Jeremy Rosen
Why Do We Repent?

Jeremy Rosen - Why Do We Repent

- So ladies and gentlemen, nice to be back with you, and I want to wish you all a very, very happy, healthy, successful New Year. Now the subject for today is a little more complicated than the announcement conveyed, and I’m going to deal as I normally do with a subject from an unusual and different point of view because this whole question of the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is very ambiguous from lots of reasons. First of all, people get confused between the idea of penitence and repentance. Repentance basically is changing your mind about something, whereas penance means paying a penalty. And these days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are called Aseret Y'mei T'shuvah, the 10 Days of Repentance. Now repentance itself is a highly controversial issue. Is it something serious? Is it something negative? And how do we understand this whole process?

Many of us are left with this kind of childhood image of God on high judging us, sitting on this golden throne in the sky surrounded by little angels and putties fluttering around and taking out this big book from underneath the seat and takes out his goose quill and starts writing each person’s name in on Rosh Hashanah as to whether they’re going to have a good year, and keeping it in suspense until Yom Kippur when everything’s sealed, and the fate is now decreed. And yet ironically, this atmosphere of we’re being judged, how awful, how awesome, how serious is belied by the fact that in a way Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur rather is a happy day. It’s a day when we are described in the Mishnah, when people went dancing in the vineyards, happy that they’d been forgiven.

And in the same way, Rosh Hashanah is not described in the Torah as a very serious day. It’s a day when we blow the shofar, but there’s no hint of anything more. And then to make it even more complicated, the idea of Teshuvah, of repentance is not a law that is given in the Torah at all. It is, the Torah simply talks about God coming back to us, we coming back to God, a sense of alienation that we have all the time interacting with God and that somehow this is something we should do. It’d be a good idea to do, but it’s not framed in the Torah as one of the legal obligations. So if it’s not a legal obligation, what exactly is it and how do we frame it? Interestingly enough, we’re supposed to act as though we are being judged, and that might be very therapeutic. On the other hand, for those who take a rational point of view, the idea of being judged is really a matter of our judging ourselves to see if we are doing the right thing or not.

To do something because a policeman is standing over you isn’t the greatest of motives for good behaviour. The one most important example of Teshuvah, of repentance that we have in the Bible is the book of Jonah. And so I want to start this session by going through the book of Jonah, which we read on Yom Kippur and explaining how this can clarify what we mean by repentance and what we mean by making things right. Now I’m going to go over the book very briefly. It’s a short book, a couple of chapters, but if you want to follow it, you can log on to Sefaria. And if you log onto sefaria.org, S-E-F-A-R-I-A.org, then look up the, all the topics and look for Tanakh, T-A-N-A-K-H which is the Bible. And under Tanakh, if you scroll down, you’ll find the book of Jonah there. Now the book of Jonah appears to be a narrative of something that actually happened, and it happened roughly speaking, if it did, roughly speaking 2,800 years ago when the Jewish people had been split into two rival kingdoms, Judea in the south and Israel in the north with the 10 tribes.

And the power at that time was Assyria. And Assyria is known in history, in archaeology, as a very aggressive militant power that was regarded at the time as the most cruel power on earth. And in the year 70 before the common era, the Assyrians conquer the northern kingdom, and they exile its citizens and scatter them around the Assyrian Empire so that it will never be able to reconstitute again. That’s a separate subject as to whether they actually did when eventually Assyria was conquered by Babylon. But this is the background to God coming to Jonah and telling him, I want you to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and get them to repent. The book is a book that starts off by describing Jonah, the son of Amittai. Some people say this is symbolic. Jonah is, Yona in Hebrew, is the dove. Amittai, his father’s name is Emmett, Truth.

