since after all a penitent can at most become like a completely righteous person, because that is the most perfect possible result of the process of repentance: that he becomes completely righteous and without sin. If he is preferable, that means the process of repentance is measured also by the very act of going through the process, and not only by the result. From this it follows that repenting has value even if the product does not last for a long time.
In general, it is important to know that there is a great deal of exaggeration about the severity of wasting seed. There are various taboos around it, but from the standpoint of Jewish law there are opinions that it is prohibited only rabbinically, and even if it is Torah-level / of biblical origin, it is not necessarily as severe as people describe it (probably under kabbalistic influence). See, for example, my words here and the article by my student Rabbi Yitzhak Rons mentioned there: