I have taught and attempted to live Teshuva, repentance, for some 50 years centered around two organizing principles. The first is that Teshuva is in itself a divinely ordained positive commandment of transformation that includes regret over misdeeds, leading to articulated confession of sins according to type and severity, abandonment of these violations, mending harm, especially interpersonal, and the promise to no longer act in a wrongful direction. I often taught this all in conjunction with a mystical view that locates sin as a break in God’s cosmos, and in the divine element of wholeness, that is the essential element in our spiritual DNA.

I can no longer use these two principles in comprehending, doing and teaching Teshuva. I certainly do retain a complete fealty and experience of the process derived above. But the organizing principles no longer speak to me clearly and compellingly. Understanding Teshuva as only one of 613 Commandments, to which we bend our will to the Almighty adds a defining element of coercion that rubs raw against the grain of true transformation. That outcome of real change must be experienced and accomplished as arriving from a profoundly free will and act. Lacking that element of choice renders the recital of the exhaustive list of confession, spiritually exhausting and exhausted of true meaning. It becomes a Jewish parallel to spinning a Tibetan prayer wheel in which we actually spin ourselves into a delusion that anything transformational has actually happened.

Associated with understanding Teshuva as externally forced behavior is the hoary image of a divine trial for us individually, and as a people in which we the accused are faced with an unflagging prosecutor, the katigor – besting one’s hapless defense, the sanigor. Alas, I sense that my own sanigor has evidently grown weary, and as we know, the caseload for public defenders is immense and crushing.

At the same time, mystical manipulation of divine spheres in the service of Teshuva has left me in this troublesome era, flat and disenchanted. In practice mystics strike me as engaging in a game of distraction with copious intentions (kavanot) and gesticulations that actually prevent a moral engagement with life. And today, the Rav Kookian theory of the inevitability of our peoples’ Teshuva – literally Return – meaning nationhood has been weaponized to serve immoral behavior, not by all, but by........

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