And so he is bringing truth through peace, and therefore the names and the reality aren’t to be taken as what we would call historically fact. But anyway, Jonah is told by God to go to Assyria to Nineveh and get them to repent, and he doesn’t want to. He runs away. So why does he run away? Doesn’t say specifically, but the indication is that he ran away because he didn’t want to be the agent of getting Assyria to repent so that then God would use them as the agent to destroy his own country. And even though he knew his own country was corrupt, he didn’t want to be the tool of their being punished by this horrible invasion and everything that went with it, slavery and rape and murder and so forth. So he ran away. Now what’s interesting is that if you look at the map, you know the map of Israel, Assyria is roughly where Kordestān is, north of Iraq, and he goes down to Jaffa and gets on a boat that’s going due north, north to a place called Tyre in our language.

And that seems very strange because if you want to run away, you should run away west, not north, northeast if you like, which is closer towards Assyria. Except of course we know that north on the coast was the empire of the sea peoples who were rivals of Assyria. And so in fact, he is going to people who are not on the side of the Assyrians. He goes into the boat, gets a boat, and it starts heading north to Tarshish which is the Hebrew name used. And all of a sudden this massive storm picks up, and the boat is in trouble. And the sailors, they start rowing and trying to get the boat under control and they’re failing, and they’re all pagan sailors, and they all cry out to their pagan gods and say, please help us. Meanwhile, Jonah has gone down into the boat, and he’s fast asleep. Those of you who are familiar with Shakespeare will know that Hamlet also when he’s under pressure, goes down to a boat and falls asleep as he’s being taken across the sea by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Stern on the instruction of the king to have him murdered. And in fact he escapes from it. But depression and sleep seem to go together.

The sailors keep on trying. They throw stuff overboard to lighten the boat, and yet the storm is terrible. They go down and they see Jonah there, and they say, Jonah, what are you doing falling asleep? Come get up and and and tell us and pray with the rest of us. And he comes up, they start praying, nothing happens. And then they decide, well, we’ve got to cast lots. We’ve tried each one of us praying to our different God, let’s see if lottery is going to solve the problem. So they cast lots, and the lot falls to Jonah, and they say, you’re the guy responsible. And he says, yes I am. I know this is because of me, so throw me overboard. Get rid of me and you’ll be fine. And you would’ve thought they would pick him up and throw him overboard. They say, who are you? He says, me, I’m a Hebrew. Very interesting. He doesn’t say I’m an Israeli, he says, I’m an ivri, which is the term that was used for Abraham as somebody travelling from one place to another. And of course he didn’t describe himself as a Jew because at this moment the term Jew doesn’t, isn’t applied. It comes from Judah.

And that was when the tribe of Judah was exiled to Babylon. Well anyway, they try. They show themselves to be good caring people. They don’t want to throw him overboard. They want to save him. You would’ve thought in our day and age, if somebody says I’m a Jew, they’re likely to throw him overboard right away. But eventually they’re in desperation. They’re about to sink and he’s thrown overboard and then swallowed by a fish. We talk about Jonah and the whale. There’s no indication it was a whale. It was a big fish. It was anything but it’s just described as a fish. And there he is in the bottom, in the bowels of this fish. And he’s there for three days, and he cries out to God, and he says, from the bowels of the fish, I’m sorry. I was wrong to run away, so please forgive me. And there’s a little poem there in which he pours out his heart, and God gets the fish to sick him out, and he lands on dry land. And this time he heads towards Ninevah and gets to Ninevah. So you might think he has atoned or changed his mind. Anyway, he heads towards Ninevah. He comes in towards the city.

He travels all through the city for three days saying you’re going to be destroyed if you don’t repent. And amazingly people listen to him, and that’s where the origin of the phrase that there is no profit in his own land. We don’t listen to our own prophets. We might listen to somebody else’s comes from. Surprisingly enough, the people in Ninevah do repent. They take it very seriously. And even the king, the powerful king repents, and they sit in sackcloth and ashes, and they don’t eat food. Not only that, they get the poor animals to fast as well for three days and three nights. And clearly Jonah succeeds, and yet Jonah is very unhappy. So if he’s unhappy, there could be two issues here. One of them is he’s unhappy because of the fate that God is going to decree, but he’s supposed to accept God’s decree, and yet he’s unhappy mainly again because he sees, because they have changed and repented, they’re going to be used to destroy his own homeland. So he goes and he sits outside the city, overlooking to see what’s actually going to happen, and why is he doing that? That’s also strange.

