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Jewish World Review Sept. 28, 1998 / 8 Tishrei, 5759
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Horowitz
"If a person violates any commandment of the Torah ... when he repents and
turns from his sin, he must verbally confess to the Creator. ... This confession
vidui is a positive commandment ..."
The act of repentance, which Maimonides goes on to identify as feeling remorse over the
past and commitment to a better future, seems not to be the fulfillment per se of
a Torah commandment; only vidui, the confession it engenders, is.
But if repentance is indeed so natural a human response, so obvious an element of
conscious life, why is it that so many of us seem entirely incapable of it? And what makes it
so difficult for all of us?
One reason so many people refuse to face the obviousness of the need for
teshuva is simply because we find it so daunting. How, they ask, can we go from
where we are to where we should be? It is so far and difficult!
Their mistake, of course, lies in the assumption that the journey must somehow be
instantaneous, that one must immediately and totally rectify all of one's wrongs to become
a baal teshuvah, a true penitent.
The truth is, though, that like any journey's return, the return from transgression has many
stages. And the moment the first step has been taken, small though it may be, a baal
teshuvah has been made.
Indeed, we might better understand the issue by recognizing that the actual translation of
teshuvah is not "repentance," but "return."
Consider the person who has made a long trip to a foreign country and completed his
business there. The moment he begins his drive to the airport, he is a "returnee;" he began
the process of return.
The fact that he is very still on some Island in the Pacific, that his plane is still on the
ground, that thousands of miles separate him from his family, does not change his status as
a "returnee."
The spiritual "return" of teshuvah is much the same; it, too, is a process, one
made up of numerous, and sometimes tiny, steps.
I am always fascinated by the runners in the Boston Marathon who run pass the Chassidic
Center on Beacon Street every year. The leading four or five contenders are easy to
understand. Each of them has a chance of winning the race, and that is his motivation.
But more puzzling are the bulk of the runners, those with no hope at all of finishing as
number one. They, nonetheless, continue to run, often near the point of collapse. Why?
The answer is really quite evident. A runner might have aching legs, stomach pains,
cramped muscles, and be running 156th in the race, but the prospect of perhaps
overtaking 155 manages to keep him going.
He may not win the race, but he knows he can still win his race. He
can still do his best.
There is much we can learn from those runners' attitude to the marathon. In our own lives,
to be sure, we face myriads of obstacles to perfection. But we all too often make the error of
allowing them to deter us from improvement. Teshuvah does not mean the
accomplishment of our every spiritual goal in one stroke.
It means, simply, a new orientation, a step in a trip, the beginning of a process. While one
must always have an ultimate ideal as one's motivation, overtaking the "next runner,"
overcoming the next spiritual challenge, is what should concern us.
That is how repentance truly
happens.
Running life's marathon
IT IS TELLING that the Rambam, Maimonides, does not include teshuvah,
repentance, among the Torah's 613 commandments as do most other early Jewish
codifiers. His language at the very start of Laws of Repentance is as follows:
Grand Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Horowitz is the Bostoner Rebbe and a member of the Council of Torah Sages.
