If I had to name the psychological phenomenon that is most glaringly absent from the conventional model of the human psyche, I would point to teshuva-תשובה.
Freud spoke a lot about pleasure, self-image, and people-pleasing. Skinner — reward and punishment. Maslow — actualizing one’s potential. Frankl — people’s search for meaning. Kahneman — loss aversion and satisfaction. And Seligman — wellbeing.
But what about teshuva?
To quote the famous first words of the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook in his tour de force on teshuva called the Orot HaTeshuva (“Lights of Teshuva”) :
Orot HaTeshuva, Foreword:
Teshuva occupies the largest part of the Torah and life. Upon it are built all of our personal and collective hopes. It is a commandment of God that is, on the one hand, the easiest of all — for even the mere thought of teshuva is already teshuva — and yet, on the other hand, it is the most difficult of all undertakings, for it has not yet been fully realized in the world and in life…
…Much has been written in the Torah, in the Prophets, and in the words of the Sages concerning [teshuva], yet for our generation, these things remain hidden and in need of clarification.
Teshuva is everywhere around us and within us, but still eludes us.
We’ve started thinking about this mysterious but somehow simultaneously familiar concept of teshuva-תשובה in the last XL post, and the one before it.
Firstly, it literally means “return.”
Most simply, it refers to a person who turned away from God, in his behavior and attitude, but later finds the desire and the humility to turn around and come back.
But Rav Kook explains it more:
Orot HaTeshuva 15:10:
The primary role of teshuva…is for the person to return to his true self, to the root of his soul.”
Teshuva isn’t merely about behavior. It’s about identity.
In recent years, this understanding of teshuva as a “return to self” has been widely disseminated, especially in contrast to the Christian-influenced notion of “repentance” that is essentially synonymous with “penitence,” meaning the pain of remorse.
While returning to oneself requires remorse at some point, teshuva, in Jewish consciousness, is not defined as remorse.
In case you missed the footnote in our last post, Maimonides’s proof for this is a verse in Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) that seems to very clearly place remorse as a step one takes after the personal transformation of teshuva:
Yirmiyahu 31:19:
כִּי־אַחֲרֵי שׁוּבִי נִחַמְתִּי וְאַחֲרֵי הִוָּדְעִי סָפַקְתִּי עַל־יָרֵךְ בֹּשְׁתִּי וְגַם־נִכְלַמְתִּי כִּי נָשָׂאתִי חֶרְפַּת נְעוּרָי׃
For after I returned, I regretted; and after I was made aware, I slapped my thigh [in remorse]. I was ashamed, and even mortified, because I carried the shame of my youth.
After one grows and matures, he has the perspective to look back at his actions and regret them — and should do so to continue to move forward in his growth process. But teshuva is not the regret itself. True regret is rooted in true teshuva.
Teshuva is about moving forward to a new place by going back to one’s original place — a sort of transformation that brings the person back to who they were all along. This sounds paradoxical. How does it work?
Teshuva does not mean “return” because a person is going back to an arbitrary starting point. The notion of returning of teshuva is much deeper. A person is pulled back, by his own soul, his own conscience, to his most natural state, much like the way a spring goes back to its equilibrium or a boomerang comes back to its starting point.
![giphy (24).gif [effects output image]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qsh3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7ac3c6f8-85bc-4843-a43f-3f340507ba0b_480x360.gif "giphy (24).gif [effects output image]")
The sages coined another word in post-Biblical Hebrew for the verb “to return”: lachzor-לחזור. Interestingly, they took it from the Biblical word for pig, chazir-חזיר. But this notion of returning is different. ”Lachzor challila” means to go “around and around.” This is a return to the beginning that is not really returning to any true, essential point of origin. It’s just an endless loop.1
We are used to thinking about teshuva as a discrete, linear, almost ritualistic recipe that we do once a year between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. It almost seems odd to be speaking about it now, after the holiday season. But as we begin to see it more clearly, more deeply, and in a more real way — as a return to our truest self — we realize that now is the best time to speak about teshuva. Now is when we can really put the teshuva mindset into practice because teshuva is iterative.
“Now is when we can really put the teshuva mindset into practice because teshuva is iterative.”
Rav Kook, Orot HaKodesh 3:
The call to purify one’s character never ends. One may have already purified it when on an intermediate spiritual level; however, after growing further, new mysteries of life that have never yet been exposed emerge from the depths of chaos for one to refine and clarify.
There are holy people who never cease growing. They go “m’chayil el chayil” (from strength to strength), always engaged in practical repentance, of which purifying and refining one’s character is a vital ingredient.
The very fact that, on some level, human beings want to get better — that people drift from living the way they know deep down they should be living — and then feel pangs of desire to come back to themselves — bespeaks of the inextinguishable flame of the soul within them.
To understand human beings, we must first accept the neshama (soul) as part of the human psyche, and then train ourselves and others to listen to its gentle but resilient voice:
Rav Kook, Orot HaTeshuva 11:2:
One must believe in oneself; one must believe that one’s life and feelings come directly from the essence of one’s soul, are good, and lead one upon a straight path.
Rav Kook, Maamarei Hare’iyah:
The way to truly heal an individual is by uncovering the wellspring of strength and health that is hidden within the self. It is through the revealing of the soul within the soul, the uncovering of the unconscious self that is so hidden and covered up that often people do not even recognize their own essence.
Once we get it — once we grasp the meaning of this return, we don’t just understand teshuva, we believe in it. It is for this reason that the Torah assures us that the national teshuva of the Jewish nation is an inevitability:
Devarim 30:2:
וְשַׁבְתָּ עַד־ה׳ אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ וְשָׁמַעְתָּ בְקֹלוֹ כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם אַתָּה וּבָנֶיךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשֶׁךָ׃
You will [eventually] return to ה׳ your God, and you and your children will heed His voice according to all that I command your today with all your heart and soul.
Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Teshuva 7:5:
Israel will only be redeemed through teshuvah. The Torah has already assured [us] that, ultimately, Israel will repent towards the end of her exile and, immediately, she will be redeemed as [Deuteronomy 30:1-3] states: ”There shall come a time when [you will experience] all these things... and you will return to Hashem, your God...”
May we see and accept that teshuva is not reserved for only 10 days a year, but is the essential driving force of who we are — and and ongoing process — for us as individuals, couples, families, communities, a nation and as a civilization.
Esav is represented in Rabbinic literature by the image of a pig-חזיר. The most notable example of his cyclical behavior is after seeing his brother Jacob take his blessings, and his father sending him away to get married, Esav goes and marries an additional wife from the house of his uncle Ishmael in addition to those he married — against his parents’ wishes — from among the pagan Canaanites.