What is repentance all about? The Hebrew word תשובה (teshuvah) has at least 3 meetings: repentance, return and “the answer.” What is Teshuvah in answer to? The question What does God want from me right now in this very moment?

         That is a question which I won’t propose to answer today. However, I’ll share words from Rabbi Shai Held’s book Judaism is about Love. He writes that teshuvah “is less about castigating ourselves or enumerating our manifold sins than it is about remembering what we are capable of and taking stock of what we still need to do in order to live in a way that reflects God’s love and our worth.”[1] We are aware through teshuvah that we have human agency as well as the ability to bring atonement through our constructive actions.

          There is a Hasidic teaching by Rabbi Simha Bunim that one should have pieces of paper in two different pockets. One should contain the maxim בשבילי נברא העולם, for my sake the world was created. The other should contain the statement, אנכי עפר ואפר, I am but dust an ashes. Rabbi Bunim instructed that when we are in imbalance, leaning more towards one side than the other, we need to open the pocket that will lead us back into balance. Thus, if I feel on top of the world, that nothing can touch me, I need the “I am but dust and ashes.” If, on the other hand, I feel down in the dumps, I need to remember “For my sake, the world was created”-what we celebrated on Rosh Hashanah, the creation of all humanity.

          In balancing ourselves out, we also need to find the areas that we need to work on in our lives. Rabbi Yeruham Levovitz’s student, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, cited him as stating: “Woe to a person who is unaware of their shortcomings, because they will not know what to work on. But even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues, because they don’t even know what they have to work with.”[2] We must always be aware of the good things that we have in life and utilize them to strengthen ourselves.

As Rabbi Elyakin Krumbein notes in the name of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, “any confession of sin must include, in order to be meaningful, the realization that one is a spiritual being with spiritual achievements.”[3] We are always aspirational, trying to grow in any way we can. In Shabbat Torah Study, I once was asked why do we go through this High Holy Day season year after year? What could possibly be its purpose? My response was that we are G-d willing different people this year than we were last year. We have grown in so many different ways and will continue to grow over the course of the coming year.

As we grow in our knowledge and in our understanding of the world, we recognize that we do not have all the answers. That is where humility comes in. At times we can say, “I don’t know but I can look it up or get back to you,” or “Let me think about that.” In so doing, we acknowledge that we are far from perfect and that each of us is always on a course of growth and development. At the same time, we recognize that we can make a big impact in the world around us.

---

[1] Rabbi Shai Held, Judaism is about Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004), pg. 38, footnote 39.

[2] Ibid, pg. 38.

[3] Rabbi Elyakim Krumbein, “on the ‘Humility’ Dilemma and Its Solution, Tradition 39, no. 1 (Spring 2005), pg. 54.