The essay in me, the one I am screaming with…well, I sat down to write it and realized I wrote it last Rosh Chodesh. I’m the kind of activated where I keep talking myself down from picking unhelpful fights on WhatsApp (with only medium success) and can’t focus for more than about a minute at a stretch. This essay took days to sit down and start, hours to start actually writing after I wrote “Rosh Chodesh Elul” at the top of the document, and even as I work on this paragraph I am clicking away to check my email and texts.
I hoped that starting this essay would make it easier to continue it. Then, after drafting that first paragraph, I gave up, closed my computer, and opened a volume of Pachad Yitzchak hoping for something other than what the inside of my own brain was giving me (mostly incoherent yelling noises, which don’t translate well to the newsletter format). Rav Hutner, as he always does, delivered.
Okay, dear readers, I have been striving to be gentle in writing about the war while also being clear and honest about what I think, to acknowledge how different people who are good and moral can look at the same set of facts and disagree on what the right thing to do is. And I love Am Yisrael and I know that we are all hurting so, so, much. And you know what? I think everyone who supported this war and who has continued to is deeply in the wrong and needs to do teshuva.
Part of me wishes for a pulpit, or a megaphone at a protest. I want to do some good yelling. It’s Elul. As a Jew among Jews, I don’t have any ground to stand on to exhort others to behave differently other than our usual commitments and covenants. But as a rabbi, I am wishing I could reach for a coherent community and make moral demands. But that’s not the path I’ve chosen.
I turned to Rav Hutner looking for a way to think and speak about teshuva. Obviously, we each have our own internal work to do, and each community has its work as well. But I am grappling with what to do when I think that so many people I love – both specific and abstract love – have a very concrete thing to repent for.
Rav Hutner often starts out his maamarim with a technical-leaning textual question, which he transmutes into an engine to drive spiritual meaning-making. In his sixth maamar (article/essay) on Yom Kippur, his opening question is this: what does it mean for forgiveness to be suspended or held in limbo between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? And also (here he is citing a piece of Gemara), why does a person who does complete teshuva merit to be called “rabbi?” Isn’t that title reserved for those with extensive expertise in Torah?
His answer to the first question is, to put it blithely, teshuva is a form of time travel. In the normal order of the world, things move from good to bad – the primary example being that we are alive, and then we die. Teshuva – and the resurrection of the dead – is an inversion of this natural cycle of things. It needs an extra boost of chesed from God to even begin to be possible. And part of that inversion is that normally, we make decisions and then act – our thinking creates our actions. But with teshuva, our regret actually retroactively changes the nature of our actions, undoing the bad (this, of course, applies much more tidily to sins against God rather than against people, where we are obligated to resolve the harms interpersonally). Our actions are affected by our thinking, metaphysically.
This inversion, teaches Rav Hutner, causes “the sparks of the future to enter into the flow of life in the present.” Teshuva is miraculous and needs God’s help, because only with Divine support can such a topsy-turvy process be achievable. So when we are in the liminal space between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are suspended between Rosh Hashanah, a day which is about actions and the present, and Yom Kippur, a day about teshuva and the future.
This circles back to why someone who does full and complete teshuva is referred to by the Rabbis as “rabbi” themselves. “Every tear of teshuva and every groan of teshuva, in addition to fulfilling the mitzvah [of teshuva] themselves, opens up an opening for teshuva to enter the world,” writes Rav Hutner. A person who does teshuva changes the shape of the world, makes the inversion and impossibility of total change more and more imaginable. Just as Torah changes us and changes the world, so does teshuva, and so those who do teshuva are compared to those who teach Torah.
This month, I need the idea of teshuva as spurring inversion and opening doors to the impossible, messing with the order of past and future, completely undoing and remaking the world. I need another world to be possible. We all do.
It is my hope that doing teshuva in all our smaller-scale ways, for our mean emails and our snappishness under pressure, skipping laying tefillin for no particularly good reason and accidentally-on-purpose missing the time to daven mincha, can help us experience how to turn the world inside out and upside-down. Teshuva itself can teach us how to do more teshuva.
I want us to be each others’ rebbeim in teshuva. I want us to keep flipping the world around until it is something that neither you nor I imagined but that is so much better. We need God’s help to do that impossible-seeming task, and we need one another.
With love,
Avigayil
I needed this when I finally got to checking my email today 💜