Rabbi Jonah knew the process of teshuva intimately because he himself needed it. In 1233, Rabbi Jonah instigated a book-burning of Maimonides’ most controversial work, The Guide of the Perplexed, in France. The Aristotelian overtones of the book felt foreign to many rabbis, and they worried about the impact this would have on the faith of their flocks. When twenty-four cartloads of handwritten volumes of the Talmud were put on trial in 1240 and then burned publicly in Paris two years later, Rabbi Jonah regretted his involvement in the initial book-burning. Rabbi Jonah seemed unable to forgive himself for condemning a great Jewish scholar, perhaps believing that this paved the way for future ecclesiastically driven book-burnings and anti-Semitic acts.
As penance, legend has it, Rabbi Jonah cited Maimonides in every one of his teachings and planned to enact an ancient Jewish custom: he intended to go to Maimonides’ grave in Tiberias and bring a quorum to beg for Maimonides’ forgiveness. He had already publicly acknowledged the error of his ways in his synagogue. He could not write about teshuva without practicing it. He could not describe and chastise the willful ignorance of those who did not improve themselves when he himself felt guilty of betrayal. He set off on the trip but was detained along the way and died of a rare illness in 1263; some attribute his illness to the fateful day that he assigned Maimonides’ work to the flames. He knew he had to make amends, yet Rabbi Jonah never carried out the ritual to externalize the anguish he carried inside by making his apology in the presence of the offended and the community. Like so many of us, he knew what he had to do to right his error, but he only embarked on the journey. He did not complete it.
There are many activities we do this season to externalize sin so that we can be emboldened enough to conquer it. In the ancient days of the Bible, Yom Kippur was a time when two goats were designated by lottery to bear the sins of the people. One was to be sacrificed to achieve expiation and the other was, according to rabbinic tradition, to be dashed off a cliff, carrying to its death the weight of our collective transgressions. The ceremony must have been freighted with a degree of momentousness and nervous anticipation:
Although in talmudic interpretations the goat met its death, in the biblical text the goat was merely shunted to an inaccessible region, a stunning metaphor for the abandonment of sin. We cannot kill the past; we can only hope that it travels to an inaccessible place where it no longer tempts, marks, or harms us.
In the introduction to his commentary on the Rosh HaShana Maĥzor, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that teshuva means that our past does not dictate our future. Rabbi Jonah believed that, too, and actively worked to overcome a wrong he had done in the past. That requires strength of character, as all authentic change does, and Rabbi Sacks elaborates on how important this drive is, especially during this season:
Our determination to grow as human beings – our commitment to a more faithful, sensitive, decent life in the year to come – gives us the courage and honesty to face our past and admit its shortcomings. Our teshuva and God’s forgiveness together mean that we are not prisoners of the past, held captive by it. In Judaism sin is what we do, not what we are.
Perhaps because it is harder than anything else, teshuva, for Rabbi Kook, contains the possibility of dramatization. He wrote that “the inner pain of repentance is a great theme for the poets of sorrow to strike up upon their harps and for artists of tragedy – to thereby reveal their talent.” Repentance is the great dramatic narrative besetting all relationships. In that spirit, Michael Lavigne opens his novel, Not Me, with a contemporary father and son estrangement story. Michael, a middle-aged stand-up comedian, was in a marriage that crumbled, taking with it his one son. Michael’s father, Heschel Rosenheim, is an aging Holocaust survivor who was once an upstanding member of the Jewish community but is now in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But Michael discovers that his father was never a Holocaust survivor; he was actually an SS officer who, to save his own life at the time of liberation, tattooed numbers onto his arm, traveled to Israel, and, ironically, ended up defending the country. On his deathbed, with his last breath Michael’s father cries out, “Forgive me! God in heaven forgive me.” As Michael looks at his lifeless father, he is filled with pity. He sees no expected darkness, only light. Michael then makes some of his own observations about teshuva:
I found it so hard to believe any of it really happened. How could a person change from one thing to its direct opposite, as if becoming someone else is as easy as changing your tie? And yet, what if it were true? What if he had been in the SS and on kibbutz and served in the Palmach and was a hero of the War of Independence and through pain and loss finally achieved some sort of capacity for love?
I remembered how once he tried to explain to me the meaning of repentance. I was playing with the fringes of his long, elegant tallis. He smiled down at me.
“In Hebrew,” he said, “it means turning. Better, it means returning. It means to come back, Mikey, to come back to your true self.” And then he laughed and pinched my nose. “And what could be easier than that?”
“So why do we have to do it every year?”
“Because, my dear little one, there is no one true self. And that is why repentance can never end.”
Teshuva is a never-ending process because we are always changing and the context of our universe is always shifting. This does not mean that there is no stable or true self – to disagree with Heschel Rosenheim; we know when we are being true to ourselves. We need multiple opportunities for teshuva because our mistakes and errors change over time, and our circumstances are fluid. The self is not static and unchanging, even if our essential personalities may be well established. Events change us. Relationships change us. Decisions change us. Life changes us. Therefore, there can never be an end to the process of teshuva.