"I WILL SIN AND REPENT:TRAVELING THE PATH TO TRUE REPENTANCE"

Over the last several years, there has been a prayer which has captured the hearts of countless Jews, especially Reform Jews.  Indeed, this prayer has become a phenomenon in and of itself.  I am talking about the Mi Shebeirach prayer.

Now Mi Shebeirach is not new to Judaism.  In Orthodox and Conservative congregations, the traditional Mi Shebeirach has been offered for centuries, at least.  However, in Reform Judaism, it was lost until Debbie Friedman composed her extremely popular EnglishHebrew rendition.  Now, almost every Reform synagogue offers a Mi Shebeirach.  Not only that, congregants are submitting many, many names to be read on Mi Shebeirach lists, and more names are being added during the services, as we do in ours.

In fact, this successful phenomenon has created its own crisis, especially in the larger congregations.  For in many congregations, healing lists are becoming so long that they are no longer manageable.  Even if certain people do not feel the obligation to come to services themselves, they still want those who do wor­ship to pray in their stead for the healing of their loved ones and friends.  And for those who do come to services, it is remarkable how many of them will raise their hands and call out the names of those they wish to be healed.  They will call them out loud; people who, in other instances, are extremely reticent to speak in pulpit discussions; people who generally would not expose themselves that way in public.

I suspect that the overwhelming popularity of this prayer is but a reflection of the profound hunger so many of our people feel for healing; for their healing and the healing of those they care about.  Whether or not they personally believe that God can heal the sick or help the sick to heal themselves, they are so hungry for healing that they will hedge their bets and grasp onto this prayer as yet another hopeful oppor­tunity.  Even if filled with theological doubts, their actions are guided by the philosophy of, “Well, it couldn’t hurt!” and behind that is the aspiration, “God, I hope it helps!”

For those who actually attend the services in which the names are read and the healing prayer is recited and sung, they know that there is something very good about this because they know how good they feel doing it.  They know how good they feel reciting those names.  They know how good they feel singing those words.  Since this prayer has the power to change them for the better, it is not a great leap of faith for them to believe that this prayer has the power to change those in need of healing and in whose names it is offered for the better.

We hunger for healing.  However, we often forget that there are many types of healing.  There is refuat haguf, healing of the body  physical healing  and refuat hanefesh, healing of the soul  spiritual heal­ing.  And even though our Mi Shebeirach prayer speaks of both and in fact states that both are necessary if one is to have a refuah sheleimah  a complete healing  still we tend to focus our attention on refuat haguf  the physical healing  rather than on refuat hanefesh  the spiritual healing.  Perhaps that is be­cause the physical world is by its very nature far more tangible and tactile.  Physical healing is more easily measured than spiritual.  Bodily wounds, when properly treated, fade and disappear, perhaps leaving be­hind a benign scar to remind us of their ever having occurred.  Not so with spiritual wounds.

Spiritual wounds tend to be more complex and elusive.  They are not so readily measured nor are they so easily treated.  While one can argue that injuries to the body, unlike injuries to the spirit, can lead to death, still injuries to the spirit can lead to a living death; a painful existence which, if left untreated haunts us throughout our lives till the day we die; and who knows, perhaps beyond that.

Like physical wounds, spiritual wounds possess their own pain.  And like physical pain, spiritual pain is there to serve as an alarm, a warning signal.  “Something is wrong!  Something is broken!  We need to pay attention to it!  We need to get it repaired!”  However, unlike the pain of physical wounds, we cannot readily locate the source of spiritual pain.  We cannot say “Ouch!” and point to a specific spot and say, “Here is were it hurts.  Here is what needs to be repaired.”  Even so, that does not make the pain any less real or the wound any less in need of treatment.  Indeed, quite the contrary, for if we choose to ignore our spiritual wounds because their nature and their treatment are not so obviously apparent, then they, like physical wounds if left untreated, will fester and grow.  If we permit that to happen, we will never achieve refuah sheleimah; we will never have complete healing.  As Rabbi Isaac Arama said, “Only when the soul is at peace, so will the body be.”^[1]

So how do we successfully address our spiritual wounds?  The answer to that question is very much wrapped up in the meaning of this day, Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement.  For Yom Kippur is a day totally dedicated to the life and health of the spirit.  Indeed, it is a day when we are instructed to turn away from the life of the body and our physical needs so that we may focus with intensity upon the life of the spirit and our spiritual needs.  That is one of the reasons why we fast  to put aside the needs of the body and turn our total attention to the needs of the soul.