And there he’s sitting outside, and it’s hot, and the sun is beating down, and he makes a little hut, a little Sukkah, something to get shade from as he watches to see what’s going to happen. And then a lovely little tree starts suddenly growing and giving him shade and nice leaves, and then all of a sudden sitting under this shade, and it’s relatively comfortable, and God sends a little worm to destroy the tree and the little worm destroys the tree, and the sun is beating down on Jonah, and he’s feeling terrible. God calls to Jonah, he says, Jonah, did you actually make that little tree that grew? And he said, no, I didn’t. He says, are you happy a little tree grew and gave you shade? He says, yes, I was. So God says say, well listen, if you are sad about the destruction of a tree, which you had nothing to do with directly, why shouldn’t I be sad at the destruction of a whole city of human beings and not only of human beings, but of animals and other life as well. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I be sorry?

And that beautiful story of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur in the afternoon, and there are different reasons as to why. One reason is that it’s talking about repentance and about being able to negotiate with God. Another explanation is that God cares about everybody. Don’t think that God only cares about you because you’re Jewish or because of whatever it is. You’re a religious person. God cares, not only does God care about everybody, God even cares about the animals. So if God can care about the animals, not want to see them destroyed or the ordinary people destroyed, then of course God wants you to repent as well. But my problem with all this is that Jonah’s attitude, what was it? And what do we mean then by repentance? Because after all, he didn’t wholly repent. He was there under duress from God.

He was forced in a sense to go there. It’s not because he himself changed his mind. And so there’s something missing in Jonah’s sense of repentance. So in the Torah itself, which is where I begin with these talks that have a religious theme, the Torah talks about, first of all, when you do something wrong, there is such a thing as confession, viduy. That is to say, I recognise that I have done something wrong. And this is the beginning of what we call repentance. But the term repentance isn’t used there. It’s just used as this statement of viduy, and of course that plays an important part in the Yom Kippur service cause we all the time talk about confessing, but there we’re talking about confessing basically for the nation, half the sins we confess to we’ve never done ourselves. We certainly most of us haven’t murdered anybody or done terrible things. But this is, if you like, common repentance, but that’s very different from personal repentance. And you can’t repent in Judaism on the behalf of somebody else, which is something we’re going to come to.

So first of all, you have the idea of confession, and then with confession you come the idea of saying, I’m not going to do this again, I’m not going to do this again. And this is the beginning of what we call teshuvah. And then having decided not, we then have to go for some kind of active atonement. And in the Bible that would’ve been a sacrifice of some sort. There are all kinds of ranges with those for the rich and those for the poor and so forth. And we have translated that now with no temple into charity and good deeds in order to, if you like, atone for what we’ve done wrong in the past. So this process is what we are supposed to deal with during this period of time from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. And again, it works both on a national level and on a private, personal level. But you and I know that in effect most of us, and I’d say most people, go through this process and we don’t change.

The purpose of coming closer to God of teshuvah is to change to be a better person. But you know, I see most people walk out at the end of Yom Kippur, they’re glad the fast is over, and they carry on doing all the things they were doing beforehand. So if we see that people don’t change, how are we supposed to deal with this? Saying, look, they might be bad doesn’t mean to say I can’t be a good person, I can’t improve. But I think it’s also emphasising the idea that we are part of a people. And if we’re part of a people, then if this people sinks, if this people falls apart, that’s going to have a dramatic effect on us as being members of this people. And so the question then is, is there room for us to pray on behalf of other people that they should repent, that they should think of the nation rather than of themselves? And here we come to a major theological problem, and one of the major differences between Judaism and Christianity, and that is the question of forgiveness.

