Shabbat Shuvah 2023: The Process of Return
This Shabbat is Shabbat Shuvah, the Shabbat of Return which falls between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur each year. Why is Shabbat Shuvah so significant? After all, we don’t refer to the Monday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as the Monday of teshuvah.
Shabbat plays a special role in the process of teshuvah, return and repentance, and may even be the key to proper teshuvah. The Talmud states in Shabbat 118b, “Anyone who keeps the Shabbat according to its laws, even if they worship idolatry like the generation of Enosh, they are forgiven.”
Maimonides’ legal codification of the Talmud is quite clear that in order to do teshuvah, to gain repentance, one must go through certain steps: regret for what they have done, verbal confession, asking forgiveness and resolving not to do the sin again. Without these steps, says Maimonides, one can not achieve teshuvah. So how is it possible that keeping Shabbat alone affects forgiveness even for terrible sins?
Perhaps there are two aspects to repentance, atonement and purification. We see this in the verse we say often on Yom Kippur (Leviticus 15:30), “On this day you will have atonement to purify you from all of your sins, before God, you will become pure.” What is the difference between atonement and purity?
Atonement—kaparah, the erasure of sins—must come through a process, the process which Maimonides codifies from the Talmud, which must include regret, confession and forgiveness. But perhaps taharah, purity, is something else. Purity is a state of being; it is a state of being close to the Divine. When we are in this state, we are far from sin, and when we look back at our sins, we are perplexed at how we could have done them, at how we could have felt the desires we did and given in. Perhaps this relates to what Rav Kook said, that when we sin, in that moment, if we have sinned willingly, then it is just that—a sin done on purpose. But after we do teshuvah, especially teshuvah out of love and look back in retrospect at the sin, it seems to be, and indeed is, one committed in error.
I think this is because we have changed, we have become someone who at this moment would not do such a sin; indeed we see it now as anathema. Sometimes teshuvah achieves tahara, or a new state of being. But sometimes that more purified state of being can be achieved by other means and indeed teshuvah’s goal is then already achieved. In other words, we kind of skip over the process and go to the end.
Perhaps it is akin to learning to play the piano by practicing. It takes a great deal of practice to learn to play the piano, but there are those who are born as savants and they can naturally hear the notes and play the songs; it does not take the same process to achieve the end. Perhaps there is something greater about the work it takes to learn to play, but there is also, it seems, an alternative path.
Admittedly, without verbal confession and asking forgiveness, the kaparah, the atonement, is not fully accomplished, but in a way its goal, tahara, the change of self, has been. Whether this state will last is of course another question, but at least now, at this new level, perhaps the process of teshuvah will be one that is even more heightened than it could have been before.