But what are the needs of the soul?  What are the viruses that attack our spiritual health?

According to our tradition, our soul comes from God, and as such, comes to us in a state of purity.  But once within us, that purity is open to challenge and attack.  The viruses which attack the soul are to be found in the poor choices we make throughout our lives.  It is our words and our deeds, if they are wrong­ful words and wrongful deeds, if they are hurtful words and hurtful deeds, that taint the soul.  We call these wrongful, hurtful words and deeds chataot, “sins.”  It is our chataot, our sins, which deny our souls their native purity.  For it is to a state of purity that our souls yearn to return.  They wish to be as they were when they were with God; before they were implanted within us.  They wish to be purified, for that is what it means to heal the soul.

Yom Kippur offers us an opportunity to turn our attention to this spiritual purification process.  Recog­nizing that by our very human nature, we can never attain absolute spiritual purity, still, if we so choose, we can draw closer and closer to it.  We may never become truly pure, but we can strive to become purer than we are today.  And as long as we spend our lives continuing in that direction, striving for greater and greater purity of the soul, then we have done our part to secure our own refuat hanefesh, spiritual heal­ing.

The means by which we purify our souls is called teshuvah  “repentance”, a returning to God, for that is what the term teshuvah means, “returning.”

The concept of teshuvah  repentance  goes handinhand with the concept of cheit  sin.  For as teshuvah means “returning,” cheit mean  not doing evil  but rather “missing the mark; going astray.”  For more often than not, that is the very character of our sins.  It is not that we are evil beings who have said things and done things with malicious intent  though there have been and there are some people who are that way and sometimes even we slip into being that way  but rather more often than not, we are ba­sically decent people who are trying to do the right thing but for one reason or another we get lost.  Once lost, we may find ourselves saying things and doing things which, in calmer moments, in more objective moments, in moments when we could give more consideration to the implications and the ramifications of our words and deeds, we would never say or do.  Thinking we were doing the right thing, we went astray and as a result, we wound up doing the wrong thing, and perhaps people were hurt because of it.

So we need to do teshuvah  repent; return to the right path in our lives.  It is that very act of returning which serves to purify our souls.  But how does one do true teshuvah?  What is the nature of real repen­tance?

The first step on the road to teshuvah is acknowledgment.  Before we can return to the right path, we have to admit that we have gone astray.  We have to look at ourselves through clear glasses, not defen­sive ones.  We have to stop justifying our actions and making excuses for ourselves.  Let us recognize that at times we have been wrong.  What we said might have been wrong.  What we did might have been wrong.  And we have to face up to it.  In PIRKE AVOT Rabban Gamliel said, “Don’t judge your fellow human being until you have reached that person’s place.”^[2]  We need to turn Rabban Gamliel’s statement around just a bit.  We need to live by the rule, “Don’t judge yourself until you have put yourself in the other person’s place.”  We need to stop looking at ourselves as we wish to see ourselves  always in the right  and begin to look at ourselves as others see us; begin to look at ourselves as those who have been hurt by us see us.  We need to recognize their pain and admit our own responsibility for having caused it.  And if we cannot understand how we are responsible for that pain, then we need to be courageous enough to ask.  “I know that you feel I have hurt you.  I don’t understand how.  Please explain it to me, for I want to heal old wounds and avoid inflicting new ones.”  Only when we can do this, can we start down the path toward true teshuvah.

Once on that path, we need to take our teshuvah seriously.  “I am sorry” are three of the most difficult words for human beings to utter, but they are also three of the most important words  three of the most powerful words  that we can say.  But that is only true if we say it and mean it.  We probably all have known people in our lives who have used those three words  “I am sorry”  as if they were a “GetOutofJailFree” card in a Monopoly game.  They say “I am sorry” but what they mean is “Oh!  You caught me.  Now get off my back.”  We know that they are not sorry for what they did.  They are just sorry that they were caught doing it.  Their words, their repentance, is empty and meaningless.  This is not true teshuvah.  This is not the teshuvah for which we should be striving.  Such teshuvah avails us nothing.  It contains no healing power within it.  MISHNAH YOMA speaks of such teshuvah when it states, “One who says: ‘I will sin and repent, then I will sin again and repent again,’ is not really repentant.  And one who says, ‘I will sin, and the Day of Atonement will atone for me,’ will find that the Day of Atonement will not atone.”^[3]