Can we forgive? Now in the Torah, the term Selichah, forgiveness is only used twice, and it’s used only of God. God forgiving on the request of Moses, the Jewish people after the golden calf and after the debacle of the spies where they were forced to go back for 40 years into the wilderness. So forgiveness, Selichah, is in the hands of God. That’s up to God. Can we forgive? Can we forgive other people? And in what way do we forgive other people? I’m sure you’ve heard Elie Wiesel give this example of this Nazi on his deathbed calling in a Jew and asking for him to forgive him for the terrible things that he’s done. And Rabbi says, I’m sorry, it’s not up to me to forgive. I don’t have the capacity to give. And this is one of the issues that divides Judaism for Christianity. For us, we can forgive those people who have done wrong to us, but we can’t forgive people who’ve done wrong to somebody else, which is what this Nazi is asking us to do.

In Christianity, you have this idea that the founder died in order to bring atonement and forgiveness to people, and therefore you have the idea developed within the Christian world that the church or church authorities or the priest have this capacity to forgive, which is something that does not exist within theological Judaism. Some people might think so, but it isn’t. And therefore forgiveness is something that is thrown onto us. And people often ask me, look, I was raped by somebody. My life was ruined by somebody. How can I possibly forgive? How can people who went through the camps possibly forgive? And certainly forget? You can’t command somebody, forgive and forget. So this is something that we have to deal ourselves as best we can, but it is inevitably going to be incomplete. That is to say most of us are incapable of completely forgetting and even if we claim we forget, maybe not so, and to what extent, and therefore what has religion got to say about that?

And I think that the story of Noah, no, I’m sorry of Jonah illustrates to me the way I understand this conundrum. Jonah does what he has to do. If we are asked by somebody to, if you like, forgive what we have done to them. We are challenged with this. What the law in Judaism requires is we put things right, that we put things right by paying back something we might have stolen, by repairing something where we can. So compensation, kapara, in some form is something that we can do, but, and you know if for example we have done something wrong, and we go to somebody and ask for forgiveness, and that person refuses, we must keep on going three times. But if then that person doesn’t forgive us, we should feel we’ve done the most we can and get on with our lives. And it’s this issue of getting on with our lives that I think is the root of everything.

Jonah could not get over the fact that he was going to be the agent of destroying the Jewish people or destroying rather the northern kingdom, which was a corrupt idolatrous kingdom admittedly, and that’s why it’s Judah the South that kept the banner of Judaism alive, Torah alive. So he could not forget the pain that he was responsible for. He stayed with that, and therefore it’s not as though he could forget. It’s not as though he was given the job of even forgiving. But what he had, and that’s why he sat there in the state of depression, overlooking Ninevah and seeing it change into the agent of his own destruction, he felt helpless.

And many of us do feel helpless. We feel helpless either because the horrors of what was done to us or because of the horrors that we imposed or caused to other people or the hurt we caused, or the damage, emotional damage that we’ve done in our lives to other people. This is a burden that we are left with, and we can’t shove off, and we can’t just atone for and forgive and forget, and yet we have to carry on. So that repentance was incomplete, but on the other hand, the obligation is for him to witness and then to go back home and to try to find a way of carrying on in life afterwards despite the catastrophe that is faced, that we face. And I think that is in many ways the secret of our survival. We’ve gone through so much, and yet we’ve always been able to come back. Have we forgiven the people who did it to us?

Not necessarily because that’s a very personal thing, and it involves the person who offended us as much as our sense of offence coming together and making some sort of peace. But the ability to go forward, the ability to overcome pain, the ability to see the positive, that is as much a requirement of this period as it is to tot up the things that we did that we shouldn’t have done. We will try our best to do better even though we know that we can’t. Now there are so many other different aspects to repentance, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And so I would like to bring you into the discussion about these things. And people have often asked me, can we see what the questions are? And the answer is you can. If you go down to the box which talks, which has Q&A question and answer, you can actually see, so I’m told, the questions as they crop up. So I’m now going to turn to questions and answers and start.

