Parashat Ha’azinu

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Teshuva at Three Levels

 Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan

l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai

A generation committing suicide, on the one hand, and sanctifying God’s name, on the other.  Today only the higher teshuva – teshuva out of love – remains as an option, according the Master and Maggid of Koznitz in his book Avodat Yisrael.  If the preacher encounters deaf ears, if the generation refuses to give up its base and alienated existence, then the preacher must retreat, and make an appeal to the very root of their soul.  This is the meaning of ha’azinu hashamayim,  “Give ear, O Heavens,” and only then v’tishma ha’arets, “the earth shall hear the sayings of my mouth.”

Today it seems that we must immediately appeal to the higher root, because the generation’s hold on existential reality is weakening; its connection to life is increasingly uncertain.  It is a generation committing suicide in practice, and also indirectly, through drugs, driving, family life – a generation that has given up on life’s value.

It is the disease of the generation:  Our generation no longer asks questions of good and evil, but rather “to be, or not to be.”  Why does the Torah presents the problem the way it does: “Behold I put before you life and good, and death and evil.”  Enough to say good and evil.  Because a generation would yet come whose problem would not be good or evil, but rather life or death.  This is our generation.

Absurdity celebrates.  We accept absurdity as part of man’s existential reality, due to the fact that he has “a part of God with him”, which acts here below through itaruta dil’ta.

The midrash teaches: (Devarim Raba 11:4)  “And this is the bracha that Moshe, the man of God, blessed Yisrael before his death: ‘If ‘of God’, why ‘the man’, and if ‘the man’, why ‘of God’?’  Rabi Abin said: ‘From the middle down, ‘the man’. From the middle up, ‘of God.’”  From here we learn that he is born in contradiction, and that his life is travels the road of absurdity. 

Only a get may not be blurred by the mists of absurdity, and must be clear and absolute.  Gittin 52: “[One who says,] ‘this is your get on my death’, has said nothing at all, for he contradicts himself.  After all, when he dies, she cannot be both divorcee and widow. 

But all the rest is built upon absurdity, and teshuva is chief of them all, born entirely of the absurd.  The very possibility of teshuva is absurd, for how can a human being be expected to do teshuva as an absolute and total decision, “to the point that “the One who knows hidden things will testify for him.”  How can he even be certain he is capable of discerning good from evil for his present actions, let alone for his past?  How can one wield influence over the past in the present? 

That is why there is the mitsva of the two se'irim, satyr goats, one to God and the other to Azazel.  It is not man who is charged with distinguishing the one from the other; only God can discern this, and inform us through the goral. 

Yet the greatest absurdity of all is the process of liyeshuatcha – a process that begins with fear of punishment, passes to fear of God’s awesome grandeur, and then to love and attachment, such that one watches one’s own existence move from a state of animal  self-preservation to an expression of the Godly Presence. 

The process begins with sin, and also with teshuva.  With sin, meaning it begins with a lack of awareness, a non-distinction between good and evil.  Then it passes to discerning and understanding the results of evil ways and actions, to the point of shame at the very fact of sinning, and then to heartache at the desecration of Heaven’s name that is entailed in sin. 

This parallels the levels of teshuva, as mentioned, and thus is the greatest absurdity of all understood: “One’s premeditated malevolent actions are counted as  one’s virtuous acts,”  by virtue of one’s having become wholly and entirely an expression of Godly Presence, one’s virtues and one’s faults included.

This three-staged structure exists in the rational connection as well, between Rav and talmid, teacher/master and student.  At the beginning, the student expects the teacher to resolve an issue that is difficult to grasp.  At the first stage, the student is impressed by the Rav’s greatness, and by the greatness of the qualitative gap separating them.  At the second stage, when the talmid understands the way the Rav’s words are capable of resolving his distress, he becomes able to relate to the Rav’s words, and to properly appreciate him.  At the third stage, when the talmid has been privileged to digest torat rabo, and to identify with it, he chides himself in amazement: How could the Rav’s simple, on-target idea not have occurred to him,?  How could he not have found the solution himself?

The other side of existence’s distress is teshuva.  Returning in teshuva, one renounces the lifestyle that has been habit since childhood – quite easily, because existence’s entire foundation is weak in our era, and therefore this generation has been blessed with a massive turn toward teshuva. 

This disadvantage, the weak hold on existence, contains an advantage: With the same ease with which one renounced prior habits, one can relate to the highest level of the ideal, to Hashem liyeshuatcha kiviti, “God, for Your saving I have hoped”.  Since this ideal requires a state of exclusiveness,  of living only for the sake of the Godly purpose while renouncing all other interests, only in a generation that suffers from a weak foundation in all areas of existential interest is such a thing possible.  The grave threat of life’s destruction can be alleviated by renouncing the survival mechanism as an exclusive mode, and attaching it exclusively to an ideal that expresses the spiritual self. 

“One who says, ‘I will sin and then I will do teshuva,’ is not given the opportunity to do teshuva.”  Because teshuva does not tolerate conditions.  By making conditions, one is expressing control.  Thus there is no get “on condition” because the husband is required to remove his control over his wife, and it would be absurd if he ceased the connection with his wife and continued to control her through a condition.  Similarly with the issue of teshuva, despite the fact that teshuva is the complete opposite of a get, which does not tolerate absurdity and must be absolute certainty, whereas the entire origin and birth of teshuva derives from  absurdity’s bet midrash, as mentioned above, yet nevertheless there can  be no teshuva “on condition.”