Teshuvah — We Can Do It
The stakes are immense, for the forgiveness of Yom Kippur comes only once a year
Surely there can be few physical experiences more pleasant than a shower when one's skin is crawling from having gone too long without one, or the accumulated sweat and grime of one's exertions. After the shower, one feels completely revitalized, almost a new person.
Yom Kippur is such a shower in the spiritual realm. We emerge from Yom Kippur, in Rav Yitzchok Hutner's unforgettable description, not a bessere (better) person, but an andere (different) person. The Rambam describes the chasm between the person we were and the one whom we become through teshuvah: "Last night, he was hated before Hashem, disgusting, distant, and abominable. And today, he is beloved, a delight, intimate, a close friend" (Hilchos Teshuvah 7:6).
That is why Yom Kippur is for many the happiest day of the year — the day on which we are lifted above our bodily drives and completely freed from the importuning of our yetzer hara.
Of all the satan's tools, none is greater than our innate desire to be independent and to follow our own will — to go "b'shrirus libi — as my heart desires." The essence of teshuvah is thus the desire to realign our will with the Divine will.
In parshasNitzavim, we read: "When you listen to the voice of Hashem, your G-d, to observe His commandments and His decrees that are written in the book of the Torah, when you return to Hashem, your G-d, with all your heart and all your soul" (Devarim 30:10). The Meshech Chochmah explains the verse to mean that when you do teshuvah by giving up the need to assert your own independence, then, and only then, will you be able to fully hear the voice of Hashem, His will, as embodied in His commandments.
THE STAKES ARE IMMENSE, for the forgiveness of Yom Kippur comes only once a year. And that is part and parcel of the feeling of being fully alive on Yom Kippur, as Rabbi Avrohom Neuberger pointed out in these pages two weeks ago.
The Meshech Chochmah asks a question that has probably bothered most of us at some point or another. In parshas Re'eh, the verse reads, "Behold, I place before you blessing and curse" (Devarim 11:26). In Nitzavim, however, a very similar verse adds new elements: "Behold, I have placed before you today life and good, and death and evil" (Devarim 30:15).
The earlier verse referred to blessing and curse, which can be read as paralleling "good" and "evil" in the latter verse. But the latter verse adds another element: life and death. What does that new element signify, asks the Meshech Chochmah, and why is it only introduced in the latter verse?
He answers that a new element, the possibility of teshuvah, has been introduced between the two verses, and that element offers the fullest understanding of life itself. Beginning with Yom Hadin and throughout the Ten Days of Teshuvah, we are called upon to give din and cheshbon. The former refers primarily to performance of mitzvos: Did we avoid aveiros and perform the positive mitzvos incumbent upon us?
Cheshbon, according to the Vilna Gaon, refers to the use of our time. Did we put it to use to realize our mission in the world? For beyond the mitzvos, which apply equally to all of us, we each have a unique mission in this world, and the crucial determinant in how we fulfill that mission is how we use our time.
Yom Hadin takes place on the first day of the year, the day when HaKadosh Baruch Hu created man. Prior to the creation of man, there took place, according to the Midrash, an argument in Shamayim: Should man be created or not?
While the angels were arguing, Hashem went ahead and created man. In that reading, naaseh adam does not mean "Let us create man," but rather records Hashem's decision to create man, "man has been created."
And every year on Rosh Hashanah, a similar question is presented to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, with respect to each of us individually: Are we worthy of having our mission extended for another year? Are we, at this moment, committed to fulfillment of that mission? And that requires a commitment not just to the fulfillment of a checklist of mitzvos, but to using our time as if we really believed that our life has purpose and meaning, that there is something that only we can do.
That, in turn, requires us to take advantage of the unfathomable opportunity to do teshuvah and to come close to Hashem, and in the process to recognize that He created us, each of us, for a purpose. Doing so is a source of life in two senses.