Q&A and Comments:

And first of all, I just want to thank those people who have wished me a Shanah tovah and a good year, and I reciprocate and have welcomed me back after the gap. And for those who have been very nice and paid me nice compliments. But let’s go to the issue. So Marcia already gave us where Sefaria was, and Ellie asked this question, Ellie Strauss or whoever is asking for Ellie Strauss.

Q: Why is it that synagogues have decided never to forgive someone who is guilty of possessing incriminating pornographic material 15 years ago and buying from services? Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations?

A: Ellie, that’s a very good question. I am very unhappy about synagogues or religious people being judgemental. And we all make mistakes. I mean, there’s an interesting case at the moment of a very well-known English comedian, comic actor who has been very, very successful as a spokesman for YouTube and elsewhere. And this gentleman had a terrible past, and he admits that he had an absolute terrible past. He behaved as badly as sexually, drugs, everything like that as it’s possible, as it’s possible to be. And yet from that position of being at the very, very bottom, he has changed. And today he stands for reason, tolerance, understanding. And he has been incredibly successful, and there have been plenty of cases in the past where he regrets and admits and asks for forgiveness, and yet he has now been banned by YouTube for coming on to their site. And the whole question is this, look what he did was terrible, and he has apologised for it. He hasn’t had to defend, try to defend himself, he agrees he did terrible things, and yet nobody wants to forgive him on the left. On the right, they’re trying to forgive him. And therefore it looks a little bit as though this is a matter of wokeness as opposed to what the right thing to do is.

I have always criticised those synagogues that have banned people for whatever reason if their behaviour changed. Because we do believe, and my monitor says in black and white, if a person’s behaviour has changed, and they’re behaving in a good way, you must not remind them of their past. You must accept their changed state. And it’s forbidden to remind them of the past. Now I’ve come across synagogues who have banned people for sexual abuse, and I think that is something that is something that has to be faced, and the person has to show complete repentance. But at the same time, I happen to know that in so many synagogues there are people who have committed adultery, who have destroyed marriage, who have done horrible things, and they are still treated as important members of the synagogue, sometimes because they give big donations. And so you have a huge moral problem here about how you deal with people who have repented. And I believe that no matter who, if they have done something terrible, they should have, should make whatever compensation they can. They should make up for it in whatever way they can. But if they do, they should be forgiven and accepted, particularly within a house of worship.

Q: David says, why do you think there’s no repentance on either side in the present protest in Israel?

A: Well, this is a very good question, David, because both sides utterly believe they are right. And both sides represent two very different worldviews, two different worldviews about what a state should be in general and what Israel should be. And the difficulty is that in Israel there are so many different tribes that have so many different views and perspectives, which is why up to now Israel has been so good at finding ways of compromising. And I believe that in the end there will be compromises. I don’t like either extreme, I don’t like people who are not prepared to make concessions to others. And I hope that in the course of this year this will happen. But I’m pained by extremists on both sides. I don’t like either extreme. And I believe that a democracy is a very, very faulty system. I think it’s a system that needs constantly to be tweaked and changed, and it’s right that they should be changed. But what I find problematic is that in democracy you can’t suddenly say, oh, I don’t like the conclusion, and therefore I’m going to pull the whole house down.

Okay, Rita, thank you. Forgot to mention, had repented, undergone radical treatment. Well, if you have, then I’ve answered that one.

Star, none of us are God’s policemen. Well, yes and no. The Torah does say if you see somebody doing something wrong, you should put them right. You should be able to say I think this is wrong. On the other hand, the Torah as explained in the oral law says, but if the person’s obviously not going to listen to you, don’t waste your time. Don’t try working on somebody who’s not open to hearing another point of view. But we do have a responsibility for other people and for society, and that is reflected in various laws in the Torah, famously the law of the red heifer, the law of the heifer with a broken neck. That’s another issue you could look up on the internet if you like. So it’s well built in that we should try to take responsibility and change people. What we don’t have the right is extra judicial punishment. We can’t go around punishing people, but we can go around saying, listen, you know, keep away from this guy. He’ll swindle you. He’s bad for you. Or don’t allow your son or daughter to marry somebody who you know has another side, which is a dangerous side.

