Teshuvah: Returning to God or “Repentance”
(and a gesture too)
In the previous chapter I made some comments about cleanliness, both of the place and of the person. Cleanliness is indeed important for successful meditating. More important that physical cleanliness is cleanliness of the self. You are about to engage in the Divine service, and just as you wouldn’t want to stand before the King with any material stains, you would not want to have any spiritual stains either. In the Shiviti meditation you are attempting to move beyond illusory being (the illusion of independently existent person in a material body) into life in the light of truth. Intentions desires and deeds which are inconsistent with the light of truth cannot stand in the Divine presence. We who believe in the Halacha have extensive and elaborate notions concerning the Divine will. Deeds and intentions which go against in the divine will separate us from the light of truth. However, the greater impurities are those attitudes or personality traits which often go unnoticed, like selfishness, greed, anger and falsehood. Regardless of your views of Halacha, or the kind of Jewish community (if any) you belongs to, all can agree that negative personality or character traits and their damaging results should be repented of. Therefore it is important to do Teshuvah and return to God before engaging in you meditation session. Once you have identified some of the traits and actions to rectify (and remember that no-one can really see them all) Teshuvah comprises the following stages set down by the Rambam in his Laws of Teshuvah: 1) putting the sin aside and deciding never to do it again 2) regretting the sin and 3) confessing the sin. Teshuvah and atonement are really nothing less than miracles, accomplished by an unfathomable Divine purpose. The spiritual stains which keep you from the Divine presence are real. How many life times of penitence and austerity should it take to undo them? God's compassion transforms them in an instant. At our time in history the prevalent attitude is that one should not feel guilty. Yet without Teshuvah spiritual life is weighed down by negativity. Great clarity can be found in meditation if the miracle of Teshuvah is recognized and utilized
The Rambam’s requirement that a penitent promise never to do the sin again as part of the confession presents a problem for many. Can we really say to God “I will never do it again!”? Is there any point in lying to ourselves and our creator? For many of us (I am certainly no exception) our spiritual journey is full of advances, retreats, successes and failures. The goal is to become good, righteous enlightened persons, but the path is full of obstacles, twists and turns.
I once heard a great truth I heard from Harav Yochanan Zweig many years ago. To confess means being willing, at that time, to have God take away the desire for your sin so you will never do it again. If you can sincerely stand before God and be willing never to sin again, you will be cleansed. Such willingness is no small matter. Sometimes we love and nurture our sins. We would prefer to keep them and be released from their consequences. This is vanity. At least I must be willing to be released from the sin that traps me! Still, what if I just can’t bring my self to imagine life without the sin of my desires? What then? Perhaps it can be said, taking some inspiration from Rebbe Nachman, that I should be willing, at the very least, to have God make me willing.
Is this what the Rambam actually means? I don’t know. He actually seems quite strident in his rejection of any Teshuvah that is not absolute. And yet, anyone familiar with the Rambam’s writings in his “Eight Chapters” or his “Guide” cannot fail to notice how well the Rambam knew human nature. He knew that a teen with raging hormones is at a different developmental stage that a mature scholar. How then could he demand and absolute irrevocable repentance from everyone, when obviously, there are many stages and ages to be traversed before one can get it right? I think the answer can be found in the idea that Teshuvah involves the awakening of an inner self. As long as you see yourself only as natural organism the only way to satisfy the hunger for being, vitality and self fulfillment is through grasping and taking. Evolutionary biologists, with great difficulty, attempt the claim that even pure altruism can be explained as an adaptation that benefits the individual organism, or at least the organism’s genetic package. Teshuvah begins with the realization that one can transcends biology. There is a real inner freedom which is conditioned by the natural world, but limited by it. A free self can aspire to the light of truth. The awakening of the self is the fundamental act of Teshuvah.
Hopefully, if you are reading this you are already awakened in some way. You need to be focusing on your awakened state. You can strengthen your awakened state by thinking about your essential nature as a free being. Are you driven by bodily instincts, social conformity or consumer culture? Are you running through your life without attending to your own identity? Have you confronted the reality of death? Where do your desires lead? Do you really have to follow them helplessly? These questions, contemplated seriously, bring about an awakening of the self. The awakened self turns towards life in the light of truth.
If so, it might well be that that Rambam means for everybody to use the same formula and state “I will not do it again.” This is not a lie in God’s face. It is the authentic statement of the awakened self. If the penitent fails to withstand temptation at some future time, it will not have been a failure of the awakened self, but rather the result of the self falling back into slumber. In a sense, the awakened self never returns to the sin. It gives the sin to God in confession because the sin is not part of its nature. The more enlightened and righteous a person is, the more completely awake is the inner self. Awakening the self is a lifelong process. It begins with intermittent flashes, and hopefully it evolves into a steady state of awareness.
In any event, the Rambam’s formulation of the confession never became part of the Day of Atonement liturgy. The Sefardic liturgy contains an interesting disclaimer. The penitent tells God “Indeed I should promise you I will never sin again, but I fear my negative inclination. It is fire and I am but flesh, and if I were to lie at your face I would be adding guilt to my transgression” The Ashkenaz liturgy seems to accept as a given that we cannot promise God how we will behave in the future. We can repent sincerely in the here and now, and continue the journey of life to a successful conclusion.
Here is the text of the confession (somewhat shortened but essentially unchanged) taken from the bed-time reading of the Shema:
Master of the world, I hereby forgive anyone who has angered, insulted or injured me; be that injury to my body, my property, my honor or anything else I have. It doesn’t matter if the harm was done unwillingly or willingly, by accident or on purpose, by word or by deed. For all human beings, let no one suffer on account of me!
God who is God of our ancestors, let our prayers come before you. We are not so arrogant and stubborn as to tell you “We are righteous and have not sinned.” Indeed we and our ancestors have sinned. We have sinned, we have distorted ourselves, and we have transgressed before you.
[If you want, you can quietly specify the wrongdoings you remember]
What can we say to you? What can we tell you? Nothing is secret from you and nothing is hidden from your gaze. Let there be a will from before you Lord our God and God of our ancestors that you forgive us our sins, remit us our wrongdoings and atone for our transgressions.
My God! Before I was created I was unworthy, and now that I have been created, it is just as if I was never created. I am dust in my life, how much more so in death. May there be a will from before you that I never sin again and what I have sinned erase in your abundant mercy. May the words of my mouth be desired along with the thoughts of my heart, Lord my refuge and redeemer.
There is a well known gesture that goes along with reciting the confession. The gesture is to strike the heart gently with ones right fist, at the time that one mentions the word “I have sinned.” My father, Ze’ev Binyamin Glick of blessed memory, taught me some important commentary to that gesture. Like many things I learned at a young age, I failed to appreciate the depth and subtlety of his teaching at the time. Today I know it came from a very high place. He taught me that the gesture should not be performed forcefully. It is not a way of beating up on your self. The gesture should be done gently. Next he said that it is important to slip your fist under you jacket or under your tallit when you “beat your heart.” The gesture should be done in a private and personal way, not as a public visible demonstration of remorse.
The gesture has nothing to do with punishing yourself. Rather it is a gesture of awakening. Most all living creatures have heart beats. Pulse and rhythm is the sign of life. Teshuvah is an awakening of a new inner self, so it introduces a new pulse into the center of one’s being. The Human heart is approximately the size of ones clenched fist, so using the fist to symbolize a new heart beat makes a great deal of sense. The awakened self has an inner spiritual nature, and is not reducible to materiality biology or society. So too, “beating the heart” should be an inner act, performed in a subtle and private a way.