First, when we commit to the fulfillment of our mission, we are much more likely to have our time for realizing that mission extended for another year. But secondly, a person who lives with a sense of purpose and meaning lives a qualitatively different life. He is truly alive.
PRECISELY BECAUSE the potential through teshuvah is so great, the yetzer harawill do everything in its power to convince us that we will fail. It will tell us that the commitments made the previous year came to naught, and so will be the case with those we make this year. We just do not possess the strength to overcome him.
To counteract the yetzer's taunts, it is crucial that we think of teshuvah as realignment with Hashem's will, and recognize that alignment with His will is our natural state. As the wisest of all men informs us, "For G-d made man straight, while they pursued many calculations" (Koheles 7:29). After a person passes from the world, say Chazal, his soul testifies against him (Taanis 11a). That soul contains the innate moral sense with which man is born. In the course of our lives, we corrupt the soul and cover over its intuitions through our thoughts and deeds. The soul's testimony after we have left the world attests to that corruption.
The shofar-blowing on Rosh Hashanah (though not this year on the first day) recalls the first breath that Hashem blew into Adam's nostrils. Hashem blew into Adam an element of the Divine, a portion of Himself. That is the tzelem Elokim, the Divine image.And it always remains and gives us the potential to act in accord with our Divine nature.
We are born with an innate moral sense and an awareness of Hashem as the Creator of the natural universe that we see around us. That is how Avraham Avinu was able to recognize the Creator: There cannot be an ordered universe tailored to our every need without a Creator. The Seven Noachide Laws similarly attest to an innate moral sense in man and to his ability to discern the Creator in the world around us, for they do not result from revelation.
The opinion of Rabi Akiva that the "great principle" of the Torah is the injunction "to love your neighbor as yourself" is well known. Less known and less understood is Ben Azzai's counter suggestion: "Zeh sefer toldos adam — This is the book of the generations of man" (Bereishis 5:1, cited in Yerushalmi, Nedarim 9:4). How is this even a principle at all, much less a great one? What is Ben Azzai driving at?
The Meshech Chochmah, as explicated by Rabbi Immanuel Bernstein in From the World of the Meshech Chochmah, writes that man himself is a book from which the command to treat his fellow man justly can be read. And man's initial uncorrupted mode of emanation — toldos adam — is in accord with moral behavior. That understanding comports with the statement of Chazal that Avraham Avinu recognized his Creator from "himself" — not by himself but from within himself.
The recognition that our natural state is one of alignment with the Creator and His instructions for us should itself allow us to approach the process of doing teshuvah with confidence that it can be done.
After all, did we not just read, "For this mitzvah [i.e., teshuvah, according to the Ramban]... is not inaccessible to you, nor is it far away... for the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart to do it" (Devarim 30:11–14).
May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life. —
Will AI Make Us Less Human?
A few days ago, I watched a clip of Spencer Klavan, a professor at the University of Austin, a new college based on the Great Books model, telling his students that because of the school's emphasis on paper-writing and strict rules against the use of AI to do so, they might soon be the last people in America who can construct a logical argument.
Coupled with Rav Chaim Brisker's observation that there is no such thing as an idea that cannot be expressed in words — If you cannot express it, it does not yet exist — that is truly frightening. Not only might they be the last people capable of expressing a logical idea, but the last people to have such an idea.
(Needless to say, I mean outside of the beis medrash, where yeshivos across the spectrum have taken a characteristically dim view of the new technology, though one talmid chacham told me last week that AI can make a good chavrusa.)
Nor will the deficit be confined to expository writing and logical thought. It is likely to extend to our ability to express emotions in a manner that can be conveyed to those we love.
I recently read that people are speaking to one another less and less, and employing fewer words in the course of the day. There is even something, I learned courtesy of the Washington Post, called the Gen Z stare.
My fear is that like logical arguments that cannot be expressed, emotions that are never spoken will, at some point, cease to exist. And as a consequence, we will all become just a little, or a lot, less human.