Q&A: The Nature of Sin
The Nature of Sin
Question
With God's help,
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: what is the nature of sin and atonement?
Is it because we did something that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us not to do, and He has ownership over us (for example, because He created us or brought us out of the land of Egypt), and therefore when we sin before Him and act against His will, He keeps that in mind until we appease Him and He forgives us?
Is there also some blemish in the soul, and is the purpose of the world the building of souls or something along those lines? And therefore atonement has practical significance, and one still has to remove the dirt even after the initial forgiveness. I never fully understood the ideas around this topic.
Answer
Are you asking why one should obey the Holy One, blessed be He, or what the meaning and nature of sin are? There is a conflation here between those two questions.
As for the question of why obey Him, see the end of the first book in my trilogy.
As for the question of what the nature of sin is, I assume that a forbidden act causes some kind of damage (in a spiritual sense, in my estimation), to me or to the world. I do not know whether repentance actually repairs that damage, but it at least helps reduce the chance that I will sin again.
Thank you. There really was a kind of conflation here, even though I meant only the second part, about the nature of sin.
But I first tried to define the reason that a sin is considered a sin, and that is why I needed the question of why obey Him, unless those things are not necessarily connected to one another.
Indeed, what I meant to ask was what kind of damage this is. For example, if a person wrongs his fellow and violates an agreement, then when his fellow forgives him it would seem that no further “blemish” remains in the sinner's soul in relation to him. But with regard to the Holy One, blessed be He, as far as I know people sometimes distinguish between forgiveness and atonement: even though the Holy One, blessed be He, is appeased by a person who repents, something still remains that needs repair. For example, there is a midrash on the Thirteen Attributes that says, “Whenever Israel sins, let them perform before Me this order, and I will forgive them,” but together with that, what I am used to hearing is that people add that there is still something that requires further repair.
So that is why I asked you which aspect is involved here: is it in the person, in the world, what exactly is that blemish that is created, and so on.