Q: Marcia asks, hi, Marcia, another question. Why did or how did God differ in God’s approach to Sodom and Gomorrah and Nineveh? Why was God ready to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah but willing to be merciful to Nineveh?

A: Well, that’s an excellent question. One can answer this question rationally, and one can answer this question mystically. On a rational level, of course, one could say, well, you know, frankly, there was about 1,000 years difference between the two examples. Things have changed. That we’re not told specifically how bad Sodom was or in relation to Nineveh whether it was worse or whether it was not worse. But either way, each one of the examples that we have about God acting are if you like metaphors. We don’t know how God works. We certainly know that God is not like Superman acting as a superhuman being and intervening all the time. God is a different dimension. And as far as we’re concerned, God is the vehicle through which we are given certain moral instructions. And so the instruction coming from God in these two cases is that sometimes evil people are so bad that they have to be stopped in one way or another. So one way is if you can persuade them as in the case of Nineveh. The other one is in the case of Sodom. Sodom was not prepared when it was given the option to change its mind. So there are always nuances in any instruction, in any law in the Torah that allow for different perspectives.

Eileen, thank you very much, coming from Glasgow. I wish you all the best. I have such happy memories.

Martin, what about the prayer before the Shema? God, I hereby forgive. Well, I, oh, I see you’re talking about the Shema on Al Hamita, the Shama that we say at night. Yes, we pray to God to enable us to forgive, but it is a hope rather than shall we say something that you can control. So there are lovely ideas of forgiveness, and we are asked to forgive all the time. But the question then is, is that the same thing as forgetting, and what do we mean by forgiveness? If for example, I forgive somebody, but I still feel the pain, is that genuine forgiveness or is it not? And this is again another example of there is so much poetry within our prayers, so much personal opinion by the people who compose the prayers of deciding what to put in. For example, I don’t believe in such a thing as a Satan. Satan, an idea is only mentioned in the Book of Job, and most of the time it’s just meaning some sort of negative temptation. And so I don’t feel comfortable ever saying, as it says in certain prayers, keep us away from the Satan, because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a Satan. But the fact that it’s in the prayer book is something that is part of how people felt at one time. In the same way, there are things in the prayer book about sacrifices. I can’t stand the idea of sacrifices, of killing animals. I don’t like killing animals for food. I don’t like killing animals for any other reason. I just don’t like it. But it’s there, and it reminds us of a stage in our history and in our lives as the religion evolves. So one shouldn’t take every word in our liturgy or indeed in our text at face value without trying to go a little bit deeper. It’s good to be reminded of social responsibility says, Roman and Bev, thank you, yes. And that’s what prayer and that’s what these festivals do. They’re supposed to remind us. They don’t tell us anything new. They don’t tell us anything we don’t know all the time. And some of us say every day, and some of us have atonement prayers every day after the Hamita of asking for forgiveness. But you know, we get into a habit, and we need these special days to break our habit and to get us to focus, whereas otherwise we might not.

Stephen says, my understanding of Judaism theological forgiveness is that between person to person in order to forgive, the forgivee needs to express remorse and to ask the forgiver before we can receive God’s forgiveness. Between man and God, we repent directly. That is true. The Talmud says that Yom Kippur has nothing to do with personal forgiveness of another person. That is something that you have to do yourself and repay. It’s only about those sins or failures between us and the spiritual truth and the spiritual standard that Yom Kippur talks about.

So on that note, I will bring our lecture to an end and hope that Yom Kippur will be a meaningful one and how meaningful is going to depend entirely up to each one of you. Thank you.