Every year, during the Days of Awe, Rabbis urge their congregants to repent of their wrongdoings of the previous year. This process of taking stock in ourselves, of examining our actions and our motivation, and of recognizing and regretting where we have gone astray is called teshuvah in Hebrew, repentance in English. It is the single most important value within rabbinic Judaism, the key to the entire system of mitzvot (commandments). Small wonder, then, that our holiest days are devoted to its pursuit.
How is teshuvah the key to Judaism? God and the Jewish people are linked through the brit, the covenant in which God promises to be our God and we promise to be God’s people. That brit is concretized in the Torah and made real through the mitzvot. 613 commandments of the Torah, with all the amplifications and interpretations of the rabbis are obligatory on each and every Jew, for all time. Yet even the most pious Jew cannot perform them all perfectly, and many of us are unable to always do even those mitzvot we find personally compelling. What happens, then, when a Jew fails to perform a mitzvah, or when a Jew violates a prohibition. Are we then always in a state of sinfulness? Are we forever barred from God’s love?
For the system of commandments to work, there has to be a provision for how to wipe the slate clean in the case of an error or even an intentional sin. That corrective is teshuvah, repentance. God’s love is bigger than any sin we might commit. And after making it up to the person we have wronged, after attaining their absolution, all it takes to get God’s forgiveness is a simple act of contrition; all it takes is teshuvah.
Teshuvah, then, is the linchpin that keeps Jews connected to God and engaged in mitzvot. Without it, our sins would simply mount irreversibly, and there would be no corrective within the system. Teshuvah is the oil that keeps the machinery of Torah humming.
Paradoxically, however, there are few biblical embodiments of the act of teshuvah, few biblical figures who we see repenting of their sin and then being forgiven by God. Even the command to repent, while understood by the rabbis to come from the Torah, itself is a little murky. True, the Book of Numbers records that “when a man or woman commit any sin…then they shall confess their sin.” But this sentence, in context, goes on to mandate the offering of a sin offering, a sacrifice to atone for the sin that was committed. Ever-careful readers of the Torah, the rabbis note that offering the sacrifice is preceded by awareness that a sin was committed, and implies remorse about having erred. But separating teshuvah from sacrifice isn’t explicitly mentioned until the prophets.
Today’s Torah portion is understood to contain one of the few cases of teshuvah in the Torah. Reuven watches as his brothers decide to kill Joseph by leaving him in a pit. When he returns to the scene, they have already sold Joseph by selling him to the Midianites as a slave. Describing his return, the Torah says, “And Reuven returned to the pit.” The verb used for “return” is va-yashav, the same verb as “to repent.” One can translate the verse as “When Reuven repented at the pit.”
Unlike his brothers, Reuven is filled with remorse. He realizes that he has allowed his brother to be wronged, and he returns to the pit to try to correct his sinful act, to restore his brother to freedom. Yet he arrives too late. Anguished, he turns to God. While the Torah never tells us where Reuven had gone, the rabbis fill in that lacuna through their powerful imaginations: “Where had he been? Rabbi Eleazar said, Reuven was taken up with his fasting and sackcloth, and when he became free he went and looked into the pit.” Reuven did teshuvah, and sat with sackcloth and ashes to mourn his tragic lapse.
In reward for that act of repentance, according to Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, “God says ‘No one has ever repented after sinning before Me, and you are the first who has repented. As you live, your descendant will stand forth and be the first to urge repentance.’ To whom does this allude, to Hosea, who cried out, ‘Return, O Israel, to Adonai your God’.”
Because Reuven “discovered” teshuvah, he was rewarded by having that mitzvah expounded through one of his descendants, the prophet Hosea. Such is the greatness of teshuvah.
As the Sefer Ha-Hinnukh, a 13th Century Spanish listing of the mitzvot explains, “the essence of teshuvah is sincere remorse in the heart over the past, and one must resolve not to do such a thing ever again. This confession is the essential part of repentance.”
By offering himself as a model of teshuvah, Reuven cleansed his family name, and gave a precious gift to his children and to us, his distance relations. Let us pray that we can use his model to stimulate our own introspection, repentance, and resolve.
Shabbat shalom.